Abstract:This essay discusses somatic awareness practices created by Elsa Gindler and taught by her students Charlotte Selver, Carola Speads, Susan Gregory, and Stefan Laeng. Gindler’s somatics originated in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and her emigré students continued the work into the context of the postwar US Human Potential Movement and into our own time. Somatic awareness echoes...
Abstract: Amidst a heyday of overlapping crises, political subjects are encouraged to pursue economic and political freedom through individual effort, amidst illusions of collectivity in digital spaces. From these logics of alienation, transhumanist solutions to these crises have gained increased traction, even striving to liberate us from the anxieties of impermanence and mortality. I note...
Abstract: This essay explores how the fundamental qualities of the psychedelic experience—including heightened affective intensity, the disorganization of the ego, and a sense of cosmic interconnectedness with the universe—offers a hopeful alternative to contemporary left-wing identitarianism. This is a widely popular political logic that associates the pursuit of social justice with the...