This article examines archival materials and artworks from Mina Loy’s later life that document her engagement with metaphysics, revealing entanglements between their philosophical, aesthetic, and feminist dimensions. Focusing on “Incident,” “A Hard Luck Story,” and Insel as well as the assemblages Nectar and Untitled (The Drifting Tower), it uncovers Loy’s transmedia project to interrogate the ideal-material constitution of reality and the subject’s position in relation to immanence and transcendence. It reveals how Loy’s feminist metaphysics and modernist aesthetics intersect, arguing that her continuing search for innovative forms is driven by the need to contain a metaphysics split between a feminist commitment to embodiment and the pursuit of self-transcendence. It also illuminates the ethical potential of Loy’s approach. By tracing its evolution towards a materialism that locates transcendence in humble dirt and dust, it challenges the sense that Loy’s late metaphysical writing is socially disengaged or out of step with the rest of her oeuvre.
Julia Heinemann (Tue,) studied this question.