'Henri Michaux: adventures of a reluctant psychedelic psychonaut'
Professor Oliver Davis, University of Warwick
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Still from Images du monde visionnaire (Michaux and Duvivier, 1964).
Looking back from the perspective of the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ today, with its promise of new therapies to treat some of the world’s most troublesome mental health problems, this paper presents some of my recent research on the extraordinarily rich cultural production around drugs by Modernist poet, writer, critic and visual artist Henri Michaux (1899–1984). For about a decade, from the mid-1950s, the otherwise famously sober Michaux wrote five books, included within which were dozens of drawings, and made one half-hour film, charting his adventures as a reluctant psychonaut, principally with the psychedelic mescaline, but also with psilocybin, cannabis and LSD. A leading cultural historian of drugs has rightly described this as one of the world’s richest cultural explorations of mescaline (Jay 2019): it is far more extensive, textually complex, and aesthetically demanding for its audience than Aldous Huxley’s better known near-contemporaneous works on psychedelics in English.
In this second of a series of four papers I will develop my analysis of Michaux’s acutely sensitive phenomenological analysis of drugs’ effects on the brain by focusing especially on the following areas, where I believe Michaux can make a substantial contribution to ongoing debates in the psychedelic renaissance today: (i) the role of psychedelics in enhancing ‘creativity’; (ii) the qualitative difference to the nature of the experience depending on whether a resistant-reluctant mental attitude (‘set’) or a more ‘open’ approach of ‘going with the flow’ is adopted during the session and the wider personal, political and social implications of either; (iii) the aesthetico-political significance of psychedelic experience; (iv) his acerbic critical appraisal, as a prolific traveller with a profound interest in the cultures of East Asia and Central America, of the naïve Orientalism endemic in US psychedelic counterculture at the time, which can in turn inform heated debates today about the appropriation of indigenous cultures’ understanding of psychedelics by Western biomedicine. I will aim to show that Michaux’s work on drugs has much to contribute to cultural understanding of psychedelics today and accordingly that this unjustly neglected classic of French – and global – drug culture deserves to be far better known.
Oliver Davis is Professor of French Studies at Warwick University, Executive Editor of Modern & Contemporary France and Co-Editor of a new series of articles on ‘the Psychedelic Humanities’ for Frontiers in Psychology. He has published widely on the work of Jacques Rancière and most recently, in a co-authored book with queer theorist Tim Dean, on the cultural aversion to sex: Hatred of Sex (Nebraska, 2022). Other work has examined techniques of policing and imprisonment, in France and more widely, and he is collaborating at present with Sophie Fuggle on two co-authored articles about the French penal colony. The main focus of his current research is the politics of psychedelics, both in the psychedelic renaissance today and in the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s.
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