Drugs: Rhetoric of Fantasy, Addiction to Truth

144 Pages·2007·1.04 MB·English

by  Dennis Schep

ATROPOS PRESS
new york • dresden

DRUGS
Rhetoric of Fantasy, Addiction to Truth
Dennis Schep
© 2011 by Dennis Schep
Think Media EGS Series is supported by the European Graduate School
ATROPOS PRESS
New York • Dresden
151 First Avenue # 14, New York, N.Y. 10003
cover design: Hannes Charen
all rights reserved
ISBN 978-0-9839152-0-1
Acknowledgements 5
Acknowledgements
This book was written within the framework of my
studies at the European Graduate School, and I am
grateful to all my fellow students and the faculty members
for their contributions to this stimulating enclave of
thinkers in the Swiss Alps.
Special thanks go out to Rodrigo Maltez Novaes and
Katrin Frisch for their help preparing the manuscript, and
to Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schirmacher, my supervisor, without
whom this publication would not have been possible.
Table of Contents
Introduction..........................................................................9
The concept of drugs...........................................................13
Denotative instability.....................................13
Connotative stability.....................................20
Privation of truth.................................................................25
Transcendental insight..................................25
Simulacral delusions.....................................28
History of an abyss..............................................................31
The user as Other...........................................31
Drugs as madness..........................................33
Blue Tigers.....................................................38
The undoing of unity...........................................................45
Fragmentation and expropriation.................45
Dualism..........................................................47
Boundless representability............................51
Senseless language..............................................................57
Withdrawal from the with.............................57
Intoxicated writing.........................................61
Writing against language...............................63
Reason judges unreason................................66
Overcoming the ego............................................................69
The fascist subject..........................................69
The schizophrenic subject..............................71
Drugs without drugs......................................74
Drugs as intruder................................................................79
Dictation / possession...................................79
Metaphysics of inside and outside................82
War against Enlightenment................................................87
Politicized drug use........................................87
New sensibility / new World.........................89
Mourning the Death of God................................................95
Table of Contents 7
Narcotic thought................................................................101
Muteness.......................................................101
Intensity.......................................................102
Communication............................................106
Notes...................................................................................111
Bibliography.......................................................................133
Books:...........................................................133
Films:............................................................143

Introduction
Several attempts have been made to write a
philosophical study of drugs. Most authors have
approached the topic by means of something external to it:
Jacques Derrida has written about the rhetoric of drugs,
Avital Ronell about the structure of addiction, Sadie Plant
and Marcus Boon about writing on drugs, Ernst Jünger
about drugs in relation to just about everything he could
think of... Charles Baudelaire (Les Paradis Artificiels) and
Walter Benjamin (On Hashish) have come closer to
addressing the topic directly, but they have managed to do
so only in an autobiographical form, using themselves as a
point of mediation – an approach that is precisely opposed
to that of science, where technical jargon is employed to
hide the very experiential dimension that constitutes drug
experience.
Of those authors that attempted to engage with the
topic without circumventing it, many have failed to
overcome the level of fragmentary protocol notes. Rather
than attempting once again to overcome this fragmentary
state, in this book I want to suggest that our inability to
write about drugs may be a valuable lesson about drugs
rather than a failure. For reasons I will address later, the
very topic renders a systematic approach impossible.
Drugs refuse to be pinned down – they slip away,
incessantly, from law as well as language. Staying under
reason's policing radars, they allow their empty core to
become the playing ball of a multitude of enunciators,
none of which is able to fix their meaning once and for all.
But rather than making another futile attempt at definition
or description of what it is like to be on drugs, I will
attempt to trace these slippages, to plot out their
cartography, and to excavate the metaphysical foundations
of the emptiness that underlies them. Rather than a book
about drug experience, this is an investigation of drug
discourse, whose main goal is to understand why we still
do not understand drugs. Not the defense of the
10 “Drugs” – Rhetoric of Fantasy, Addiction to Truth
indefensible or the condemnation of the undeniable, but
the archeology of an aversion and the topology of tensions
between drugs, language and truth are the objects of my
fascination and the subjects of this book.
It is an oft-heard truism among the defenders of a
liberal drug policy that there has never been a culture
without drugs. While it may be so that every culture has
taken recourse to psychoactive substances in search of
spiritual transcendence, the very notion of drugs seems
fundamentally distinct from this. As I will argue in the first
chapter, 'drugs' is a thoroughly Western notion, whose
history cannot be separated from the history of
secularization, technology and law, nor vice versa. “Who
will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? – It is
almost the history of 'culture,' of our so-called high
culture,” wrote Nietzsche.1 And Foucault himself once
considered writing “a study of the culture of drugs or drugs
as culture in the West from the beginning of the nineteenth
century.”2 As we know, neither Foucault's History of
Drugs nor Nietzsche's The Birth of Narcotica has been
written thus far.
We are the only society that synthesizes drugs only to
subsequently prohibit them.3 Histories of technology,
politics, medicine, law, literature and philosophy intersect
in this topic, and they are all the more difficult to
disentangle since 'drugs' has also become the object of
debates in which neutrality is hardly an option. As
Maurizio Viano noted in his essay about cinematic
representations of drugs, “Talking/writing about drugs, in
academia, as well as in any other situation where a job, a
career, a reputation, are at stake, is no easy task.”4 Few
academics have dared to engage with this topic – and
those that did have more often than not felt it necessary to
employ certain inoculative measures in their texts to
protect their reputation, if not their income.5 But while
admitting to drug use involves a risk for the user, his
employers, family members and authorities will constantly
try to seek him out. Even aside from the question of
illegality, being a “drug user” seems to have become, if not
a delegitimizing aspect of one's identity, at least a