The Nearly Forgotten Futures of Acid Communism: Foucault and Antonioni at Zabriskie Point

Abstract

With a focus on the 1970s—in particular, narratives recounting Michel Foucault’s 1975 LSD experience at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, as well as Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point—this article seeks to recover any politically or aesthetically radical potential that psychedelics might still retain, given neoliberalism’s recent recouperation, containment, legalization, medicalization, and even promotion of these drugs. Drawing upon work by Mark Fisher, Herbert Marcuse, and others, I read these two events (Foucault’s LSD experience and Antonioni’s film) emblematically and genealogically, as symptoms or representations of how larger discourses, ideas, and bodies intersected with psychedelics in the 1970s.