Psychedelic politics and humanities, with Oliver Davis
What is the current arc of the psychedelic renaissance in Western society missing? How do psychedelic experiences affect politics? And what are the psychedelic humanities? To guide us through these questions, I speak with Oliver Davis. He's a professor of French Studies and director of graduate studies at the University of Warwick in the UK, a co-editor of an ongoing series on the psychedelic humanities, is working on a book about the politics of psychedelics, and wrote of a recent paper on the French artist Henri Michaux’s writings on psychedelics, which serve as a guide for our conversation. By tracing Michaux's writing on psychedelics, we explore how they impact everything from creativity to metaphysics. Using that lens, we get into: what is lost in the potential of psychedelic experience when it’s approached exclusively as a therapeutic tool to be used under highly regulated and controlled settings, threading the needle between science and mysticism when it comes to making sense of psychedelic experiences, psychedelics and politics, where one of the most important implications of psychedelic experience is not what it can teach us about consciousness or the nature of the universe, but how it might help us rethink our social and economic worlds, how psychedelic experiences might help foment a more democratic form of politics. Enjoy!