The global pandemic has intensified a desire for alternative ways of experiencing the world, and the recent resurgence of interest in psychedelics may reflect this need. While the 'psychedelic renaissance' is largely framed by scientific research, this article examines it from a philosophical perspective, using concepts from Deleuze and Guattari about aesthetics and nonhuman perception. It argues that psychedelics can help understand the current era of the Anthropocene. The article draws on the work of artistic psychonauts like Aldous Huxley and Philippe Garrel to develop this framework.
Psychedelic experience has an aesthetic dimension that reveals the nonhuman otherness of the universe, a phenomenon explored by Aldous Huxley in *The Doors of Perception* and by Deleuze and Guattari, who describe psychedelic aesthetics as pushing perception to the limit of abstract geometric forms. This article examines two experimental films—Philippe Garrel's *Le Révélateur* (1968) and Morgan Quaintance's *Surviving You, Always* (2021)—to show how cinematographic techniques evoke a psychedelic, mind-revealing experience. The camera's nonhuman perception, its 'body without organs', and its affective intensity create an ethics of 'becoming not unworthy of the event'.
Drawing on Stanislav Grof's decades of LSD research, this article argues that cinema should be understood not as a conscious or ideological representation of the world but as part of the vast realm of the unconscious. It proposes a psychedelic reorientation of the cinematographic unconscious, suggesting that media culture itself enables strange encounters that raise profound questions about being human in a transforming world in crisis.