A partir de las propuestas metodológicas de los Estudios del Imaginario, este trabajo busca mostrar que algunas de las principales tramas ideadas por Philip K. Dick tienen un sustrato gnóstico. Para ello, en primer lugar, mencionamos algunos datos biográficos que muestran el interés de Dick por el gnosticismo; en segundo lugar, identificamos mitemas idénticos entre ambos corpus (“este mundo es un engaño”; “este mundo es una prisión de hierro”; “el iniciado tiene un doble”; etc.). Con ello, esta investigación contribuye al (...) debate científico en torno a la recepción y reutilización de antiguos mitos en la literatura de ciencia ficción. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of `exile' — as an individual or collective experience — on how human experience is theorized. The relationship between `exile' and thought is initially approached historically by looking at the period that Eric Dodds famously called the `age of anxiety' in late antiquity, i.e. the period between the emperors Aurelius and Constantine. A particular interest is in the dynamics of `empire' and the concomitant religious ferment as a context in which `exile', both experientially and symbolically, (...) appears to assume an overbearing significance. Plotinus' narrative of emanation and epistrophe as well as a group of narratives often classified as `Gnosticism' are juxtaposed as two radical examples of a wider spiritual trend at the time according to which `exile' could be considered constitutive of human experience. By way of an historical analogy, the insights gained from this study of late antiquity are then used to guide an analysis of the current, `restless' epoch, in which experiences of displacement and exile on a mass scale undermine traditional notions of belonging, thus reviving the gnostic vision of cosmic reality as an alien, exilic environment. The article concludes with a discussion of Jacques Derrida's work as an example of contemporary gnosticism, in which a `metaphysics of exile' is presented in the disguise of an `exile from metaphysics'. (shrink)