Deleuze and Guattari and the Psychedelic Revival

Volume 17, Issue 4, November, 2023

The premise of this special issue is that Deleuze and Guattari offer important concepts and insights to make sense of this renewed interest in psychedelics in the context of today’s world. The articles collected here want to make a contribution to a humanities approach to the psychedelic experience. They are written by ‘noumenautics’ who often combine phenomenological experiences with philosophical analysis.
One of the recurrent themes throughout various contributions in this special issue is an emphasis on media and mediation. While this is a particular focus (admittedly at the expense of many other important issues that need to be addressed in psychedelic discourse), the reason why this is relevant is because our contemporary world is increasingly becoming one big media machine, which might cause what Kenneth Ring describes in The Ketamine Papers as a ‘sense of profound metaphysical fright’ But we may also remind ourselves of Marshall McLuhan’s words: that the attraction to psychedelic drugs has to do with adapting to our penetrating electronic environment. In the 1960s this was television, but in the age of an increasingly artificial intelligence mediated environment we might need the psychedelics, as well as Deleuze-Guattarian concepts that move our thoughts and insights beyond the human into the molecular and the nonhuman in equal measure.

See here for more information about this issue. The introduction can be found here. See also the blog entree on this issue on this site.