A Transatlantic Political Theology of Psychedelic Aesthetics: Enchanted Citizens
Abstract
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 2019 (Green 2019) A Transatlantic Political Theology of Psychedelic Aesthetics: Enchanted Citizens constitutes quite a novel insight, insofar as it identifies a distinctly neoliberal religiosity in psychedelic culture and psychedelic aesthetics. Green reads aesthetics as an important site of political intervention and argues that "political theology has yet to engage seriously with the question of literary aesthetics" (Green 2019). His is a study of the political impact of the aesthetic sensibilities of psychedelia, which can be understood as an unexpected source of neoliberal piety. ...
Carl Schmitt’s controversial 1922 Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty initiated a long-standing, lively, and oft misunderstood discourse at the intersections of religious studies, theology, and political theory. Political theology as a discourse has seen something of a revival in recent decades, which has raised genuine problems of interpretation. These include questions of what is at stake in political theology, how political theology can be applied to economic discourses, and how it can be understood in relation to secularity and post-secularity. This study takes Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and Glory as a conceptual bridge that helps to situate contemporary political theologies of neoliberalism historically and theoretically. A survey of four recent political theologies of neoliberalism yields a methodological reflection on the limits and potential of political theology as a discourse. A distinction is made between descriptive-genealogical political theologies and normative-prescriptive political theologies. The former is privileged in its philosophical potential, insofar as it reveals both the contingency and genuine variety of normative-prescriptive political theologies.
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