Deleuze and Guattari Studies
October 27, 2023
Patricia Kubala
6 citations
The paper argues that psychedelic-assisted therapy could benefit from Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus and their alternative practice of materialist psychiatry, schizoanalysis. Clinical research on psilocybin over the past fifteen years has privileged mystical experience, assessed by a quantifiable scale, as the goal of therapy and source of cure. The author questions whether 'mystical experience' has become the 'imperialism of Oedipus' within the psychedelic revival, toward which all psychedelic experience is expected to tend. Instead, the unconscious should be understood as a desiring-machine, and the cure as completing desiring-production without reducing it to pre-assigned ends. Patients' embodied memories and visions enable learning how their desiring-machines work and destroying obstacles to their functioning.
Deleuze and Guattari Studies
October 27, 2023
Amir Vudka
1 citation
Vincent Moon's films and live cinema performances are described as 'psychedelic' because they open perception to invisible realms of percepts, affects, and durations beyond ordinary human experience. Drawing on Paul Schrader's concept of the transcendental style in film and Gilles Deleuze's time-image, Moon, an audiovisual ethnographer of world religions influenced by shamanic and animistic traditions, brings the transcendental style back to its plane of immanence. His live cinema has a ritualistic and ecstatic aspect recalling the esoteric history of haunted media, inducing altered states of mind, tapping into spiritual realities, and immersing audiences in magic.
Deleuze and Guattari Studies
October 27, 2023
Patricia Pisters
1 citation
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'.
Deleuze and Guattari Studies
November 1, 2023
Erica Biolchini
The article proposes a new concept called the 'psychedelic crystal', building on Gilles Deleuze's idea of the crystal-image. This concept links the crystalline regime of cinema with current scientific research into the healing potential of hallucinogenic drugs. The psychedelic crystal emerges from the intersection of Deleuze's crystals of time, the therapeutic use of psychedelics, and Siegfried Kracauer's idea of cinematic redemption. Both films and drugs are seen as media with curative power, capable of restoring belief in the world and renewing life's affirmative potential. Analyzing Jan Kounen's film Blueberry (2004), the article argues that cinema can reanimate mental and physical reality, particularly in cases of traumatic, repressed, or dissociated memories. This positions certain film aesthetics as a mind-revealing, mind-expanding, and mind-healing technology, entangled with the revival of psychedelic therapy.