Oliver Davis - - The politics of healing trauma

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The politics of healing trauma.

The treatment of traumatic after-effects has been key to the success of the psychedelic renaissance in so far as MAPS’s capacity to forge cross-party consensus in an otherwise highly polarized US climate around veterans’ mental health has been essential to advancing regulatory and legislative change. The concerns raised in their ‘Power Trip’ podcast series (2022) by the Psymposia collective focus retrospectively on the alleged mistreatment of individual cases in clinical trials of MDMA therapy. By contrast, this paper advances a prospective structural critique: the aspiration for a ‘zero-trauma’ society facilitated by psychedelics raises significant philosophical, political and ethical questions. For instance, while the success of psychedelic therapy in treating veterans has been remarkable (Moghaddam 2021) and those involved have clearly benefited, the likely cost of making conflict less costly in this way may well ultimately be more conflict, less reluctance to have recourse to violence, indeed perhaps even the rehabilitation of violence as a tool of government.

Socially and politically, it will be argued that such use of psychedelics to treat the aftereffects of trauma tends towards an undoing of political communities grounded in ‘wounded attachment’ to ‘injured identity’ (Brown 1995). Notwithstanding almost a century of functionally very effective ‘postcolonial healing’ (Calabrese 2013) by the Native American Church using peyote, in healing traumatic symptoms psychedelics tend to strengthen the ‘one-dimensional’ (Marcuse 1964) unity of the technocratic society by reintegrating dissensual communities of injured identity. While some of us may yearn for a politics free from ressentiment on Left and Right alike and for a world in which there is generally less obsession with traumatic injury, particularly in its commodified and bureaucratised forms (Davis & Dean 2022), the deployment of a biomedical cure for wrongs which are primarily political, historical or criminal, is still a disturbing prospect. Viewed from a slightly different perspective, the prevalence of trauma-based thinking today provides psychedelic therapies with numerous commercialisable holds on contemporary society. subjects of psychedelic neoliberalism. With this paper I aim to demonstrate the pertinence of a ‘micropolitical’ and ‘transversal’ (Guattari 1977, 1972) approach to the politics of psychedelics.

BIOGRAPHY
Oliver Davis is based in the Arts Faculty at Warwick University, UK. His research spans Continental Philosophy, queer theory, critical security studies and the cultural politics and history of psychoactive drugs. He has published two books on one of France’s most prominent contemporary philosophers, Jacques Rancière, and more recently, together with Tim Dean, Hatred of Sex (Nebraska UP, ‘Provocations’ Series, 2022), a critique of the cultural aversion to sex and the commodification of traumatised identity. He is currently completing a monograph on the politics of psychedelics. Together with Tehseen Noorani, Alex Dymock, Nick Langlitz, Anne-Katrin Schlag and Erika Dyck, he is Co-Editing a forthcoming Frontiers in Psychology series on ‘The Psychedelic Humanities’, which seeks to delineate the contours of that new domain.