Timothy Leary and the trace of the posthuman
Presses universitaires de Rennes eBooks January 1, 2014 William Stephenson 1 citation
Timothy Leary's thought, from The Politics of Ecstasy to Your Brain is God, outlines a program for social and personal change through psychedelics and the 'turn on, tune in, drop out' process, which paradoxically urges re-humanization by stepping out of preprogrammed social games and temporarily destroying the ego, while also sketching a posthuman future where the subject of ideology is replaced by a post-subjective being operating at the cellular level. Leary's means shifted from drugs in the 1960s to computer technology from the 1980s, but the focus is on his revisions of the human and his quest to move beyond it toward uncharted posthuman states.