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.

Chapter One: Liberal Subjectivity, Religion, And The State.- Chapter Two: Psychedelic Aesthetics, Political Theology, And Religion.- Chapter Three: European Influences.- Chapter Four: The Return To ‘Nature’ And The Problem Of The Perennial.- Chapter Five: Theorizing The Psychedelic Experience.- Chapter Six: Psychedelic Citizenship And Re-Enchantment: Affective Aesthetics As Political Instantiation.- Chapter Seven: Aldous Huxley The Political Theologian.- Chapter Eight: Conclusion: Re-Enchantment And Psychedelic Aesthetics.

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.

“Roger Green's work is a fascinating and illuminating excavation of psychedelic politics in the 20th and 21st centuries.  For Green, Psychedelic adventurers and aesthetics pre-figure a world in which individual freedom and self-realization are no longer opposed to the flourishing and enlivening of all other life forms. Psychedelic experiments do this--problematically, partially, and yet productively--by evoking and imagining, a variety of “other” cultures (past and present) and the “otherness” of nature itself.  While this evocation always risks cultural appropriation and cultural imperialism, there is nevertheless something in psychedelic self-undoing, Green argues, that can be politically generative beyond the exoticization and orientalism to which psychedelic cultures are often prone.” (Joshua Ramey, Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights, Haverford College, USA)

“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))

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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