Psychedelic Citizenship and Re-Enchantment: Affective Aesthetics as Political Instantiation

Green, Roger K.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-15318-2_6

Roger K. Green²

244 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter explicates The Boo Hoo Bible by Art Kleps, then moves on to discuss narrative fiction. Connecting to earlier discussions of play, it covers Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, Clarke’s Childhood’s End, and the influence of literary imagination on psychedelic aesthetics as Tom Wolfe gestured in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests. It then discusses Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and hyperconscious approaches to life as a style among groups like the merry pranksters. It shifts to a discussion of religion and mysticism, coming back to Aldous Huxley’s work and the idea of psychedelic or “enchanted” citizenship. Connecting to recent philosopher’s calls for new “fictions,” it suggests that attention to psychedelic aesthetics opens a possibility to think in terms of metempsychosis or being-beyond-being-toward-death.

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Notes

1.
Simon Critchley, Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology . New York: Verso, 2012, 92.
2.
William A. Richards. Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, 211.
3.
Nicolas Langlitz, Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of the Brain, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013, 29–30.
4.
Ibid., 30.
5.
Ibid., 36.
6.
Art Kleps, Millbrook: A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism, Recension of 2005, Austin: Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church, 2005, 8.
7.
Martin A. & Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social history of LSD : The CIA , the Sixties, and Beyond. New York: Grove, 1985, 105.
8.
Art Kleps, Millbrook: A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism, Recension of 2005, Austin: Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church, 2005, 12.
9.
Kleps , Art. The Boo Hoo Bible : The Neo-American Church Catechism. San Cristobal: Toad Books, 1971, 19.
10.
Ibid., 20.
11.
Ibid., 21.
12.
Ibid., 124.
13.
Ibid., 24.
14.
Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, 66.
15.
“Senate Testimony of Art Kleps, Chief Boo Hoo of the Neo-American Church, okneoac.org , http://okneoac.org/senate-testimony/
16.
Ibid.
17.
United States Department of Justice, “DEA History,” dea.gov , https://www.dea.gov/about/history.shtml
18.
Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs : A Report from the Bunker, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1981, 106.
19.
Ibid., 107.
20.
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch . New York: New Grove Press, 1959, xi.
21.
Ibid., 203.
22.
Ibid., 230.
23.
Ibid., 74.
24.
Ibid., 66.
25.
Ibid.
26.
Ibid., 199.
27.
Ibid., 200.
28.
Ibid., 201.
29.
Ibid., 119.
30.
Ibid., 121.
31.
Ibid., 122.
32.
Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 298.
33.
See Alain de Benoist, “The Idea of Empire,” Democracy and Populism: The Telos Essays (New York: Telos Press, 2018), 13–31.
34.
Stephen S. Bush, “Sovereignty and Cruelty,” Negative Ecstasies: George Bataille and the Study of Religion, ed. Jeremy Biles and Kent Brintnall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 43.
35.
Ibid., 99.
36.
Ibid., 100.
37.
Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred? Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009, 146.
38.
Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, 226.
39.
Ibid.
40.
Arthur Schlesinger, “The New Mood in Politics,” The Sixties, Ed. Gerald Howard, New York: Paragon House, 1982, 45.
41.
Paul Goodman, “Patriotism,” The Sixties, Ed. Gerald Howard, New York: Paragon House, 1982, 57.
42.
Ibid.
43.
C. Wright Mills, “Culture and Politics,” The Sixties, Ed. Gerald Howard, New York: Paragon House, 1982, 74–75.
44.
May , Lary. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Cold War. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989, 22.
45.
Arthur Schlesinger, “The New Mood in Politics,” The Sixties, Ed. Gerald Howard (New York: Paragon House, 1982): 46.
46.
John Lennon, Lennon Remembers, ed. Jann Wenner, (New York: Verso, 2000), 107.
47.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, 1.
48.
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, New York: Bantam, 1999, 266.
49.
Ibid., 142.
50.
Ibid.
51.
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game , New York: Picador, 1990, 363.
52.
Ibid., 422.
53.
Ibid.
54.
Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End , New York: Del Ray, 1953, 66.
55.
Ibid., 211.
56.
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, New York: Bantam, 1999, 233–234.
57.
Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End , New York: Del Ray, 1953, 139.
58.
Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 1.
59.
Ibid., 3.
60.
Ibid.
61.
Phillip M. Weinstein, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005): 202.
62.
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, New York: Bantam, 1999, 190.
63.
Ibid., 187.
64.
Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion . New York: Penguin, 1977, 17.
65.
Ibid., 25.
66.
Ibid., 16.
67.
Ibid., 78.
68.
Ibid., 71.
69.
Ibid., 71.
70.
John Szwed, Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Penguin, 2010, 249.
71.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, New York: Penguin, 1955, 180.
72.
Ibid., xxix.
73.
Ibid., 307.
74.
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, New York: Bantam, 1999, 87.
75.
Ibid., 233.
76.
Ibid.
77.
Ibid., 263.
78.
Simon Critchley, Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology . New York: Verso, 2012, 61.
79.
Ibid., 91.
80.
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977, 5.
81.
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978, 142.
82.
Ibid., 146.
83.
Cornell West, “Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civilization.” The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, 105.
84.
Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, “Introduction,” The Re- Enchantment of the World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 14.
85.
Ibid., 2.
86.
Taylor , Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007, 218.
87.
James DiCenso, The Other Freud : Religion, Culture and Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge, 1999, 71.
88.
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, Trans. Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, 25–26.
89.
Patricia Huntington, “Kristeva, Julia,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Ed. Robert Audi, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 478.
90.
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, Trans. Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, 26–27.
91.
Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction to Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981): 71.
92.
Ibid., 72.
93.
Don Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity. Malden: Blackwell, 1998, 62–63.
94.
Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, 51–52.
95.
Ibid., 52.
96.
Ibid., 35.
97.
Ibid., 15.
98.
Ibid., 53.
99.
Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, 207.
100.
Ibid., 206.

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Department of English, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA
Roger K. Green

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Green, R.K. (2019). Psychedelic Citizenship and Re-Enchantment: Affective Aesthetics as Political Instantiation. In: A Transatlantic Political Theology of Psychedelic Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15318-2_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15318-2_6
Published: 03 April 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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