Culture on drugs : narco-cultural studies of high modernity PDF
Preview Culture on drugs : narco-cultural studies of high modernity
Culture on drugs This page intentionally left blank Culture on drugs Narco-cultural studies of high modernity Dave Boothroyd Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Copyright © Dave Boothroyd 2006 The right of Dave Boothroyd to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 5598 9 hardback EAN 978 0 7190 5598 0 ISBN 0 7190 5599 7 paperback EAN 978 0 7190 5599 7 EISBN 978 1 8477 9163 4 First published 2006 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset in Minion and Rotis display by Koinonia, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow For my mother and in memory of my father Wisdom: that seems to the rabble to be a kind of fl ight, an artifi ce and means for getting oneself out of a dangerous game; but the genuine philosopher – as he seems to us, my friends? – lives ‘unphilosophically’ and ‘unwisely’, above all imprudently… he risks himself constantly, he plays the dangerous game. (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil) Contents Acknowledgements page x 1 Deposition: drugs in theory Experimenting with drugs: or, how to take this book 1 Narcoanalysis, pharmacography and cultural studies 3 Narco-literary studies 8 Rethinking ‘drugs’: towards a post-anthropological perspective 10 The nature/culture dyad and drugs as ‘cultural substances’ 14 Drugs expertise and narco-power 17 The oblivion of drugs 19 Drugs and monstrosity 21 High modernity and high theory 23 Testing drugs in theory 25 2 Medusa’s blood: Derrida’s recreational pharmacology and the rhetoric of drugs Thedecision on drugs 29 In Plato’s pharmacy 30 Addiction and the decision of existence 33 Intoxication and dosage: doing drugs well 38 Sacrifi ce and bad conscience 39 Applying drug(ged) theory to the everyday drug(ged) world 41 3 Deconstruction and drugs – all mixed up Culture and interdiction 47 Saying ‘yes to drugs’ and ‘yes to deconstruction’ 51 Rejecting transcendence 58 Taking drugs, for example… 61 Rewriting the drugs text and taking drugs otherwise 64 Living on the margins of the unforgettable 65 viii Contents 4 Freud’s medicine: from the ‘cocaine papers’ to ‘Irma’s Injection’ Mixing psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology 69 Refi guring the ‘cocaine episode’ 72 The cocaine research 75 Experiments with cocaine 76 From Fliess’s nasal refl exology to the nose as the hinge 81 From Emma Eckstein’s nose to ‘Psychology for Neurologists’ 84 Freud on the neurochemical/psychological divide 86 The interface between inside and outside – the neurochemical mechanism of the unconscious 88 Solutions and resolution: Freud’s drug dream – ‘Irma’s Injection’ 91 Derrida on ‘Irma’s Injection’ 94 Freud’s resistance to cocaine 96 5 Benjamin’s ‘curious dialectics of intoxication’ A thinking which is eminently narcotic 100 Benjamin’s narco-analysis of the culture of modernity 101 Baudelaire and the high fl âneur 105 Surrealism: dreaming the revolution 111 Benjamin on hashish and the love of things 119 6 Hallucinating Sartre Philosophy and/or intoxication 127 The value of intoxication 129 The evidence of consciousness 132 Hallucination as a ‘stumbling block’ for the theory of consciousness 136 Sartre and Lewin 138 Sartre’s mescaline trip 142 Merleau-Ponty: ambiguity and hallucination 148 Hallucination as a literary sort of high 152 7 Foucault and Deleuze on acid Drugs and the orbit of madness 155 LSD in the Theatrum Philosophicum: ‘What will people think of us?’ 158 Deleuze and Alice/D(odgson) 163 Contents ix Deleuze’s mathematisation of the series and the function ‘LSD’ 164 Zabriske Point 166 From the self as a function of discourse to self-stylisation 167 Artaud and the artistry of depth 171 The LSD function and the surface–depth gradient 174 Deleuze, drugs and the ‘folding of thought’ 177 Deleuze and Guattari on the limits, uses and abuses of psychotropic drugs 179 Foucault, Deleuze and the power of drugs 183 8 Cinematic heroin and narcotic modernity From the heroin scene to the heroin screen 186 Deleuze and the cinema of heroin 192 Heroinised bodies 196 The cinematic fi x 197 Heroin’s signature-autograph 198 Heroin close-up 200 Heroin as icon 202 Heroin’s redeeming feature (fi lm) 203 References 206 Index 213
The list of books you might like
