This introduction to the 9th issue of the journal Cygne noir, themed 'drugs and altered sense(s),' clarifies the theme and the editorial committee's approach. It opens exploratory avenues, addressing various drug uses in light of recent history. A brief press review for 2021-2022 testifies to current media enthusiasm for psychedelic research. In the Western and North American context, the ongoing decriminalization of psychedelics is examined in light of potential pitfalls and setbacks due to the capitalist economy. The final two sections offer original reflection on psychedelics' potential: starting from the idea of 'trouble in affordances,' semiotic normativity is questioned, then a shift from psychedelia to ecodelia is suggested to reframe drugs' emancipatory potential in the current political context.
Stasiosemiotics merges the concepts of stasis (social division and temporal suspension) with semiotics to study sign systems whose meaning is deeply layered and temporally stratified. Although semiosis is inherently continuous and infinite, the paradoxical notion of semiostasis provides a method for examining complex objects like phantasms and political fictions, which Guattari calls 'group phantasms.' These act as meaning condensers involved in social subjectivation and alienation. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's semiotics, political philosophy, anthropology, and poetics, stasis is understood politically as civil strife and aesthetically as ecstatic standstill. The approach aims to virtually suspend semiotic motion to investigate sign formation and operation, with ethical consequences for consciousness of habit and implications for radical politics.