Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface: Enemies of the Truth
Introduction
Part I. Alien Gods
1. The Library We’ve Been Waiting For: The Alien Knowledge of Nag Hammadi
2. Gnostic Materialism
Part II. Mythomorphoses
3. So Dark, the Con of Man
4. The Chalice, the Blade, and the Bifurcation Point
Part III. Sovereign Institutions
5. Garveyism and Its Involutions
6. The Sade Industry
Part IV. Products of Mind
7. Cartographorrhea: On Psychotic Maps
8. Communities of Suspicion: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Laws of Science
Coda: Thought from Outer Space
Notes
Index

About the Author

Jonathan P. Eburne is associate professor of comparative literature, English, and French and Francophone studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He is author of Surrealism and the Art of Crime, coauthor of four other books, and editor of ASAP/Journal.

Reviews

"A bracing challenge to academic squeamishness, Outsider Theory is a learned, mischievous, and fascinating book that makes a compelling argument for the positive role of fraud, failure, and error in knowledge production. Outsider art, writing, and thinking can no longer be neatly quarantined in isolated and eccentric individuals, but must be recognized as thoroughly implicated in mass culture, scholarship, laboratory work, and critical theory."-John Wilkinson, University of Chicago"Jonathan P. Eburne has written a generous, curious, rigorous book about ideas often dismissed as ridiculous, embarrassing, and even dangerous. Outsider Theory takes them seriously, which means subjecting them to the same caliber of historical analysis and philosophical critique usually reserved for ‘good’ ideas. In doing so, he launches us on several fascinating voyages across what he calls ‘the oceanic expanse of modern intellectual history.’"-Evan Kindley, author of Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture"This timely book is not only genuinely interesting, but makes a strong and original contribution to the discussion concerning the future of the humanities. Jonathan P. Eburne's study of questions of method is itself an achievement of method, engaging with the outsiders not as a cabinet of curiosities, but in a way that troubles thinking, and especially thinking about thinking."-Margret Grebowicz, Tyumen State University

"Scholars will find much to consider in Eburne’s methodological innovations, and students will find Eburne’s case studies of outsider theory to be fascinating explorations of how ideas, once discarded, often have had a subterranean influence on contemporary intellectual life."-CHOICE"Jonathan Eburne’s book encourages a resolve to take as seriously and generously as he entertains every strange invention and its productive errancy, even one’s drifting thoughts on finally putting the book aside."-SubStance