Castaneda's Ecstatic Pedagogy: The Teachings of Don Juan

Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan fails before the question: What does it mean? What it does is to demand a different kind of reading—to be read as a recipe. Castaneda's text denies the regime of signification (by eliding the question of its own authenticity), casting its readers out along a line of flight of passional apprenticeship. Through a deployment of Deleuze and Guattari's notions of regimes of sign and the refrain, I argue that The Teachings can be profitably read as both an example of insurrectionist psychedelic science and as a self-referential ecstatic pedagogy.