Possible & Impossible: On the Second Edition of Archives of the Impossible. Part One.
O ver two-and-a-half days on the beautiful campus of Rice University, just near downtown Houston, Texas, I attended iteration no. 2 of Jeff Kripal’s international conference centered on not exactly the Archives itself, but rather the idea from which this very physical collection of tens of thousands of documents has arisen. There was indeed, a deep-dive into the archives—the story of one, rather major (we might say monumental) addition to this ever-growing expanse of documentation of the seemingly “impossible” (more on that collection later)—but the bulk of the conference was devoted to working out the stated subtitle of Year Two of what is perhaps fast-becoming an academic phenomenon all on its own: “Transnationalism, Transdisciplinarity, Transcendence”. Lots of trans —gression, was perhaps the thought… As with any conference or symposium (like with my own), the stated theme is one thing; how it actually unfolds within the content of the presentations and discussions themselves is q...