Dark Intelligibility

This essay stages a triadic dialogue between William Desmond's metaxological philosophy, Keiji Nishitani's Kyoto School Buddhism, and Clarice Lispector's mystical poetics. Three voices, three traditions, brought into proximity not to synthesize but to inhabit the charged space between them.

The work moves through three ordeals: our constitutional porosity to being's excess, the metabolic crisis when that excess overwhelms, and the dark intelligibility that emerges after — a mode of knowing intimate with what exceeds it. It develops the concepts of the "pharmakon of being," "metabolic companionship," and a practice of companionability with what resists comprehension.

Written during a residency at Het Wilde Weten in Rotterdam — a former Franciscan nunnery — the text was composed over several months of dwelling with these three voices, allowing concepts to metabolize somatically as well as theoretically.