The Nearly Forgotten Futures of Acid Communism: Foucault and Antonioni at Zabriskie Point
Krisis | Journal for Contemporary Philosophy December 17, 2025 Todd Landon Barnes
This article examines the radical political and aesthetic potential of psychedelics in the 1970s, focusing on Michel Foucault's 1975 LSD experience at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley and Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 film Zabriskie Point. Drawing on Mark Fisher, Herbert Marcuse, and others, the author reads these events emblematically and genealogically, as symptoms of how larger discourses, ideas, and bodies intersected with psychedelics during that decade. The analysis seeks to recover radical potential that may still remain, given neoliberalism's recent recuperation, containment, legalization, medicalization, and promotion of these drugs.