June 9, 2023

Ayahuasca and Transnational Religious Poetics (Roger Green)

This conference script was partially delivered at the Telos-Paul Piccone Conference in New York, February 15-16, 2020. The conference theme was: “After the Welfare State, Reconceiving Mutual Aid.” The implicit idea of Mutual Aid was advanced in Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 book, Mutual Aid–A Factor in Evolution. Kropotkin argued against social Darwinist attitudes stressing competition, which […]

The Pataphysics of Pharmakoi (Roger Green)

Yesterday,  an article by Josh Katz and Margot Sanger-Katz in The New York Times drew attention once again to an opioid abuse epidemic in the United States.  As they write, the 2017 death rate caused by such abuse is “so steep that they have contributed to reductions in the country’s life expectancy over the last three years, […]

The Pharmakon and Ayahuasca Globalization (Roger Green)

Jacques Derrida theorized in an interview on “The Rhetoric of Drugs”: The production and distribution of drugs are, of course, primarily organized by right-wing forces or regimes, by a certain form of capitalism.  But in Western Europe drug consumption and certain drug culture are often associated with vaguely anti-establishment, left-leaning ideology, whereas the brutality of […]