“Ecstasy at the End of the World: On Summers of Love and The Revolution That Wasn’t”

Psychedelics have long been associated with revolutionary social upheaval, even liberation. During the Summer of Love in 1967, LSD was the holy sacrament of youth in revolt. In the Second Summer of Love, from 1988-89, the counter-cultural drug of choice was MDMA. Radical change was in the air. Altered states of consciousness promised to overturn our whole collective reality. So what happened? What caused these moments of euphoric hope and audacity to evaporate? Or are they still around, only dissipated into our general social atmosphere? Were they really drug-induced and drug-fuelled? Or was it merely mainstream moral panic that propelled acid and ecstasy to the vanguard of anti-establishment agitation? And what can this teach us about psychedelics’ revolutionary potential, or their counter-revolutionary uses, today, at the outer edge of our increasingly catastrophized, terrorized, medicalized present?

Nathan Gorelick is Term Assistant Professor of English at Barnard College. Previously, he was Associate Professor of English at Utah Valley University, and he holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has published widely on the intersections of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. His first book, The Unwritten Enlightenment, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. He is currently researching the history of the relation between psychedelics and the Freudian field, as well as how this relation may be reinvented today.