The following paper was presented at the Seventh Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–17, 2013, in New York City.
In Faith of The Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, Simon Critchley writes: “What is lacking is a theory and practice of the general will understood as the supreme fiction of final belief that would take place in the act by which a people becomes a people or by which a free association is formed” (92). Critchley’s work turns to poetics or “making” as a mode of engagement and resistance for dealing with democratic-liberal crises. I suggest that psychedelic aesthetics and religion can provide a discursive ground for Critchley’s “supreme fiction” in the United States, because the making of the sacrificial figure in the psychedelic experience presents itself as capable of more ethically aware citizenship. A brief historical look at religions founded in the 1960s gives insight into the instantiation of a certain citizenship.
