Things to keep in mind:
Another secret of magic.
Approached differently, the construction of science and religion as antagonists implied a third position representing where the categories both convene and collapse. In my last book I deployed this trinary in a genealogy of the category “religions,” but here I want to follow the third term. Negatively valenced, it is understood to be superstition and in this respect appears as the double of either religion or science. Hence, a certain cross-section of scientists trumpeted the power of their respective domain by suggesting that all of religion was a superstition. Positively valenced, the third term is magic, which was often supposed to take the best elements of religion and science together or to recover things suppressed by “modern” science or religion. Indeed, most of what gets classified as contemporary esotericism or occultism came into being as an attempt to repair the rupture between religion and science.
—posted 1179 days ago
