Call for Papers for the Journal

Plant pollen and fungi spores stir in the air with word and elemental dust we inhale and partake in the textures we exhale at varying rhythms, intensities, speeds and slowness. We can never tell when such a mixture suddenly overwhelms, takes over, lets something new emerge that perdures. It could be something latent, virtual that actualizes itself, contracts, leaks a past into a present, the former being under the latter (Bergson 2003[1888]). In anthropology we often call these events “telling moments” or “serendipity”, typically taking us by surprise. Artaud’s “breath of chaos” is a force, a presence or an order that elaborates in a mystery or chaos beyond things;  “… this sort of vital hunger, changing, opaque, whose currents sweep across the nerves, and battles with the intelligent principles of the brain.  And these principles, in their turn, recharge the pulmonary breath and confer upon it all their powers” (2003[1979]:16). To reach this chaos or what he also calls the Marvelous of conscience, Artaud considers a cactus (Peyotl), to which he was initiated during his stay with the Tarahumara (Rarámuri) in Northwest Mexico, can indicate “where it is and according to which concretions of an atavistically repressed and obstructed breath the Fantastic can give rise and renew its phosphorescence and powdering in consciousness” (ibid: 38). It would be the breath of all poetry which pushes the hand to draw or write, and the same vegetal, by indicating the right way, can diminish the chances of falling into the obscure of a sensation that leaps out.

Following Deleuze, sensation is vibration, and when it is in direct contact with a vital power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all, it can feel like a wave passing through us; a unity of the senses (sense as event) which can be felt like a fall or a rise.  This vital power he calls rhythm, more profound than vision, hearing, etc. (Deleuze 2002[1981], p.47). “We can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed” (Ibid.: 44).   It is not that order is engulfed by chaos, yet chaos itself, or the power to affirm it which happens to us (Deleuze 1968).  It is irrational and more powerful because of it;  “a wave in the mind, a rhythm far deeper than words, that one must recapture and set working, find words to fit” (Woolf 1926 in Le Guin 2004: 1). This might modify a well anchored idea that ‘Any classification is superior to chaos…” (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 24), since it brings us closer to what is going on in experience and is thus relevant for anthropology. Ultimately, anthropology’s attention to the everyday emerges from what surges unexpectedly, adheres and perdures. We thus ask, along with Deleuze, if such events can be tapped into in more fruitful manners.

“ We can not give up the hope that the effects of drugs and alcohol (their “revelations”) will be able to be relived and recovered for their own sake at the surface of the world, independently of the use of those substances, provided that the techniques of social alienation which determine this use are reversed into revolutionary means of exploration.  Burroughs wrote some strange pages on this point which attest to this quest for the great health  —our own manner of being pious:  ‘Imagine that everything that can be attained by chemical means is accessible by other paths…’  A strafing of the surface in order to transmute the stabbing of bodies, oh psychedelia.”

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 1990[1969]

Most of all, we are interested in levelling the playing fields of currently reified “psychedelics” by exploring how a breath of chaos is accessible by other paths.  We also want to explore how the bracketed “revelations” are “revelations without revelation” since the psyche is not something already there, yet an opening to what is yet to come.  As such we wish to retrieve the ancient Greek meaning of “psyche” which refers to life or its breath, thus expanding this sort of ode to “psychedelia” in as broad a sense as possible which brings it closer to something we might rather call “cosmodelia”.  Spinoza’s insistence that we do not know what bodies can do, nor is anything good or bad in itself (1994 [1849]), thinking beyond good and evil as per Nietzsche (1987[1886]), attuning to cosmic forces in a sort of mastery of non—mastery (Taussig 2020), tending to suspension (Choy and Zee 2015), to lines (Ingold 2015), chaos (Grosz 2020), sonorous sensations (Laplante 2020), elements (Fujikane 2021; Papadopoulos & al.’s 2021), jolting events in art and fieldwork (Rethmann and Wulff 2023) or to the short moment of breath that can inspire the next move, give it its specific tempo and intensity (Motta 2021), all turn our attention towards ways life emerges unexpectedly in ways that we do not yet know. It invites contributions done in a single breath, a wind, a performance, stretching out from a singular plant or encounter with fungi, animal, elemental or word dust, attending to rhythms without measure, to what surges and perdures, or in other words, to the potentials of life to renew itself. 

We invite researchers and artists to engage critically with breath and chaos as ways of tapping into what is yet to come to compose foreseeable futures.

We welcome submissions from diverse perspectives, including academic research, experimental performative writing, drawing, and sounding in anthropology, philosophy and art.

Submission Information: Planned Publication Date –September 2026