Overview
- Pushes beyond perennial lore in psychedelic culture to offer a different narrative for those interested in political theology.
- Contextualizes the “psychedelic movement” within intellectual impulses from early twentieth-century Europe.
- Argues that it is necessary to understand psychedelic aesthetics not just as a set of formal markers of certain kinds of art and music, but as a metaphysical and religious argument about a different way of conceiving subjectivity and the stakes of politics.
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Arguing that we ought to look to psychedelic aesthetics of the 1960s in relation to current crises in liberal democracy, this book emphasizes the intersection of European thought and the psychedelic. The first half of the book focuses on philosophical influences of Herbert Marcuse and Antonin Artaud, while the second half shifts toward literary and theoretical influences of Aldous Huxley on psychedelic aesthetics. Framed within an emergent discourse of political theology, it suggests that taking a postsecular approach to psychedelic aesthetics helps us understand deeper connections between aesthetics and politics.
Reviews
“What is missing from our restless existence? What magic or joy eludes us in the Empire of Capital and endless War? Roger Green explores the rich tentacular field of entheogens in this pioneering book, defining a way into an aesthetics or reckoning with psychedelic research. Its pitfalls, its fantasies, its European vs American praxis, the expectations, the fraught colonialism. The sacred power and risks for the shaman. Green’s repertoire here is vast, deeply knowledgeable, with current political, mystical, and literary insight. This radical book conducts a stunning discourse on one of the most important investigations of our time, of any time, and most visionary: of future time and consciousness.” (Anne Waldman, co-founder of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, USA)
“Roger Green's book is a truly remarkable, groundbreaking analysis of how Western liberal "subjectivity" was both transformed and re-configured, as well as disfigured, by the fascination with psychedelics and mind-altering substances from the 1960s onward. Bucking the conventional wisdom that psychedelic experimentation was merely a 'counter-cultural' obsession that lasted for only a decade or so, Green mobilizes a archive of intellectual and cultural history to show how contemporary patterns of political thought can only be understood in light of this alternative, and all-too-often ignored, legacy of ideas.” (Carl Raschke, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Denver and author of Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy (2015))
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Roger Green is a lecturer in the Department of English at Metropolitan State University of Denver, USA, where he teaches English and Songwriting. He is also a working musical artist, combining literary and aesthetic ideas in sound.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: A Transatlantic Political Theology of Psychedelic Aesthetics
Book Subtitle: Enchanted Citizens
Authors: Roger K. Green
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15318-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-15317-5Published: 11 April 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-15318-2Published: 02 April 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 302
Topics: Religion and Society, Aesthetics, Critical Theory