The article argues that Bernard Stiegler's concept of the Neganthropocene, which calls for transforming the destructive technosphere into a constructive one, overlooks an important resource: psychedelics. Unlike the digital technologies Stiegler focuses on, psychedelics offer a nontechnical means to expand human noetic experience beyond the digital realm. They may grant access to dimensions of reality that could help humanity awaken to a postanthropocentric planet and commune with nonhuman intelligences in a shared noosphere. The author contends that this psychedelic pharmakon may be essential for the neganthropic transformation to succeed.
This article examines the noetic potentials of psychedelics as pharmaka within Bernard Stiegler's organological and pharmacological framework of noesis. It argues that psychedelic-mediated experiences, particularly with ayahuasca, can be better understood through this 'spirito-materialist' lens but also fundamentally challenge it. The paper addresses the libidinal, ontological, and epistemological dimensions of psychedelic pharmaka, relating them to Stiegler's negentropic-neganthropic interpretation of noesis. It contends that these pharmaka can significantly contribute to a future noetic pluralism or noodiversity, and thus to the necessary—though not necessarily technical—expansion of the neganthropocene noosphere.