Culture on drugs : narco-cultural studies of high modernity / Dave Boothroyd.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Boothroyd, Dave.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Drugs of abuse--Social aspects.

Drugs of abuse.

Narcotics--Social aspects.

Narcotics.

Drug abuse--Psychological aspects.

Drug abuse.

Intellectual life.

Social evolution.

Social aspects.

Physical Description:

ix, 219 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Manchester, UK ; New York : Manchester University Press ; New York : Distributed in the USA by Palgrave, 2006.

Summary:

Never has a reconsideration of the place of drugs in our culture been more urgent than it is today. Drugs are seen as both panaceas and panapathogens and the apparent irreconcilability of these alternatives lies at the heart of the cultural crises they are perceived to engender. Yet the meanings attached to drugs are always a function of the places they come to occupy in culture. Culture on drugs rigorously investigates the resources for a re-evaluation of the drugs and culture relation in several key areas of twentieth-century cultural and philosophical theory.

Addressing themes such as the nature of consciousness, language and the body, alienation, selfhood, the image and virtuality, the nature/culture dyad and everyday life - as these are expressed in the work of key figures such as Freud, Benjamin, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze - Culture on drugs argues that the ideas and concepts by which modernity has attained its measure of self-understanding are themselves the products of encounters with drugs and their effects. In each case the reader is directed to the points at which drugs figure in the formulations of 'high theory', and it is revealed how such thinking is never itself a drug-free zone. Consequently, there is no ground on which to distinguish 'culture' from 'drug culture' in the first place. Culture on drugs offers a novel approach and an introduction to cultural theory for newcomers to the subject at the same time as presenting an original thesis concerning the articulation of modern thought by drugs and drug culture.

Contents:

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

The decision on drugs 29

In Plato's pharmacy 30

Addiction and the decision of existence 33

Intoxication and dosage: doing drugs well 38

Sacrifice 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

4 Freud's medicine: from the 'cocaine papers' to 'Irma's Injection'

Mixing psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology 69

Refiguring the 'cocaine episode' 72

The cocaine research 75

Experiments with cocaine 76

From Fliess's nasal reflexology 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 flaneur 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

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 fix 197

Heroin's signature-autograph 198

Heroin close-up 200

Heroin as icon 202

Heroin's redeeming feature (film) 203.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [206]-211) and index.

ISBN:

0719055989

9780719055980

0719055997

9780719055997

OCLC:

70882457