On one side, God, the laws of nature, right Reason, genetic circuits: the truth. On the other, possibility, the ephemeral, the finite, the random: life. Between these two poles opens an intermediate space: the realm of the spiritual, the quintessential realm of man — a being mixed and hybrid, a monstrous coexistence of opposites.

This essay at hand narrates a history of the spiritual — from Secundus the silent philosopher, Pico della Mirandola, and Pascal to Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida; from Melville, Baudelaire, and Kafka to Ted Hughes, Thomas Pynchon, and Michel Houellebecq; from Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky to Bill Viola, Jim Jarmusch, and David Lynch — seeking an answer to the question of whether this transitional zone could be reborn for us now.