Nicolas Langlitz, Avital Ronell and William Rauscher: Germanic Adventures in Drug Experimentation
Tuesday 30 October, 2012
6:30pm, $0
New York University, Deutsches Haus
42 Washington Mews
Please join us for a discussion on the contemporary roles played by German-speaking research institutions in current psychedelics research. This talk between Nicolas Langlitz, Avital Ronell and William Rauscher will inquire after the emergence of drugs as a technology and attempt to read the drug trials conducted by Germanic research institutions as scenes of modern scientific experimentation.
The history of psychedelic drugs in the twentieth-century circuits repeatedly through Germanic precincts, and it is not a stretch to say that Western popular culture would not be the same without certain chemical innovations by Bayer AG, Merck KGaA, and the Swiss Sandoz Laboratories, innovations that, once they left the controlled framework of scientific procedure and entered the mainstream of mass consumption, altered the minds and bodies of several generations in unpredictable ways. Following Avital Ronell’s reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Gay Science, each institution can be said to represent a crucial test site where the logic of the test at once belongs to and undercuts the will to scientific knowledge.
In light of the recent revival of psychedelics research in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy and neuroscience, anthropologist and historian of science Nicolas Langlitz will take an anthropological look into current pre-clinical trials being conducted in German and Swiss institutions, where research focuses on broad questions concerning the nature of consciousness and the function of mental conditions such as psychosis. Avital Ronell’s comments will critically engage the philosophical stakes of such volatile meetings between subject and substance in a scientific setting.
Nicolas Langlitz is an anthropologist and historian of science. He has written a book on the clinical practice of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (Die Zeit der Psychoanalyse, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2005). A second book on the revival of psychedelic research since the “Decade of the Brain“ is in press. He has begun to work on a new project on the interdisciplinary exchange between life scientists and philosophers in the contexts of dream research. He serves as assistant professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Avital Ronell annually taught a course with Jacques Derrida at New York University. She co-directs the Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Program, gave nine performances at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and produced and acted in a play commissioned by the City of Berlin on her work, called: “What was I thinking? A Spectral Colloquy.†Avital loves teaching at NYU and is Professor of Media and Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She has written a number of books that have appeared in France, Germany, Japan, and Israel. Her latest book is Loser Sons: Politics and Authority.
William Rauscher holds a Ph.d. in German Literature from NYU. He is the co-founder of Acid Age, a research blog on the genealogies of psychedelic culture, and the co-editor of On Acid: A Field Guide to Altered States, recently acquired by the MoMA library.
The history of psychedelic drugs in the twentieth-century circuits repeatedly through Germanic precincts, and it is not a stretch to say that Western popular culture would not be the same without certain chemical innovations by Bayer AG, Merck KGaA, and the Swiss Sandoz Laboratories, innovations that, once they left the controlled framework of scientific procedure and entered the mainstream of mass consumption, altered the minds and bodies of several generations in unpredictable ways. Following Avital Ronell’s reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Gay Science, each institution can be said to represent a crucial test site where the logic of the test at once belongs to and undercuts the will to scientific knowledge.
In light of the recent revival of psychedelics research in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy and neuroscience, anthropologist and historian of science Nicolas Langlitz will take an anthropological look into current pre-clinical trials being conducted in German and Swiss institutions, where research focuses on broad questions concerning the nature of consciousness and the function of mental conditions such as psychosis. Avital Ronell’s comments will critically engage the philosophical stakes of such volatile meetings between subject and substance in a scientific setting.
Nicolas Langlitz is an anthropologist and historian of science. He has written a book on the clinical practice of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (Die Zeit der Psychoanalyse, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2005). A second book on the revival of psychedelic research since the “Decade of the Brain“ is in press. He has begun to work on a new project on the interdisciplinary exchange between life scientists and philosophers in the contexts of dream research. He serves as assistant professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Avital Ronell annually taught a course with Jacques Derrida at New York University. She co-directs the Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Program, gave nine performances at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and produced and acted in a play commissioned by the City of Berlin on her work, called: “What was I thinking? A Spectral Colloquy.†Avital loves teaching at NYU and is Professor of Media and Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She has written a number of books that have appeared in France, Germany, Japan, and Israel. Her latest book is Loser Sons: Politics and Authority.
William Rauscher holds a Ph.d. in German Literature from NYU. He is the co-founder of Acid Age, a research blog on the genealogies of psychedelic culture, and the co-editor of On Acid: A Field Guide to Altered States, recently acquired by the MoMA library.