Lettres d'automne: Special intelligences

Grégory Delaplace, anthropologist and Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, conducted work on the place of the dead in daily life in Mongolia, then around the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, a British scholarly society which studies “paranormal” phenomena (transmission of thoughts, apparitions). Maylis de Kerangal invites him to discuss the book that was born from this research: Particular intelligences, investigation into haunted houses (Editions Vues de l’esprit, preface by Vinciane Despret). The subtle investigation carried out in this book about contradictory investigations moves towards a proposed method: ghosts belong to the texture of the places they haunt. If only certain “particular intelligences” know how to be sensitive to their presence, it is because they already inhabit the world as strangers.

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