Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science and Technology Studies at Williams College, a historian and philosopher whose work spans European intellectual history, Japanese religion and critical theory. His books include The Invention of Religion in Japan, a “reverse ethnography” of how Japanese thinkers encountered the categories of religion, science and superstition; The Myth of Disenchantment, which shows that the very theorists of a disenchanted modernity were often holding séances and moving in occult circles; and Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, which proposes a way for philosophy to move beyond postmodernism. He is co-founder, with Brendan Graham Dempsey, of the journal Metamodern Theory and Praxis, and is currently writing Transcendent Machines: Religion and the Philosophy of Technology for Cambridge University Press.
In this conversation, I sit down with Jason to explore one of the foundational stories of modernity: that God died, magic vanished, and the modern West became a disenchanted place. Jason traces this narrative back through Schiller’s The Gods of Greece and the German Romantics, and much further, to medieval books of magic that already claimed magic was lost, Chaucer’s departed fairies, and the Irish fairy farewell. We discuss the romantic spiral, Hegel’s negation of the negation, and how Jason’s Hegelian reading of postmodern theory, originally titled Absolute Disruption, became Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. Jason tells the story of how the Fukushima disaster, a Kyoto tattoo parlour and an offhand remark about “mystical Asia” exposed the Orientalism at the heart of the disenchantment story, and why so many of its theorists, from Freud to the Vienna Circle, were themselves doing psychical research. We then turn to the new myths of technology: religion as technique, the Denden-gū shrine where Thomas Edison is worshipped as a god of electricity, the AI bubble, and why college should be a gym for the brain. This is a conversation for anyone who has felt the loss of meaning in modern life and wondered whether the story of that loss is itself a myth.
🔗 Links
- Website: https://sites.williams.edu/jaj1/
- Blog: Absolute Disruption: https://absolute-disruption.com/
- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/profstorm.bsky.social
⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro - Is the death of God a myth?
01:00 Did God die, or did meaning pluralise?
05:27 Schiller, the gods of Greece and the long foreground of God’s death
08:35 Chaucer and the fairy farewell: magic has always been leaving
09:17 The banshee, pishogues and the electrification of rural Ireland
13:42 Magic as always foreign and archaic: from the Magi to Hermes Trismegistus
17:36 Pro-Enlightenment Romantics and modernity as always elsewhere
20:09 Why does modernity always look west? Hegel and Orientalism
23:02 The romantic spiral
24:30 Hegel’s dialectic: abstraction, negation and the negation of the negation
29:24 From Absolute Disruption to Metamodernism: The Future of Theory
32:33 Why every road in metamodernism leads back to Hegel
36:03 Rebelling against postmodern teachers: is there nothing after Derrida?
39:45 Buddhism, Japan and The Invention of Religion in Japan
45:23 Fukushima, a tattoo parlour and the birth of The Myth of Disenchantment
47:41 But aren’t a quarter of us disenchanted?
50:58 A real myth: occult disavowal and how disenchantment breeds re-enchantment
54:32 The Vienna Circle’s psychical research and the cycles of the occult
55:43 Transcendent Machines: technology as eschatological promise
59:00 Religion as technology: the codex, prayer wheels and techniques of the body
1:03:20 How did Thomas Edison become a Japanese god?
1:06:54 The AI bubble and the myths we’re living through
1:13:07 AI in the university: free cheating machines and watermarking
1:17:40 Labs for the humanities: college as a gym for the brain
1:21:16 Jason’s guest recommendations: Ruth Millikan and Andreas Malm
1:22:35 Where to find Jason
