Drugs: Rhetoric of Fantasy, Addiction to Truth

ATROPOS PRESS new york • dresden DRUGS Rhetoric of Fantasy, Addiction to Truth Dennis Schep © 2011 by Dennis Sch...

Author: Dennis Schep

24 downloads 517 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

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

Introduction

11

somewhat sinful aspect that always “must be spoken” – in this respect not unlike one's sexuality. Since drug use is a sin, it must always be confessed.6 In my research, I have made use of three kinds of texts, the boundaries between which refuse to fully crystallize into a stability that transcends the methodological: -First, there are the texts that inform my own reading: Derrida, Foucault, Ronell, etc. – those figures I can proudly call my teachers, be they dead or alive. (But how did I read these texts, if they first taught me how to read?) -Second, the texts about drugs from which I have extracted the conceptual frameworks that uphold our thought about this topic: Thomas De Quincey, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, etc. At all times, I have taken care to establish a dialogue between various viewpoints, rather than allowing these texts to become the passive object of unilateral intrusion by an active theoretical apparatus. Convinced that every text contains its own world, I have tried not to let one world colonize another. -Third, there is that most final semiotic universe, the origin and end of all our knowledge: the world itself. At times, I have opposed the non-verbal letters of this ultimate text to the supposed wisdom of the others, privileging phenomenology to unlearn common sense and undermine mindless discursive repetition. Drugs stand in a tension with language and truth; but rather than attempting to overcome this tension, I have tried not to walk into the traps set up by language, not to set up new truth regimes, not to legislate and (de-)legitimate, not to be for or against. Clear-cut conclusions cannot be anything but simplifications when dealing with a topic as ambiguous and internally heterogeneous as drugs. Dealt with by every discipline and art form imaginable, drugs do nothing but upset the boundaries between them, leaving their narcotic trace precisely in a refusal of predictability, unity and closure (“was he high when he wrote this?”). Drugs disrespect clear boundaries, be they national, disciplinary or methodological. For this reason, I have chosen not to address them using a single, clearly delineated method or

12


from a specific disciplinary perspective, instead opting for an amalgam of phenomenology, deconstruction7 and discourse analysis. The purported mastery of any single scientific method is established on the basis of a number of evictions and postulations. Throughout this book, I have tried to revive reason's casualties by rejecting this sense of disciplinary mastery. My interdisciplinary angle is not grounded on the rejection of science as such, but on the assumption that science too is a “human function,” 8 exercised by human scientists with human feelings and fallibilities; that a purely objective science excludes this human element; and that for a proper understanding of drugs this human element is essential. The scientific discourse that reduces intoxication to the mechanics of synapses brings us no further than the New Age discourse that seeks to reduce drug-induced hallucinations to the workings of spiritual forces. Nevertheless, I have drawn from both traditions in order to understand what upholds them, and in what ways they are embedded in a shared metaphysical framework that still prevents us from truly thinking drugs.

The concept of drugs Denotative instability The notion of drugs is notoriously ambiguous. Its contemporary colloquial usage crystallized during Romanticism, together with the modern meaning of literature.9 But as Marcus Boon notes in his introduction to Walter Benjamin's On Hashish, drugs and literature share more than just their birth date: both are, in Boon's terms, “conceptual garbage heaps”10 where we place that which has no place and does not fit into traditional disciplines. Moreover, both are concerned with the manifestation of the power of the human imagination in a time of progressive utilitarianism. As Lacan never tired of mentioning, the signified constantly slips away under the signifier.11 In his admirable essay on structuralism, Deleuze cites Lacan's reading of Poe's The Purloined Letter to clarify what characteristics allow us to recognize a structuralist approach – one characteristic being that “the place is primary in relation to whatever occupies it.”12 In structuralism, the Symbolic is conceived of as a domain without extrinsic designation or intrinsic signification, with an ambition that is strictly topological and relational. This domain covers up the singularities that occupy the Imaginary and the Real, which “correspond with the symbolic elements and their relations, but do not resemble them.”13 Insofar as Lacan accepts the relative independence of these domains, he is undeniably a structuralist. His infamous slippage of the signified is premised on the absolute heterogeneity of the three domains constituting the Lacanian triad, that prevents each sphere from being determined by the others through relations of causality. It is this same relative independence that leads Deleuze to speak of the primacy of place over whatever comes to occupy it as a defining characteristic of structuralism. From the perspective of this structuralist approach,

14


“drugs” appears to be one of the privileged loci for the demonstration of the primacy of place or the Lacanian slippage of signification. Let us take this approach, then, and trace some of these slippages. The anti-drug discourse that emerged in the course of the 19th century inscribed itself in a preexisting discursive structure that pathologized “low” art forms, especially novels, relating them to artificiality and the awakening of dangerous sentiments.14 Not without reason could Nietzsche bemoan the type of music and art “that tries to intoxicate the audience and to force it to the height of a moment of strong and elevated feelings,” comparing them to drugs, only admired by those “whose lives are not an 'action' but a business” so that they can “observe strange creatures for whom life is no mere business.”15 Wagner, we are led to assume, is a drug; a comparison that reiterates the association of both Wagner and drugs with a cheap longing for sensation – an association that lies at the heart of anti-drug discourse. Of course, early anti-drug discourse did not explicitly argue for prohibition or regulation, and had little to do with the medical discourse of addiction; although De Quincey provides us with a clear description of his opium dependency, it is worth noting that the term 'addiction' was not used in relation to drugs until the early 20 th century.16 Be that as it may, drugs came to occupy a position that was laid out by the novel and other low art forms in the 19th century (and in doing so, the novel may have come to look slightly less corruptive). Once this position was occupied, drugs attained the discursive force associated with this older symbolic position that could now be mobilized for the illustration of other arguments; and hence, Marx could call religion the “Opium des Volkes,” 17 and Lawrence could describe a holiday in Venice in the following terms: But anyhow, with all the cocktails, all the lying in warmish water and sun-bathing on hot sand in hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow in the warm nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And that was

The concept of drugs

15

what they all wanted, a drug: the slow water, a drug; the sun, a drug; jazz, a drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth, to be drugged! Enjoyment! Enjoyment!18

The prohibitive discourse on drugs that emerged during the second decade of the 20th century, to a large extent diffused by cinema,19 largely based itself on this association that presented drugs as artificial pleasures that threaten self-sufficiency and the freedom of the will. More recently, these aspects have been mobilized to foreground the supposedly addictive nature of mass media; for instance, Debord described the spectacle as a “permanent opium war which unleashes a limitless artificiality...”20 – inscribing images in the position drugs occupied within the Symbolic and activating a by then familiar linkage between mass media and addiction. Even Gaddafi's recent insistence that the insurgents partaking in the 2011 uprising against his regime were “on hallucinogenic drugs”21 functions by mobilizing the free-floating signifier “drugs” and its discursive punch in order to portray as irrational the revolt against a dictator who has given ample proof of his own irrationality.22 Like many other politicized notions (freedom, democracy, globalization), “drugs” form the locus of a discursive battle, exactly because the word functions as a signifier whose signified perpetually slips away, as a primary place awaiting a secondary occupation – an empty space at the mercy of numerous enunciators representing a wide spectrum of political agendas. Like a palimpsest, the meaning of “drugs” is endlessly overwritten and displaced according to a play of successive discursive forms, subject to all manner of tensions and resignifications – never stabilizing, always pushed back, “until the notion of origin seizes to be pertinent.” 23 The semantic weight that is sedimented in the process of these displacements is frequently mobilized to place non-drugrelated discourses in the “wartime epistemology” 24 within which drug discourse tends to unfold itself, thereby reiterating the basic conditions of this epistemology, most

16


notably the belief that one has no choice but to be either for or against drugs. As Derrida points out in 'The Rhetoric of Drugs,' the concept of drugs is a non-scientific one held together by ethicopolitical values, carrying within itself norm or prohibition.25 On closer scrutiny, it seems tempting to assume this “norm or prohibition” is in fact the only thing that prevents the notion from exploding under the weight of its incoherence. There is very little common ground between high school students smoking pot and indigenous Amazonians attending Ayahuasca healing ceremonies, while both marijuana and the active component of Ayahuasca (DMT) are placed on Schedule I of the 1970 US Controlled Substances Act. Things get even more complicated when we consider the enormous abuse of anti-anxiety pills and painkillers; while one would hesitate to call a person using Xanax to counter his or her anxiety attacks a drug user, one would not hesitate to do so in the case of addicts paying good money for Xanax prescriptions when opiates are scarce. Despite the attempts of doctors, the pharmaceutical industry and the law, psychoactive substances often fail to be contained by their prescribed uses – and these prescribed uses often turn into something else. Throughout history, opium has been used both as an anesthetic and as a recreational drug; like many other Romantics searching for transcendence, De Quincey bought his opium at a “druggist,” and first used the substance to alleviate a “most painful affection of the stomach.”26 Interestingly, when morphine (the main psychoactive alkaloid in opium) turned out to be more addictive than initially thought, Bayer AG started marketing heroin as a non-addictive substitute for morphine – that is, until heroin itself turned out to be highly addictive.27 Cocaine was first used to make stimulating wines (Vin Mariani, introduced in 1863) and soft drinks (Coca-Cola, introduced in 1886), while at the same time, the pharmaceutical industry experimented with its properties as a local anesthetic, and in 1879 Bayer AG marketed it as a means to overcome one's morphine


17

dependency. By the turn of the century, it had come to be associated with bohemians like Sherlock Holmes and abuse in the London West End club scene – an association reaffirmed with its prohibition in the second decade of the 20th century. The first large scale amphetamine use took place during World War II, where amphetamines were employed to combat fatigue in soldiers; in the 1950s, it became a popular weight loss drug, anti-depressant, and beatnik pastime; and today, it is most often used to combat fatigue in dancing youths.28 More recently, drugs like MDMA and LSD were first investigated for their potential use in psychoanalytic and psychedelic therapy, until they were co-opted by various sub-cultures and subsequently either scheduled or prohibited; and ketamine, which was introduced and is still used as an analgesic, is now also slowly but steadily invading the rave scene in various countries.29 Most of these drugs are still used for nonrecreational purposes, although their dominant usage (or at least the usage most dominant in establishing their image in the popular imagination) may now be recreational. It seems, then, that one cannot even compile a conclusive list of drugs understood in the contemporary sense of recreational drugs; whether someone is on medication or using drugs depends on his or her intentions. Or, in Jünger's words: In our context, a 'drug' is a substance that induces intoxication. However, we need something more specific in order to distinguish these substances from those used as medication or for purely pleasurable purposes. This more specific criterion should not be found in the substance, but in the user's intention, for medicines as well as stimulants can also be used as intoxicating drugs in the more narrow sense of the term. [My translation; if there is no authorized translation available, I will include the original passage in the accompanying endnote.]30

18


Moreover, in some cases it may be entirely undecidable whether a substance is used as drug or medication; an example would be the methadone programs that have been set up to treat heroin addicts in various countries. In this case, synthetic opiates are employed in the palliative care of individuals suffering from an addiction to synthetic opiates. The 'cure' – or rather, the means to maintain a relatively livable and non-criminal life – is the poison, this time not bought on the street but supplied by the state. Of course, this accords perfectly with Derrida's logic of the pharmakon: ...in the pharmacy [one cannot] distinguish the medicine from the poison, the good from the evil, the true from the false, the inside from the outside, the vital from the mortal, the first from the second, etc. Conceived within this original reversibility, the pharmakon is the same precisely because it has no identity. And the same (is) as supplement. Or in differance.31

The pharmakon, which is the word Socrates uses to designate the written texts brought to him by Phaedrus, is both medicine and poison; it is undecidable because it is the very medium in which differentiation is first produced; it has no identity because it escapes all designation. We need only read Freud's essay on cocaine (in which he lauded it as a panacea32) with the geopolitical and personal suffering this drug has caused in mind to understand how this logic applies to drugs and medication – two categories that share many of their substances. This same ambiguity inhabits the term “druggist” – a somewhat anachronistic term whose medical usage has survived until today to remind us of the notorious undecidability between poison and medicine that is now mostly covered up by law and chemistry. Indeed, De Quincey got his daily fix from his druggist; and the practice of “doctor shopping” has survived among drug addicts until today.33 More deeply disturbing than simple confusion or polysemia, the pharmakon eludes logic altogether, and must therefore be evicted for logic to instantiate itself:


19

All translations [of Plato's Phaedrus] into languages that are the heirs and depositaries of Western metaphysics thus produce on the pharmakon an effect of analysis that violently destroys it, reduces it to one of its simple elements by interpreting it, paradoxically enough, in the light of the ulterior developments it itself has made possible. Such an interpretative translation is thus as violent as it is impotent: it destroys the pharmakon but at the same time forbids itself access to it, leaving it untouched in its reserve.34

While it merely took a simplifying translation to restore reason's radars in the case of Plato's texts, in the confrontation with the ambiguity of drugs logic's panicridden reactions are much more visible. In US policy, logic reaffirms itself by classifying a wealth of substances in five categories under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA): one for the stuff that has no accepted medical use in the United States and that only DEA-sanctioned research institutes may possess (Schedule I); three for the stuff that is risky, but has some medical use, and that besides pharmacies, doctors and researchers only people with prescriptions may possess (Schedule II, III and IV, from strict to more lenient control measures); one for the stuff that has a recognized risk, but can be bought without prescription (Schedule V); and, of course, the nameless sixth category that covers everything not covered by the CSA: coffee, alcohol, tobacco,35 everyday foodstuffs, substances not meant for human consumption,36 recognized drugs with a low risk of abuse,37 recently discovered drugs and derivatives that have not been legislated yet,38 and all “drugs not yet synthesized.”39 In the collective imagination, things are even less complicated, the number of wellknown “drugs” being limited to ten or fifteen. Clear demarcations cover up the pharmakon's elusive threat / threatening elusiveness, hiding legislative logic's blind leap into being and its absence of exterior foundations under a veil of clear-cut categories with a semblance of durability.

20


Connotative stability The denotative instability of the signifier “drugs” brings us to the root of what I deem to be one of the main problems when it comes to drugs and their perception by society as well as their treatment by the humanities. The term “drugs” is almost exclusively employed as a “singular plural,”40 denoting a variety of substances and experiences that, from a phenomenological perspective suspicious of linguistic generalizations, could hardly be more heterogeneous. Judging by their cultural representations, there seems to be little to no common measure between a housewife hooked on benzodiazepines and a student relying on smart drugs to pass his exams, between a hippie hoping to find Enlightenment through psychedelics and an athlete using stimulants to improve his results. There is not one single element shared by all substances and experiences grouped together under the notion of “narcotics” or “drugs”: in Foucault's words, “there are bad drugs and good drugs”41; some are natural, others synthetic; some pleasurable, others quite the opposite; some induce hallucinations, others increase lucidity; some are habit-forming, others lose their effect when used repeatedly; some destroy the body, others may revive it; and, in Burroughs' words, some open out, others narrow down.42 All can be said to have a chemical interaction with parts of the brain, but as this can be said of literally everything that affects our brain by way of either our senses or our blood-brain barrier,43 no conclusive definition can be based on this fact alone. But while it remains quite unclear what conditions a substance must fulfill in order to be considered a “drug,” the term's connotation is less ambiguous: drugs are associated with the erosion of the will, the corruption of the spirit, the absence of reason and the end of self-sufficiency 44 – in short, they are condemned. The fact that the demarcation and internal homogeneity of the category 'drugs' are not rooted in either the chemical structure or symptomatology of this group of substances, but instead achieved through an imposition of linguistic violence, should make us


21

suspicious of the category's apparent unity. If condemnation – or its opposite, propagation, depending on which of the two superficially opposed discourses one chooses to follow – is what underlies the unity of the category, and the unified category is what is condemned, we end up in a dangerous form of circular reasoning in which the object of our condemnation is constituted by our condemnation itself – a condemnation that inevitably ends up chasing its own phantasms. If condemnation (or propagation, which in this context is the same) is an implicit part of the concept of 'drugs,' their subsequent explicit condemnation is already assumed by the unspoken luggage of the concept itself, and devoid of any additional meaning. Derrida recognizes quite clearly how, in the case of drugs, condemnation functions as the facilitator of a violent homogenization: There is not a single world of drugs. Artaud's text is not Michaux's or Benjamin's [...], neither of which should be confused with Baudelaire's text which in turn is not that of Coleridge nor of De Quincey. To conflate such differences in a homogeneous series would be delirious, indeed narcoticizing. But then, can one ever condemn or prohibit without also somehow confusing?45

In their denunciation (and often even in the reactive defense opposing this denunciation) a variety of different natural and synthetic substances are grouped together under that one word: drugs, a “decree [mot d'ordre]”46 or “ready-made category” designed to isolate the untoward.47 And so, Deleuze and Guattari can hesitantly but categorically reject drugs (that is: all drugs, and everything that can be seen as drugs) as a false means of deterritorialization that leads to a more neurotic reterritorialization;48 and even a famous spokesperson in favor of drugs such as Timothy Leary fails to take into account the specificity of various substances in his guide book The Psychedelic Experience, proposing one protocol based on the Tibetan book of the dead for the guidance of

22


everyone under the influence of any type of psychedelic; as if there is one protocol that fits all psychedelic drugs, or even all psychedelic “experiences”! “Drugs,” then, is a predominantly ethicopolitical notion, uniting a wide array of substances under the banner of their denunciation.49 And although I insist on the necessity of resisting this unity, I do not intend to saturate it with secondary distinctions, for this would require a quite different methodology probably involving actual experimentation. I am more interested in the conceptual foundations and discursive effects of this homogenization. If the unity of 'drugs' rests on their denunciation, it seems urgent to ask what underlies the antagonism between drugs and society (an antagonism that, I repeat, rests on the same foundations as the propagation of drugs by certain social – or 'antisocial' – elements). In probing into the foundations of the “rhetoric of fantasy”50 that makes up contemporary drug discourse, I hope to be able to gain some insight into a topic that, despite its obvious social relevance, has historically been all but evicted from the precincts of philosophy. While I believe the dominant rhetoric of drugs is based on ambiguous foundations, I do not endeavor to criticize the argument that condemns drugs on the basis of these foundations in favor of its opposite – as we will see, the discourse of both sides is largely upheld by the same presuppositions, so that condemnation and propagation may very well turn out to be two sides of the same coin. To criticize is to maintain oneself in the sphere of the thing criticized, to subject oneself to a dogmatic relation of knowledge – to attempt to switch positions, without altering the coordinates or questioning what conceptual framework supports and constitutes the opposition. As Heidegger knew all too well, thinking is not warfare, 51 and the refutation of one argument is not the defense of its opposite. Thinking does not take place in polemics, but begins with an attentive listening to what polemics cannot say – to what has been “evicted / evacuated for a discourse of mastery to sustain itself.”52 Let us attempt to listen, then, to the unspeakable assumptions and mute


23

foundations that allow us to speak about drugs without hearing or approaching them – not so that they may finally begin to speak, but so that we may understand their muteness.

Privation of truth Transcendental insight No dog would endure such a curst existence! Wherefore, from Magic I seek assistance, That many a secret perchance I reach Through spirit-power and spirit-speech, And thus the bitter task forego Of saying the things I do not know,— That I may detect the inmost force Which binds the world, and guides its course; Its germs, productive powers explore, And rummage in empty words no more!53 54 -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part 1 Considering the reasons for the widespread animosity toward drugs and their users, Derrida writes: “We do not object to the drug user's pleasure per se, but to a pleasure taken in an experience without truth. Pleasure and play (now still as with Plato) are not in themselves condemned unless they are inauthentic and void of truth.” 55 This stands in marked contrast to the discourse used by a number of psychedelic drug users, who appear to believe their trips have more to do with truth than anything they encounter in consensual reality (a term I will come back to later). Examples include Marcia Moore, astrologer, yoga teacher and self-described “priestess of the Goddess Ketamine,”56 who, with the help of this drug, could reach the self-invented state of “cosmatrix,” which she equated with Sat, “the first emanation from the power source which the Hindus call Brahman.” In Moore's recapitulation of Hindu cosmology, Sat is “concerned with the essences of all forms... the will-to-be which brings all things into existence.” It is worth noting that Moore disappeared in January 1979; her skeleton was found two years later, after

26


she had died frozen in the woods from a ketamine overdose. According to her widower, Howard Alltounian, “Marcia became addicted to ketamine and committed suicide (January 14, 1979). Ketamine is dangerous. Its use should not be encouraged.”57 Another interesting figure who stood by the Faustian belief that drugs could bring extraordinary knowledge to their users is John C. Lilly, famous for his work on dolphin communication and his invention of the isolation tank. After being injected with ketamine for the first time, Lilly believed extraterrestrial beings contacted him and urged him to continue his use of the drug for “educational purposes.”58 59 This set him off on an extensive binge, leading to what he called the “overvaluation domain,” in which he valued inner drug realities more highly than the external world. In the following 13 months, Lilly developed a belief in a general conspiracy with several layers, that involved among other things aliens in charge of the earth's computers, solid-state entities on the comet Kohoutek, time travel, dolphins and whales. Interestingly, both Moore and Lilly expressed a belief in the potential of psychoactive substances in providing a way out of the “Armageddon,”60 to avoid war,61 or even to convert “the whole planet... into the Garden of Eden.”62 These are only two cases of intelligent people driven toward deranged beliefs through the use of drugs 63 – of course they do not represent the average drug user. And although there is a world of difference between the New Age flavor of Moore's delusions and Lilly's inhuman conspiracy theories, their madness is upheld by an interestingly similar conceptual topology. Both seem to have felt to be on some sort of mission imbued with transcendental significance. It is this sense of mission rather than personal enjoyment that justified their use of the substance. Moreover, both professed to have found a deeper and more pressing truth in their narcotic experiences that led them to neglect their social life and body to a dangerous extent. Both delusions had a negative outcome; Moore died under dubious circumstances shortly after recognizing her problems with the drug, and Lilly was

Privation of truth

27

tortured by paranoid thoughts for the 13 months during which he undertook his experiments, that only stopped after an intoxicated bicycle incident landed him in the hospital for three months (later in life, he disavowed his conspiracy theory as “just ideas [he] was having”64). Yet both apparently felt the insights they gained through the use of drugs (whether these were insights into the essences of forms or into the plans of extraterrestrials) sanctioned their life-threatening experiments. In his famous allegory of the cave, Plato expresses the idea that those who succeed to ascend to a higher truth will be ridiculed by those who stayed behind. However, the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world where it can finally glimpse the idea of good is its own reward; and even though this may leave the ascendant at a practical disadvantage in relation to his former fellow cavemen, he would pity rather than envy his fellow-prisoners upon return. These fellow-prisoners, however, will be unable to understand the ascendant's new-found wisdom to such an extent that, as Plato states in an oblique reference to Socrates, “if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.”65 It seems both Moore and Lilly made an attempt at legitimating their personal exploits by placing them in this Platonic narrative; they both accepted the animosity of their loved ones in the name of a higher truth to which they could ascend with the help of ketamine. Moreover, both seem to share the Platonic distrust of regular sensory experience in favor of a more fundamental truth; this is particularly obvious in the case of Lilly, who usually combined ketamine with sessions in his self-invented isolation tank.66 The belief in the possibility of reaching an extraordinary level of insight that could not be reached without the help of psychoactive substances is quite common among drug users; besides Lilly and Moore, we encounter it in Benjamin,67 Hofmann,68 Huxley,69 Jünger,70 Maupassant,71 Michaux,72 De Quincey,73 and certainly in many others whom I have not read. Jansen goes as far as

28


to say that the conviction that “life was but a dream, and [the ketamine experience] is the one reality to which the person has just awakened”74 is a regular one among users of ketamine (a conviction that may shine a dubious new light on the fact that the CIA conducted experiments with various psychedelic drugs in search of a “truth serum”). Here, one might retort with the famous lines by Calderón de la Barca: “...life is but a dream – and dreams are only dreams.”75 For by saying that compared to drug experience, life is but a dream, one merely displaces the reality principle from one side to the other, inverting the ontology in which dreams are dreams and life is life in favor of its opposite, while leaving its underlying coordinates intact. By placing life on the side of dreams, Calderón de la Barca has infinitely more success at destabilizing this disputable boundary between reality and its other, between deceptive simulacra and undivided truth.

Simulacral delusions The noble intentions behind these attempts at enlisting drugs in the search for truth and knowledge notwithstanding, for many, the means toward this end would contaminate the end itself, rendering the results illusory and the voyage delusional. As Derrida notes, ventriloquizing dominant arguments against drugs, the drug user “cuts himself off from the world, in exile from reality, far from objective reality and the real life of the city and the community; ...he escapes into a world of simulacrum and fiction.”76 The fact that not all drugs are hallucinogenics tends to be forgotten in the “rhetoric of fantasy that is at the root of the interdiction;”77 and the drug user's attempt to capitalize even on his yearning for Abenteuer (adventure)78 by providing it with truth value is nothing but bad faith, for his experience is devoid of truth by definition. Or, in the words of Dennis Cooper: Among recreational drugs, only heroin and LSD access the sublime, to my knowledge. Still, their

Privation of truth

29

styles are completely dichotomous. LSD can make anyone brilliant – temporarily, at least – but there's a catch, i.e., it also renders one freakish, inarticulate, an idiot savant uncomprehendingly jailed within the crude rights and wrongs of the world's “sane” majority. Opiates, on the other hand, tend to instigate a flirtation with death which... makes one's flirtation with dying inherently profound, since “profound” and “unknowable” are synonymous, right?79

Intoxication may lead the very distinction between profundity and idiocy to collapse – as William James so poignantly expressed in relation to nitrous oxide, an experience that begins with a sense of revelation may end with “depth within depth of impotence and indifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesis, but in the fact that whichever you choose it's all one.” 80 But while tracing the line between “reason and silliness” within the mind of a single person may prove a difficult undertaking,81 its contours within society are less ambiguous: the experienced profoundness of the drug user is nothing but stupidity in the eyes of the sober remainder. The drug user's solipsism makes him unable to judge by any standards that transcend his isolated experience. This renders him a creature without sense by definition – for, as I will argue later on, sense is always constituted in community, never in isolation. Ronell wrote that “Drugs... blur the boundaries between intelligence and idiocy, between what is knowable and unintelligible, yet often give the impression of grandiose insight.”82 Ignoring some prominent examples from the art world, however, on a wider social scale these boundaries seem perfectly clear: the drug user may deem himself intelligent, sober society does not. While a large amount of users rely on a Platonic cave rhetoric to justify their exploits by converting what society might see as madness into some form of transcendental insight, those who oppose drug use often implicitly do so in the name of the simulacral nature of drug experience. As

30


we know, the real danger of the simulacrum lies in its tendency to suffocate the divine referential that is Platonic reality, up to the point at which there is nothing but radiant simulacra that do not conceal anything; a danger whose existence is correlated with our attachment to a Platonic notion of the truth.83 “[T]o refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law,”84 writes Barthes, in a sentence we might turn around to suggest that the end of God means the end of fixed truth. Whether we praise drugs for providing us with access to a realm truer than the everyday, or denounce them for lacking truth, we never seize to reiterate this Platonic notion of truth; the arguments differ only in where they locate this notion. Both the prosecution and the defense are contaminated by Platonism – this is why condemnation and propagation may be two sides of the same coin. Despite Leary's warnings,85 some users may perceive each trip as an ascendance from the cave, while for the rest of the world this ascendance does not lead one to essential forms, but to delusional beliefs and hallucinations that bear no relation to reality. Even if the sober majority is willing to accept that the nature of intoxicated states may be programmed by experiences in everyday reality, the two are still separated by an impassable abyss, a void installed between sobriety and that which it is not – a distance that no proclamation of knowledge or insight can redeem.

History of an abyss The user as Other Throughout history, this abyss that separates states of intoxication from everyday reality has taken on various guises. In Plato's time, in relation to the Eleusian mysteries (whose narcotic nature has been suggested by Albert Hofmann among others86), it was protected by clear prescriptions, ritual preparations, and a strict door policy. In representations of the Dionysian cult (that, according to Jünger, still had the opportunity to enjoy wine as a true drug, before its domestication by habituated use87) Dionysus is often surrounded by satyrs, sileni, maenads and other mythical creatures, underlining the Otherness of the cult's ritual inebriation. Although the Middle Ages and Renaissance apparently did not have a significant drug problem, the status ascribed to the mystics and the mad of this period shows that otherworldly experiences were valued quite highly and related to the Divine; and Foucault's writings on madness suggest drugs would not have been subject to our extensive legislation before the Age of Reason: Bosch, Brueghel, Thierry Bouts and Dürer line up beside their silent images. For madness unleashes its fury in the space of pure vision. Fantasies and threats, the fleeting fragments of dreams and the secret destiny of the world, where madness has a primitive, prophetic force, revealing that the dream-like is real and that a thin surface of illusion opens onto bottomless depths, and that the glittering surface of images opens the way to worrying figures that shine forever in the darkness.88

This forgotten valuation of the fantastic is what led Artaud to lament: “...the Renaissance of the sixteenth century made a clean break with a reality that had laws

32


both natural and superhuman, and the Renaissance humanism that resulted was not an expansion but a restriction for mankind.”89 In Romanticism, some of the Dionysian spirits and the anguish that accompanied them were re-awakened, along with a controversial appreciation for the untoward; hence Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'90 and Sir Walter Raleigh Scott's insistence that the “inspirations of [E.T.A.] Hoffmann … resemble the ideas produced by the immoderate use of opium”91 – a reiteration of the age-old linkage between drugs and fantasy. There is, Scott seems to suggest, a sober and moderate type of imagination, to which Hoffmann's manic, drug-induced fantasy is the unhealthy and unreasonable counterpart. Today, the abyss that separates the sober from its constitutive outside knows various modes of surveillance, from the more tangible legal and architectural forms (think of border controls, prisons, and the many institutions of palliative care meant to separate drug users from society – the most interesting example being the “junkie boats” in Holland, uncannily reminiscent of the medieval Ship of Fools or Narrenschiff described by Foucault92) to deeply embedded conceptions that are implicit in certain cultural productions. Take, for instance, the 2000 documentary Black Tar Heroin, that follows a number of heroin users over a two-year period.93 An often repeated sequence in this film consists of a shot of a user shooting up, followed by a number of shots that follow him or her around doing casual stuff: talking to friends, staring into the void, rummaging through his/her purse, riding a bicycle. The suggestion is one of radical discontinuity: after injecting, these people no longer inhabit our world, but their own private reality, and the film turns them into a spectacle by virtue of this otherness. And now, they are high: what are they feeling? What are they thinking about? As if we could know what sober people feel or think about... The various interviews in the film retrace this discontinuity in a wider temporality by focusing on the user's past life, urging him/her to compare it to the present. Users talk about their often trauma-ridden childhoods, the family members they now no longer see;

History of an abyss

33

they look at relics from the time before heroin and discuss them in pluperfect. They paint a picture of how it once was, all the time emphasizing that now, that is no more, and clearly suggesting heroin is what caused this change. Continuity is premised on sobriety, and heroin lies at the root of an undesirable discontinuity. Drugs have come between a traumatic but sober past and an intoxicated present without perspective, breaking the user's biography in two, turning whatever continuity exists between past and present into a mere temporal progression that lacks organic unity and foreseeable causality.94

Drugs as madness Without suggesting that narcotic experience can be subsumed under the category of madness, or that drugs have come to occupy the symbolic position occupied by madness in previous eras (although as we will see, drugs did absorb some of the spillovers from madness), I will now turn to Foucault's History of Madness to bring his understanding of madness into a productive dialogue with my understanding of drugs – since it is in this work by Foucault, incidentally one of very few outspoken academic drug users, that the abyss that separates reason from its other finds its most sophisticated articulation. In the second part of the full 2006 translation of his 1961 work, Foucault develops the notion of “unreason,” a word that has since then disappeared from our ordinary vocabulary. In Foucault's work, unreason is conceived of as the empty opposite of reason that receives positive expression in the various forms of madness – that are, however, strictly conceptualized on the basis of this purely negative form. Unreason represents a “threatening space of absolute liberty”95 that must be exorcized as soon as it is glimpsed, by practices of confinement in the social sphere and positivist science in the conceptual (351). These practices curtail the threat by objectifying madness in terms that are not its own, depriving it of its subject status (443). Unreason is thought in strictly negative terms; it is error as opposed to truth, fantasy as opposed to world,

34


non-being as opposed to being, Night as opposed to Day (522). However, the truly unsettling nature of unreason, and the reason it was generally subjected to science and confinement, lies in its demonstration of the contingency of reason, of the fact that madness follows its own reason, thereby showing that reason is not One: “Unreason is that the truth of madness is reason.” (206) This fundamental fact is what positivistic science sets out to conceal. And in the 18th century, this gives madness an ambiguous face: a face that is, on the one hand, scientific, neatly analyzed and categorized; but looming underneath, the endless night of unreason threatening to challenge reason's sovereignty by exposing its very foundations as intrinsically mad. Unreason is the proximity between reason and madness, the fact that madness is nothing but a simulacrum of reason and cannot be distinguished from the latter except on the basis of terms set up by reason's grasp: Mixed up together in the perception of madness constructed in the eighteenth century then are elements that are both extremely positive and extremely negative. The positive is nothing other than reason itself, even if it wears an aberrant appearance; the negative is the fact that madness is nothing other than a vain simulacrum of reason. Madness is reason, with the addition of a thin layer of negativity; it is what is closest to reason, and most irreducible, reason marked with an ineradicable sign: Unreason. (184)

Despite Derrida's accusation of “historicist totalitarianism,”96 Foucault conceives of unreason as a notion that, at least in the late 18 th century,97 lies precisely outside of history, while simultaneously forming its foundation: In [the] disparity between the consciousness of madness and the consciousness of unreason, we find, in the late eighteenth century, the starting point of what was to be a decisive moment,

History of an abyss

35

where the experience of unreason, such as is evident in Hölderlin, Nerval and Nietzsche, always leads back to the roots of time – unreason thereby becoming the untimely within the world par excellence – while the knowledge of madness sought on the contrary to situate it ever more precisely within the direction of nature and history in their development. (363)

Unreason is thought as the “murmur” (246) that forms the backdrop of history, where history follows the time of reason – reason that constituted itself in exorcizing its constitutive outside, unreason.98 “The necessity of madness throughout the history of the West is linked to that decisive action that extracts a significant language from the background noise and its continuous monotony, a language which is transmitted and culminates in time; it is, in short, linked to the possibility of history.” (xxxii) At certain historical junctures the unreason that lies at the foundation of all madness appears as a strictly ahistorical figure – although it only exists in correlation with its Other, Reason, that is always already historical. Within the dichotomy between reason and unreason, drugs are certainly located on the side of unreason: the side of non-language, non-being, non-truth. As we have already seen, privation of truth is precisely what Derrida identifies as the reason for our rejection of drugs (“We do not object to the drug user's pleasure per se, but to a pleasure taken in an experience without truth”99). Seen in this light, drugs provide us a way out of reason's grasp, into the Night of unreason, where truth and language find no shelter. As one of his biographers suggests, we may find a reason for Foucault's fascination with drugs in his desire to probe reason's outside: Foucault first took acid together with two gay academics. The setting for the trip was Death Valley, and the soundtrack a tape of Stockhausen. Some months later he spoke to Claude Mauriac of ‘an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert

36


night, with delicious music, nice people and some chartreuse’. His experience confirmed his belief that LSD allowed the user to experience a form of ‘unreason’ or madness that was not constrained by the dichotomy between the normal and the pathological.100

In unreason's denial of the foundations of historical time, we may find an explanation for the absence of time often experienced under the influence of drugs – for instance, in De Quincey: “I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night—nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.”101 In Baudelaire: “...the dimensions of time and being are completely disturbed by the multitude and intensity of sensations and thoughts. It is as if one lives multiple lives within a single hour.” 102 In Cocteau: “Everything we do in life, even love, we do in the express train that rolls toward death. To smoke opium is to step off the moving train, it is to occupy oneself with something else than life: with death” (my translation).103 And, most poignantly, Ernst Jünger: “Intoxication leads us up to time – not merely to some of its ephemeral cells, but to its mystery and so all the way onto death. This is where the danger lies, and every physical threat is merely an indication of this” (my translation).104 105 While the abyss between reason and unreason may be timeless, it is so precisely because it constitutes historical time, which is always the time of the sober and the sane. The split that separates sobriety off from madness and intoxication gives rise to historical time itself – a time from which intoxication, like madness, is excluded. While the positive symptoms populating their experienced absence of regular time may be different, it is the same prediscursive experience of atemporality that underlies Nietzsche's “I am... every name in history” (my translation)106 and De Quincey's “100 years in one night”107 – that is to say, a certain experience of unreason as the eclipse of reason and its temporality underlies madness as well as drug use.108

History of an abyss

37

There is, however, one important difference between drugs and unreason: leaving the problematic of addiction and the very ambiguity of our notion of “free will,” so admirably analyzed by Sedgwick in her 'Epidemics of the Will,'109 out of consideration, drugs represent a free choice to descend into the realm of unreason. Until the 17 th century, madness and unreason were still understood as pathologies of the will, and hence conceived as ethical categories; we find the philosophical counterpart to this idea in the simple disavowal of madness in Descartes' Meditations110 as well as in Spinoza's conception of reason as an ethical choice that leads to freedom.111 But since then, the notion of a non-liable subject has emerged – one who cannot help being mad, and therefore cannot be held responsible for his actions and should not be punished for them. Since the classical age, reason is seen as the domain of liberty, madness as that of non-liberty.112 In contrast, drug use is still often perceived as an ethical failure, a voluntary and “free” choice for the night of unreason, or even for the non-freedom of addiction. For De Quincey, Baudelaire and many others, drugs are a sure means to destroy the freedom of the will; but this destruction is undeniably the consequence of a voluntary act (or series of acts) that can simply be refused. The subject is free, until it chooses to take its own freedom. But if freedom to choose is also freedom to choose non-freedom, how are we to think the existential undecidability of this moment of decision?113 In this context, the voluntary madness or dependence induced by certain drugs confuses the very opposition between reason and unreason as conceptualized by Foucault even more than the manifestation of reason's contingency by the logic of madness (“Unreason is that the truth of madness is reason”114). If the descent into unreason by way of madness is conceived of as a tragic occurrence that no measure of willpower can prevent, how do we understand the thousands of people that freely decide to go down that road every weekend? Despite Spinoza, can the escape from reason really be a reasonable desire?

38


Blue Tigers At this point, where reason falters and its registers encounter their originary instability, we may find solace in taking recourse to literature, that other hiding place for imagination's dangerous excesses whose subterranean linkage with drugs has been noted on more than one occasion.115 In 'Blue Tigers', a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the narrator, a professor of logic at the university of Lahore, begins by admitting he has “always been drawn to the tiger.”116 He then goes on to recount his visit to an Indian village, where rumor had it that the locals had discovered a blue species of tigers. Upon arrival, the villagers are friendly, but reticent to say anything about the tigers; they keep the narrator's interest alive by telling him the tiger has been seen at riverbeds or in the jungle, but the narrator soon suspects these stories are nothing but stories, and a means to prolong his stay at the village for their financial gain. One night, he climbs a nearby hill, a sacred place to which the villagers had denied him the right of entrance. There, he finds a number of stones, that have the same dark blue hue he had associated with the blue tigers in his dreams. He brings some of them back to the village, where, to his horror, he discovers that the stones defy the laws of logic; their number grows and dwindles, while their size and shape remain the same: I pulled out a handful, but felt that there were still two or three I had missed. A tickling sensation, the slightest sort of quivering, imparted a soft warmth to my palm. When I opened my hand, I saw that it held thirty or forty disks; I’d have sworn I’d picked up no more than ten. I left them on the table and turned back to get the rest out of the pocket. I didn’t need to count them to see that they had multiplied. I pushed them together into a single pile, and tried to count them out one by one. That simple operation turned out to be impossible. I would look fixedly at any one of

History of an abyss

39

them, pick it up with my thumb and index finger, yet when I had done that, when that one disk was separated from the rest, it would have become many. I checked to see that I didn’t have a fever (which I did not), and then I performed the same experiment, over and over again. The obscene miracle kept happening. I felt my feet go clammy and my bowels turn to ice; my knees began to shake. I do not know how much time passed. Without looking at the disks, I scooped them into a pile and threw them out the window. With a strange feeling of relief, I sensed that their number had dwindled. I firmly closed the door and lay down on my bed. I tried to find the exact position I had lain in before, hoping to persuade myself that all this had been a dream. So as not to think about the disks yet somehow fill the time, I repeated, with slow precision, aloud, the eight definitions and seven axioms of Ethics. I am not sure they helped. (241)

The narrator repeatedly emphasizes the unsettling nature of this discovery and his wish that he “had never laid eyes on it [the crevice that held the stones].” (241) He starts shunning the company of his friends out of fear that he would share this “dreadful miracle that undermined humanity's science” (243) with them. In dreams, the narrator links the stones to Behemoth and Leviathan, “the creatures of the Scriptures that signify that God is irrational.” (242) The “constant temptation to touch them, to feel that tickling sensation once more, to scatter them, to watch them increase or decrease, and to note whether they came out odd or even” (243) turns the narrator's life into an unthinkable torment: At first I was in a sort of agony, fearing that I’d gone mad; since then, I have come to believe that it would have been better had I been merely insane, for my personal hallucinations would be less disturbing than the discovery that the universe can tolerate disorder. If three plus one

40


can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness.117 (242)

Finally, the narrator is saved from his torment by a deus ex machina-like plot twist: in a mosque, he meets a blind beggar, who, upon hearing the sound of the stones in the narrator's pocket, asks him for alms. After the narrator gives him one stone, the beggar retorts in Levinasian fashion by saying he must give them all, for “He who gives not all has given nothing.” After warning the beggar that his gift may be a curse, he gives in, giving the beggar all the stones – releasing him of his painful burden. Like Borges' blue tigers, experiences had under the influence of psychedelic drugs can refute all logic we suppose to be indisputable. And like these selfengendering stones, this experience can lead to madness and monomania, as we've seen in the case of John Lilly and Marcia Moore. The implosion of the rational under the weight of the unforeseeable – an Event if ever there was one – can be a tormenting experience; but it can also captivate us, and its exceptionality can imbue a person like Lilly with a sense of mission. And for many, the apparent suspension of the universe's laws is a constant locus of attraction: “I have always been drawn to the tiger.” (239) If we read Borges' short story as an allegory for the emergence of a lavish irrationality that was suppressed in a world dominated by reason, the archaic and religious connotations of this irrationality, as well as the nature of the reason that overcomes it, deserve special attention. The narrator – a Scottish logic professor based in Lahore – encounters the threatening demise of logic in stones he finds in an Indian Hindi jungle village. He goes on to associate these stones with arcane figures such as Behemoth and Leviathan; and in the end, he finds salvation at the hands of a Muslim beggar in a mosque, in a ritual of gift exchange: the narrator gives the beggar a gift that, he warns, may also be a curse, and in return the beggar gives him a gift that is “an awesome one. You may keep your days and nights, and keep wisdom, habits, the world.” (244)

History of an abyss

41

In The Accursed Share, Bataille introduces his ideas about political economy by contrasting what he calls the general economy (i.e., the movement of energy on the globe, the circuit of cosmic energy that determines us, although we are largely ignorant of it) to the restricted economy of supply, demand, and assemblages of production and consumption that is normally treated by political economists. In this constellation, the accursed share is the irreducible remainder of the general economy that comes to undermine the restricted economy if we fail to develop a conscience of the more general movements of energy on the earth. Bataille contradicts the most basic axioms of political economy in stating that there is always an excess rather than a lack of energy, and that this excess must be spent lavishly, without return. The ultimate effect of profitable operations is the conspicuous squandering of profits. In earlier times, religion absorbed much of this accursed share; but in the absence of religion, our instrumental rationality may act as if restricted and general economy are fully congruent, thereby greatly enlarging the explosive potential of the accursed share. We tend to put the goal-oriented behavior of man in place of the unlimited play of energy, neglecting the fundamental role of waste.118 Our service economy and leisure time are part of an attempt to relieve the excess of the accursed share; but as the two world wars show, they fail to fully absorb the explosive mass of the industrial plethora. Michael Taussig already noted that cocaine obeys the logic of Bataille's general economy 119; and certainly, the wasteful behavior associated with drug use can be read in Bataillean terms of excess energy insofar as this waste cannot be recuperated by any ulterior gains such as spiritual growth, identity construction, or the yearning toward a supposedly higher form of truth. As Bataille himself notes, the ingestion of a substance “such as alcohol, whose consumption does not enable us to work more – or even deprives us, for a time, of our strength to produce” (119) is a monumental mistake from the standpoint of profit; it can only be understood from a standpoint that lies radically outside of these

42


considerations and understands waste and excess as fundamental economic terms: that is, the standpoint of general economy. Importantly, the restricted economy's colonization of general economy is also a colonization of our economy of sense; and hence, it is only after this colonization that sacrifice and religion are deemed irrational. Bataille foresees a time in which “passion would no longer be an agent of unconsciousness” (197, fn. 2) – for the general economy is an economy of excess and waste, sense and passion, that obeys laws to which our restricted conditioning has made us blind. Our utilitarian reason turns everything into an object, negating the relation of intimate (and threatening) participation between the world around us and ourselves as subjects in this world (55). Work made the world into a world of things; but man does not want to be a thing, and religion and sacrifice are part of his attempt to take something outside of its existence as a mere thing – opposing madness to reason (55), for reason and lucidity can only exist where objects are self-identical and can be known (58). Where objects (and subjects insofar as they themselves are objects) refuse their object status, madness ensues: The world of the subject is the night: that changeable, infinitely suspect night which, in the sleep of reason, produces monsters. 120 I submit that madness itself gives a rarefied idea of the free 'subject,' unsubordinated to the 'real' order and occupied only with the present. The subject leaves its own domain and subordinates itself to the objects of the real order as soon as it becomes concerned for the future. For the subject is consumption insofar as it is not tied down to work. (58)

In the general economy into which sacrificial practices as well as the use of drugs allow us to enter, our restricted reason does not apply. This is what allowed Ronell to write that being-on-drugs, “considered non-productive and somehow irresponsible, a compulsive player of destruction, [...] resists the production of value which, on

History of an abyss

43

another, more Bataillean register, indicates that it disrupts the production of meaning.”121 Like the blue tigers in Borges' story, drugs resist their annexation to a restricted economy of sense. There is, however, another way of relating our drugs and Borges' tigers to Bataille's political economy than by virtue of their inexplicable squandering.122 For as Bataille repeatedly emphasizes (in a conceptual topology later adopted by Baudrillard to explain how symbolic exchange was excluded from the realm of exchange as we have come to understand it 123), despite the fact that the accursed share and its general economy are absolutely heterogeneous and irreducible to our restricted economy, the logical violence of this restricted economy never ceases trying to subject the general economy to its logic. “It is customary to consider general interest in terms of isolated interest,” despite the insoluble contradictions this custom leads to (180), writes Bataille. In Borges' short story, we also find this reassuring movement in which the intrusion of the illogical is exorcized and a fully comprehensible logic is restored. This movement is here embodied by an act of exchange: “You must give me all of them,” he said. “He who gives not all has given nothing.” I understood, and I said: “I want you to know that my alms may be a curse.” “Perhaps that gift is the only gift I am permitted to receive. I have sinned.” I dropped all the stones into the concave hand. They fell as though into the bottom of the sea, without the slightest whisper. Then the man spoke again: “I do not yet know what your gift to me is, but mine to you is an awesome one. You may keep your days and nights, and keep wisdom, habits, the world.” I did not hear the blind beggar’s steps, or see him disappear into the dawn.124

44


Exchange comes to take the place of oppressive irrationality and the inexplicable replication of the blue stones. “The sun is … the only thing that gives without receiving,” (28) says Bataille. In exchanging this other thing that gives without receiving and refuses to succumb to the laws of our economy, exorcizing it in a thoroughly economic act, the narrator gets to keep his days and nights, his wisdom, his habits, the world. The restricted economy and its reassuring reason overcome the religiously tinted madness of Bataille's general economy. And while the narrator is allowed to live comfortably in a world that obeys the laws of logic, the Islamic beggar, who has never seen the sun, is now cast into this mad general economy, where unpredictability is a rule rather than an exception.125

The undoing of unity Fragmentation and expropriation “Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? – It is almost the history of 'culture,' of our so-called high culture,”126 wrote Nietzsche. Foucault too was aware of the discrepancy between the central importance of drugs to our culture and the lack of interest authors showed in them: “It's a subject which interests me greatly, but one which I've had to put aside – the study of the culture of drugs or drugs as culture in the West from the beginning of the nineteenth century. No doubt it started much earlier, but it would come up to the present, it's so closely tied to the artistic life of the West.”127 Needless to say, Nietzsche's history and Foucault's study have not been written, and the attempts of Coleridge, De Quincey and Benjamin128 to write a great philosophical work about drugs all remained fragmentary. More often than not, the books that have been written about drugs are only tangentially related to their stated subject. Jünger's work on drugs is undeniably well written and of great interest, but the majority of it is about art, childhood friends, and – literally as well as figuratively speaking – cats and dogs rather than drugs; likewise, Benjamin's most famous text on hashish deals mostly with dinners and a walk through Marseille, 129 and his, Baudelaire's and De Quincey's classics all opt for an autobiographical mode of writing with its associated temporality130 rather than taking their subject by its horns.131 The texts that really are about drugs often address their subject from a clearly circumscribed and technical perspective that allows their authors to write about drugs without writing about drugs (the scientific or pseudoscientific works that alternate between neurochemistry and more philosophical considerations by Jansen, Shulgin, and, with reservations, Hofmann fall in this category); or if they do address drugs directly, they tend to do so in a mystifying style that utterly lacks rigor (Leary, Huxley,

46


McKenna, Castaneda and certain passages of Hofmann fall in this category, composed of what Deleuze and Guattari would call the “knights of narcotics”132). Very few texts, then, can be said to really deal with drugs, and most nontechnical attempts to write about drugs have remained fragmentary. Nonetheless, the relation between the apprehended unity of the work and the failed achievement of this unity may very well indicate something about the nature of intoxication. If, as I suggested with reference to Foucault, it is possible to claim that drugs and madness share their relation of exteriority to the work of language, it comes as no surprise that just as the discourse about madness needs to ascertain its sanity before being entitled to speak about madness, the discourse about drugs has to exorcize intoxication before it is allowed to speak. According to Foucault's History of Madness, the nineteenth century witnessed the reduction of the classical experience of unreason to a strictly moral perception that would, with time, give rise to the scientific, positive, and experimental conceptions of madness we still live with today. 133 However, in this reduction, madness' interiority, its unreason (which, secretly, is also reason), is reduced to silence by scientific pathologies and symptomatologies – a silence only broken by Freud in the early 20th century (339). In a way, positivism was a means to defend reason from unreason by alienating unreason from itself, giving it a positive existence (359). Madness is fixed from its outside and a stable subject of knowledge is established – a subject that can know madness precisely because it is not mad (460). From the outset, positivism took for granted that the truth of madness was man's reason, and this triumphant reason alone was allowed to speak about madness (475). Similarly, the consensus that only the sober can write about intoxication seems to justify the specific enframing134 employed by scientific writing on drugs – an enframing whose foremost function presumably lies in preventing the investigating or legislating subject from being at a loss for words when confronted with drugs' exteriority to language. However,

The undoing of unity

47

here too, drugs' interiority (their unreason) is exorcized, objectified, covered up by positivistic determinations that say many relevant things about chemistry, neurology, economics, or whatever discipline the author is working in, but fail to grasp the specificity of the narcotic experience as a narcotic experience. Like the unreason underlying madness, the threatening interiority of intoxication is covered up by positivist science. It is this expropriation of interiority, which allows anyone but the drug user to talk about drugs, that tormented Artaud: “In the name of what superior light, soul to soul, can they understand US who are at the very root of knowledge and light?”135 The rationality of the drug user is disqualified in advance by reason's autopoietic self-justification, never allowing the rhetoric of drugs to be the rhetoric of their users. In Ronell's words, “While they resist presentation, drugs are still too readily appropriable”136 – appropriable by whatever discipline, never allowed to speak for themselves.

Dualism We may trace the conditions underlying the neurological alienation of inner experience all the way back to Cartesian dualism in Spinoza's formulation. In Ethics, book 2, proposition 21, Spinoza demonstrates that the mind and the body are one and the same thing, considered under different attributes: the mind under the attribute of thought (res cogitans), the body under the attribute of extension (res extensa).137 In propositions 12 and 13, he had already shown that the body is the object of the mind; in proposition 21, he adds that the idea of the mind is united to the mind in the same way as the mind is united to the body. The two attributes of thought and body are merely two of the infinite attributes in God to which we have access; and, following propositions 12, 13 and 21, the idea of the mind and the idea of the body are the two objects to which the mind has access under these attributes.138 The human mind involves neither an adequate knowledge of itself (proposition 23) nor of the body (proposition 24), but can only know itself through the

48


affections of the body (proposition 23) – however, as the ideas it has of the body (and consequently of itself) are always limited and confused, even within the two attributes accessible to us our knowledge and understanding are severely limited and the mind cannot even be said to truly know itself. Although this is undeniably an elegant solution to the mind/body problem, it also creates the conditions for a constantly reemerging attempt to bring mind and body together, while rendering this attempt futile in advance by virtue of the absolute experiential distinction between res cogitans and res extensa. In nature and God, the world is one, but we experience it as being split in two. Schirmacher is right to emphasize that the “experience of the difference [between body and soul, subject and object] must not be allowed to be explained away by the necessity of comprehending the world as unity”139 – but as he correctly remarks, while resisting monistic unification, it is also of vital importance to grasp the consequences of our dualistic division of the world. Not only is this division the “necessary condition for human dominance, justification of the exploitation of nature and fellow-man;”140 the split between body and mind also leads to the fundamental unobjectifyability of the mind – for objects are part of extension (res extensa), not of thought (res cogitans). Since we can only know the mind through the body, many authors writing on drugs are seduced into translating subjective experience into objective terms, thereby shielding the stability of the knowing subject while speaking of dopamine, serotonin and neurotransmitter receptors. Undeniably, this serves to dissolve the threat posed by potentially destabilizing topics, although we may ask ourselves whether this defense mechanism does not limit our ability to come to a true, non-objectifying understanding. It is quite questionable whether neurological and other medical research can really bring us any closer to self-understanding or an understanding of the relations between body, mind and soul.141 As William James succinctly put it in the context of religious experience:


49

Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate... All such mental overtensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover... And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.142

This passage attests to an overtly antagonistic relation between a spiritual perspective and the scientific worldview. Just like Galileo's telescope posed a threat to the worldview dictated by the church, spiritual experience poses a similar threat to our science-based worldview, and must be accounted for if science is to retain its credibility as a system potentially capable of explaining everything. So while Galileo was persecuted by the church, now it is science that attempts to foreclose inner experience by rendering it in objective terms. This tendency to objectify subjective experience takes various forms in drug literature; for instance, in his book on ketamine, Jansen resorts to neurochemistry to explain why the symptomatologies of near death experiences and ketamine intoxication show certain similarities, arguing that a similar mechanism in which the brain blocks its N-P receptors underlies both of them. The blockade of these receptors induces psychedelic effects, and can be triggered by ketamine as well as by a natural mechanism that is meant to protect brain cells from the glutamate overexcitation that follows a lack of oxygen.143 Huxley, for his part, suggests that the symptomatological similarity between mescaline intoxication and schizophrenia (a similarity whose establishment involves considerable methodological problems if we consider its subjective aspect, but this is an epistemological question I will not

50


address at this point) hints at a chemical disorder as the physical basis of schizophrenia – a disorder that can also be induced by a drug such as mescaline. 144 And while Hofmann, the inventor of LSD and the first scientist to synthesize psilocybin (the active substance of what is commonly known as magic mushrooms), attempts to imbue the chemical compounds he synthesized with a degree of mystery in order to argue that chemistry does not need to be an instrument of desacralization, 145 the very value he attaches to the chemical formula of the psilocybin molecule attests to his adherence to a certain understanding of objective reality that is proper to the enlightened Western mind. Chemical formulas teach us more than the confused knowledge of sacred rituals; a chemical disorder relating to the adrenals underlies schizophrenia as well as mescaline intoxication; and both schizophrenia and these adrenals offer pathways that may lead us to a better understanding of intoxication while avoiding the unstable terrain of intoxication itself. While there is great interest in the findings of these authors, we should be careful not to mistake their objectifying circumventions for a real understanding of drugs – for it is precisely drugs that they do not write about. Alternating between various explicatory frameworks, they conceal the mute interiority of the described altered states by covering it under a network of positive referentiality. But this network is always the result of a specific 'Gestell,'146 and may lead us away from proper understanding. Notwithstanding the value of science, the enframed perspective of scientific writing on drugs only touches upon its subject from the outside. Thomas Nagel's text 'What is it like to be a bat?' gives us some suggestions as to the reason for the excluded inside. According to Nagel, if we examine the subjective character of phenomenological features, a physical account can only be reductive, because while “every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, ... it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.”147 While Jansen, Huxley, and many others take resort to scientific language in their attempts to account


51

for subjective experience (although, to give them credit, Jansen and Huxley both indicate the limits of this method), it is quite difficult to understand what could be meant by an objective account of experience, as experience is inherently subjective. What can the physical account of an organism really tell us about its experience? And, as Nagel asks, what sort of relation does the word 'is' imply in the axiom according to which a “mental event is a physical event” that underlies these accounts? How can a mental event and a physical event ever refer to the same thing? If we want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat, we are limited to the resources of our all-too-human imagination, which are doomed to failure in advance. The detour we usually take when we try to attain the impossible knowledge of another being's experience consists in beginning with a description of physical causalities. This circumventing approach seems to be directly informed by Spinoza's proposition that we can only know the mind through the affections of the body; following this proposition, even though the mind as well as the body are objects of the mind, the logical way to begin any inquiry into different mind states is an inquiry into the bodily affections underlying them. According to this line of thinking, an understanding of subjective experience is only possible through bodily mediation. But for the description of certain altered states, notably those that involve the experience of incorporeality, the objectifying language of res extensa is quite insufficient. In this context, Spinoza's solution to the mind-body problem is problematic to the extent that it separates knowledge of the mind from knowledge of the body and grounds the former on the latter, thereby permanently alienating res cogitans from itself.

Boundless representability However, there is hope; as Nagel argues, “it should be possible to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present, and with much greater precision.... [S]tructural features of perception

52


might be more accessible to objective description, even though something would be left out.”148 He makes a compelling case for an “objective phenomenology”149 yet to be developed, that would not be based on the assumption that we can know what it is like to be a bat (or to be someone intoxicated with a psychoactive substance), but would also not make the inquiry futile in advance by limiting it to physical, objectifying description. We are accustomed to see some things as objectively describable, and some as purely subjective experiences. Where the former can be verified independently of the identity of the verifying subject, the latter contain a kernel that is inseparably bound up with precisely this subject and therefore absolutely incommunicable. What offers itself to our sense of sight is usually more readily available for objective description, whereas sensations such as pain and euphoria are considered subjective experiences. However, it seems hard to sustain that sight is an objectively more objective experience than, for example, pain or euphoria. Even what I see is inevitably seen by me, and before objectivity gets a hold of its objects, every perception is essentially subjective. Elaine Scarry has argued that pain is the unmaking of the world and the end of all language;150 but is this so because it is an inherently more subjective experience that would therefore break down our objective resources of description, or simply because we have not yet developed the language of pain? The same can be asked of drug intoxication, which may involve synesthetic or other experiences that deviate from conventional sensory pathways. After one of their joint LSD sessions, Hofmann and Jünger came to the conclusion that it was quite impossible to capture their experience in words: When I wanted to describe the perplexing alterations of consciousness to Ernst Jünger, no more than two or three words came out, for they sounded so false, so unable to express the experience; they seemed to originate from an infinitely distant world that had become strange; I abandoned the attempt, laughing


53

hopelessly. Obviously, Ernst Jünger had the same experience, yet we did not need speech; a glance sufficed for the deepest understanding.151 152

We may understand this glance of understanding to indicate a shared experience of something that lies beyond language. And in fact, many books on drugs attest to the breakdown of language in the face of intoxication. As Jansen writes, “Describing altered states of being can stretch language to its limits.”153 However, there is no reason to believe that this incapacity of language to grasp certain experiences attests to an a priori irreconcilability between language and these experiences. Perhaps, the breakdown of language in some narcotic experiences is merely due to the fact that over centuries, language has been attuned to consensual reality, whose outside Jünger and Hofmann had just confronted. Here, an objective phenomenology may help us to describe what up until now we have considered indescribable. In 'Are some things unrepresentable?', Rancière employs his tripartite division between the ethic, representative, and aesthetic regimes of art154 to argue that the notion of the unrepresentable only makes sense in relation to a threefold constraint on representation:155 -The visible is dependent on speech, which makes the object visible in an undetermined manner.156 -Representation is an ordered deployment of meanings that involves an adjusted relationship between knowing and not knowing, interaction between wanting to know, not wanting to say, saying without saying, refusing to hear, etc. -Representation always implies an adjustment of reality, that obeys certain laws which determine in what way fictional entities can resemble their real counterparts in appropriate fashion. In short, the representative regime is not just based on resemblance; it is a regime in which resemblance is subject to this triple constraint. In this reading, the break with representation in art is not an emancipation from

54


resemblance, but the emancipation of resemblance from the triple constraint, and anti-representative art is not an art without representable things, but without unrepresentable things. Things can only be unrepresentable under the representative regime, for in the aesthetic regime that follows it (and that finds its roots in the work of Schiller157), there cannot be said to be a specific language appropriate to a specific subject; and when subjects no longer demand a specific way of speaking, there are no more limits to representation. The very idea of the unrepresentable expresses the wish that there is still some measure by which certain forms can be said to be inappropriate for certain types of subject matter; yet this is not the case in the aesthetic regime, as under this regime the representative suitability of forms to subjects is abolished, making everything representable by getting rid of the prohibitions implied by the threefold constraint that pertained to the representative regime. Of course, Rancière's three regimes do not follow a straightforward chronological succession; the aesthetic regime may be dominant in our age, but even now, it coexists with the other two and intermingles with them even in individual works of art.158 And indeed, despite Rancière's insistence that aesthetics should be seen in close analogy to what Kant describes as “a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience,”159 and hence cannot be confined to the arts per se, the abolishment of the threefold constraint has not yet significantly altered the norms of suitability in scientific writing – presumably, because it is these very norms that allow science to wield a discourse that appeals to truth. However, on the verges of scientificity, some authors, Avital Ronell160 and Jean-Luc Nancy161 among others, have begun to write a subjective language (or an objective phenomenology, which is the same thing) into theoretical being; a language in which the self appears on the stage from which it has traditionally been excluded – a language that is no longer based on the Platonic presupposition that truth exists independently of its conditions of emergence –


55

a literary language that can say everything, precisely because it is always inappropriate. We may never know what it is like to be a bat – in Schirmacher's words, we are, and will always be, anthropomorphic.162 But is it as easy to preemptively exclude drug experience from the realm of objective representability? Most drug users are, after all, objectively still anthropoi. On the other hand, it is quite possible to argue that we may never know what it is like to be any person other than ourselves, or to be ourselves at any other time; a radical epistemological instability, driving Kathy Acker's Abhor mad: “How can I know how I've changed, what change is, if at every moment I am exactly who I am?”163 Nevertheless, the unknowability of everything beyond the boundaries of our own subjective experience, always caught up in the mad temporality of its eternal here and now, has but rarely withheld us from sharing our feelings and desires with others; the communal sense that inhabits language shields us from solipsistic beliefs. And although we may never fully know what it is like to be something we are not, we have an impressive instrumentarium of resources at hand to know something about what it is like to be practically anything that has a consciousness. Certainly, our understanding is always limited by our properly anthropomorphic language and worldview; and hence, we can presumably know more about what it is like to be another person than another species. But if (with Spinoza and Rancière164) we foreclose the possibility of knowability in favor of a perspective that never offers us more than partial understanding, and thereby accept an epistemological framework that can be said to be properly immanent, we can change the very relation implied by knowledge to include a partial understanding of what it is like to be someone or something we are not. After reading Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, I still do not know what it is like to be Proust – but despite various mediating instances (between experience and writing, between reading and empathy or 'Einfühlung') his language offers me some insight into the ways in which he experiences his reality.

56


Likewise, although we will never know what it is like to be a bat without becoming one (and the fact bats do not have access to language makes it a disputable matter whether even the slightest understanding could be established without becoming one), the contextualization of behavioral and biological studies in a language like that used by Von Uexküll in his text on the Umwelt of animals (ticks and flies, among others)165 may just bring us slightly closer to an understanding of the phenomenal world of the bat.166 Even though this understanding will never surpass the anthropomorphic limits set by our own human consciousness,167 if we reject the constraints to which representability is subjected in the representative regime, and with them the very possibility of a correct and complete representation on the basis of which other representations can be discarded, our hopeless inquiries cannot be said not to increase our understanding. As Foucault said in relation to the emergence of clinical medicine, description is a “seizure of being” (“une prise d'être”)168 – a seizure that is possible exactly insofar as it is never complete. Language is not life, and parts of life will always escape the grasp of language. Yet even though we will never fully know what it is like to be on acid without taking it – and even when we take it, we will never know what it is like for someone else – taking acid and listening to someone else's account of the effects of acid intoxication can only increase our ability to know and understand what this is like.

Senseless language Withdrawal from the with Above, building on Nagel and Rancière, I have argued that a subjective language that is more capable of representing narcotic experience without turning it into something else is possible, but that this potential has been covered up by the objective nature of our language, which has but few words for subjective experience. In her admirable investigation of the writings of a medical professional from Eisenach in the 1730s, Barbara Duden has shown that at the time, the conceptions women had of their bodies were radically different from the conceptions Western women currently live by, and to a large degree, this determined the way patients framed their complaints; while we would speak of a pain in the shoulder, they tended to speak of vapors and liquids moving around in places where these did not belong.169 This clearly shows that the vocalization of subjective experience involves a number of cultural mediations that determine how we verbalize our feelings; or to be more precise, our experience is always already mediated, and unmediated experience does not exist except as an inevitable postulation. This postulated interiority is absolutely heterogeneous to the symbolic layers that render it accessible, and these layers are never entirely subjective.170 This means that every experience is twofold, at once subjective and objective; subjective insofar as my experience is definitely and inalienably mine, objective insofar as it only exists in symbolic forms that never entirely belong to me. (“Je n'ai qu'une langue, ce n'est pas la mienne,”171 wrote Derrida.) In experience, the dichotomy that opposes subjective to objective collapses to the extent that purely subjective experience cannot be said to exist except as an inaccessible prediscursive domain, and purely objective language does not exist insofar as it is always spoken by a subject that lives in a world that is his and his

58


alone. Every being generates his own world, which makes the fiction of an all-encompassing universal and homogeneous space nothing but a “conventional fable [that] facilitates mutual communication”172 – and even if we were to believe in fables, Kant and phenomenology have taught us this universal (or noumenal) space is always inaccessible. Neither what we see nor what we feel can be said to be either purely objective or purely subjective; and although we may argue that an object can be seen by more than one person at the same time while no one but us can feel our pain, this argument relies on a deceptive objectivity – for how can the light I am looking at be said to be the light you see? Insofar as we perceive the world around us, this world becomes part of our universe of experience, our Umwelt, that is never entirely subjective or objective. Referring to the insane and the intoxicated, Huxley argues that all sensations are necessarily private, but certain sensations and experiences are so extraordinary that they resist being communicated.173 But Huxley is mistaken: all sensations are private only to the extent they resist being communicated, but objective and potentially public to the extent that they always long for communication. Being human, all of our experience is inclined to the Symbolic – and in this realm, everything is communicable and nothing unrepresentable.174 As I have indicated above, the experience of being at a loss for words is a common one among users of psychedelic drugs. A notion frequently used in texts about psychedelics (and rarely elsewhere) to designate the world one lives by in a sober state is 'consensual reality.' It is hard not to suspect those who use this term of employing it to destabilize the very definition of reality to the effect that drug experience can no longer be denounced for its lack of truth; nonetheless, it is worthwhile to trace the implications carried by the linguistic baggage of this notion. Of course, the addition of a qualifying adjective to the notion of reality implies that there is more than one reality. Without adjective qualification this signifier would supposedly leave ambiguity as to its signified, indicating

Senseless language

59

there are at least two realities, if not more. Consensual reality is defined in contrast to this other reality, supposedly the private reality of narcotic experience. Moreover, the word 'consensual' seems to embody a negative valuation; while objective/subjective forms a fairly common opposition that could be used inconspicuously in this context and does not rely on significant emotional attachments, 'consensual' tends to be opposed to individual or personal, terms that are valued positively in our society, and particularly in the counter cultures where notions such as 'consensual reality' circulate. In contrast, in these circles, the term 'consensual' presumably invokes connotations of conventionality and a strict adherence to social norms. Etymologically, 'consensual' is derived from the Latin consentio, which is composed of the prefix con- (with or together) and the verb sentire (to feel).175 Consensus means a voluntary agreement that goes beyond the level of mere spoken words, indicating an agreement in the sentiment underlying them. In 'consensual reality,' the adjective consensual implies a sense of general and unforced agreement among the members of a given group. Consensual reality, then, means the reality with whose reality we all agree, and whose sense and value are founded precisely on this consensus. It is doubtful, however, what other foundations for the sense and value of reality there could be. According to Jean-Luc Nancy's preliminary design for what he calls a “coexistencial analytic”176 (after Heidegger's existential analytic), there is no self, no meaning, and no language except by virtue of the unspeakable with that lies at the heart of being. As Nancy writes, “There is no meaning if meaning is not shared... Meaning is itself the sharing of being” (1). If we accept these foundational axioms, the very notion of a consensual reality becomes tautological; if reality is always shared and there is no possible attribution of sense or meaning outside the with, there is no need for the prefix con- to ratify the realness of consensual reality; in isolation, this reality would lack all meaning to begin with. The only sense that can exist is con-sense; and the

60


outside in opposition to which the notion of 'consensual reality' defines itself, insofar as it attempts to ground reality outside of the with of being, is non-sense by definition. Language, too, is “essentially in the with,” (86) and the only purpose of conversation is “to offer... the cum-, the with of meaning, the plurality of its springing forth.” Being-with “sustains itself” in conversation – whether this be idle chatter or intellectual exchange (87). In the most rudimentary as well as the most refined expressions, language “exposes the with, exposes itself as the with, inscribes and ex-scribes itself in the with until it is exhausted, emptied of signification.” (87) Following the rhetoric of fantasy that has colonized our understanding of them, drugs deeply affect this “'with' … at the heart of being,”177 isolating the intoxicated individual from the universe of sense in which he normally dwells. Wine fraternizes, hashish isolates, was Baudelaire's famous verdict;178 “Opium desocializes us and removes us from the community,”179 wrote Cocteau. As Derrida noted, the rhetoric of drugs is intimately bound up with the Platonic notion of the simulacrum; and as we all know, in Plato, “the creature of the simulacrum finds himself driven from the community”180 (although it is tempting to think the very fact one stopped making sense means that one already stopped partaking in the with, where expulsion would only be the ratification of this act of signing off181). It is the fundamentally communal character of sense and language, the fact that they are (only in) the with, and the correlated impossibility of establishing sense or creating language in isolation, that may account for the drug user's difficulty in verbalizing his experience. In fact, the incommunicability of narcotic experience is not merely the consequence of its isolated nature; isolation and incommunicability are inseparably bound up with one another, so that an experience only leads to isolation insofar as it is incommunicable and vice versa. Narcotic experience might be a lot less bewildering if we would find the means to describe it and thereby break its isolation and allow it to take its place within 'consensual' reality, which

Senseless language

61

is the only reality that sense and language can inhabit. For better or worse, the objective phenomenology hinted at above may one day create this possibility. Until that day, however, narcotic experience resists sense; a resistance that is felt in many of the writings that attempt to address the subject of narcotic experience without dodging its ephemeral interiority by resorting to some form of mediation, whether this be the mediation offered by an autobiographical mode of writing or that of objectification in terms pertaining to a specific scientific discipline.

Intoxicated writing I already noted the discrepancy between the apprehended unity of a number of works on drugs and the fragmentary result (Coleridge, De Quincey, Benjamin) as well as the apparently intentionally fragmented character of many writing on drugs (Ernst Jünger and Avital Ronell in philosophy, Philip Lamantia and William Burroughs in literature). The fragmentation displayed by these works, however, adheres mostly to their composition, leaving the language more or less intact. This is not the case in the works of Antonin Artaud and Henri Michaux, which, in my opinion, succeed in fully grasping the specificity of drug intoxication, precisely because they enact the very breakdown of language that characterizes drug experience. And suddenly the countless waves of the mescalinian ocean were breaking over me, knocking me down. Knocking me down, knocking me down, knocking me down, knocking me down, knocking me down. It would never stop, never. I was alone in the ravages of that vibration, with no circumference, no annex, a target-man who can't manage to get back to his offices. ...It is so absolutely horrible, horrible in its essence, I can't find any way of saying it and I feel like a counterfeiter when I try.182

62


Infinity in mescaline. Its characteristics: Feeling of the infinite, of the presence of infinity, of the proximity, the immediacy, the penetration of infinity, of the infinite endlessly crossing through the finite... The finite either prolonged or fragmented, everywhere betrayed by a crossing, overflowing infinity, a magnificent annuller and dissipater of everything circumscribed, which can no longer exist.183 From time to time, turning my eyes away, I would try to collect myself “against it,” since I'd been pushed to the limit of what I could bear to lose of my self.184

Like many others, Michaux hints at the fact that language seems to lack the means of expression required by his (mescaline) intoxication; but in the struggle between language and experience, his language seems to break down, which consequently renders his experience all the more accurately. Importantly, as Gilbert Lascault has pointed out, for Michaux everything is a drug; abstinence, coffee, the effort at lucidity, fatigue... 185 As Michaux himself writes: I'm more the water-drinking type. Never alcohol. No stimulants, and for years no coffee, no tobacco, no tea. From time to time wine, and very little of that. All my life, very little of everything people take. Take and abstain. Abstain, above all. Fatigue is my drug, as a matter of fact.186

Clearly, for Michaux, drugs were not primarily a source of pleasure: “Should one talk about pleasure? It was unpleasant,” he begins one of his mescaline reports.187 Rather, they are means he employs to intensify certain feelings and experiences, whether these be positive or negative, and reveal the vastness of the mind in this intensification. A central concern in much of Michaux's writing is the destabilization of the unified self. Indubitably, one of the things that fascinated Michaux in mescaline (rather than in, say, cocaine, or even LSD) is its

Senseless language

63

ability to provoke a radical destabilization of the self; and while this may be an experience of absolute horror, it can also be deeply revelatory. Ronell has written that “drugs act as a radically nomadic parasite let loose from the will of language.” 188 And indeed, in its attempts to pin down this destabilizing parasite, everyday language has often resorted to expropriation or been led to fragmentation. However, the language Michaux employs to describe his experiences willfully partakes in this drug-induced destabilization rather than trying to describe it from the outside by way of symptoms or working mechanisms. On mescaline, Michaux becomes something other than man, and his language follows him in this transformation. Intoxication does not merely provide the content for his texts; it governs their very form. It is precisely the self-exploding nature of his language that is intoxication. This is no longer a language about intoxication; it is a language that becomes intoxication, an intoxicated writing.

Writing against language It is quite clear that what attracted Deleuze and Guattari in Michaux's writing is precisely this intoxicated style that incessantly moves away from subject, substance and stability. Capitalism and Schizophrenia is, besides many other things, an enormous attempt to liberate philosophy from its obsession with stasis. However, insofar as our language substantializes the objects it postulates and makes these seemingly independent of their subject of enunciation, this attempt, however desirable, remains futile. As Heidegger suggests in his artwork essay, the subject-predicate structure fundamental to all Western languages may have colonized our understanding of the structure of the thing to the effect that we see all things as having a substance with accidents:189 “...could it be that even the structure of the thing as thus envisaged is a projection of the framework of the sentence?”190 191 Although he goes on to problematize this question from a perspective seemingly informed by Husserl (“Yet this view,

64


seemingly critical yet actually rash and ill-considered, would have to explain first how such a transposition of propositional structure into the thing is supposed to be possible without the thing having already become visible”192 193), it is clear that the current thing-concept is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it fits any being whatsoever – but does so not because of some innate structural isomorphism between the sentence and the thing, but by making an assault upon the being in question. Habituation has led to naturalization, which has closed our access to a more originary experience of the thing, and only our pre-conceptual, sensible experience of the thing as aistheton (αίσθητόν) may restore it to its proper being.194 Although he clearly follows a very different trajectory than Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger's thought on language may allow us to grasp the fact that Deleuze and Guattari are constantly writing against language in their attempt to overcome Platonic residues of truth and substance. Insofar as Deleuze and Guattari's very means of expression are contaminated by the enemy, their fight is a desperate one; we may attempt to think beyond substance, but as soon as we express our thought, the subject and its predicates pin us back to it. This endows the puns and language games that pervade Capitalism & Schizophrenia with a certain philosophical significance insofar as we understand them to be part of an attempt to destabilize language itself and undermine the efficacy of its tendency to colonize our thought with its underlying ontological presuppositions. Play is an effective means of freeing behavior from its inscription in a given sphere;195 and for Deleuze and Guattari playing with language serves to neutralize some of language's ontological foundations. By departing from conventions and writing in a language that pokes fun at the very foundations that allow it to be understood, Deleuze and Guattari attempt to overcome linguistic resistance to an ontology that is based on desire rather than substance. From a more Heideggerian perspective, Schirmacher's notion of Homo generator postulates another

Senseless language

65

fundamental truth that runs counter to our language's substantializing tendencies. Schirmacher defines Homo generator as “a Dasein beyond metaphysics, a human being which needs no Being, no certainty, no truth.” 196 One of the primary conceptual advances of Homo generator is his rejection of external measures for the evaluation of life; Homo generator refuses to abide by the so-called “realistic” coordinates imposed on him, knowing his right of origin is absolute.197 Each Homo generator generates his own self and world (where, following Heidegger, “world” should be understood as the opening up of a universe of sense that exists in striving opposition to the closed realm of the earth198), and is thereby the only person capable of judging it and the only one accountable for its shortcomings: Homo generator … acknowledges with releasement his own shortcomings. He is capable of recognizing that life as a “constant vacillation between suffering and boredom” (e.g. in Arthur Schopenhauer's grim formulation) is something he has generated himself. The limits of the feasible and the limitations of our knowledge are not forced upon Homo generator from without, but are rather integral to the success of his own worldgeneration.199

As the “beginning of all phenomena,” Homo generator perceives his responsibility “in the origin of justice, in the simultaneity of events, in the attentive listening to the obstinacy of occurrence.”200 His insistence upon the fulfillment of the world is unconditional; however, the conditions by which he assesses this fulfillment are fully his, and his alone. The generation of “the ego, the self, the individual” and its associated principles are all part of the process of “world-generation” that Homo generator constantly instigates anew, refusing all objective determination: Homo generator will allow no objective determination to deny its own self-experience.

66


Whether it is symbolization or language itself that determines the limits of our experience, can remain an open question, since the self itself is not an empirical self, but rather an activity that generates something like the ego, the self, the individual.201

Unfortunately, the fundamental truth Schirmacher captures with his notion of Homo generator is almost impossible to hold; it slips away under the ontological inclinations embodied by our language. For Homo generator, like for Deleuze and Guattari in their attempt to overcome stasis, language may become an obstacle rather than an asset to thought.202 Until we start speaking in the strange languages of the planet Tlön from Borges' famed short story 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,' whose primary syntactic units are not the subject and its predicates, but the verb on the southern hemisphere and the monosyllabic adjective in the north,203 postmodernism's “cleanup work”204 will not be sufficient to rid the world of all remnants of independent substance.205

Reason judges unreason Despite Schirmacher's insistent rejection of external measures to assess life and happiness, when Lyotard asks him whether there are any valid immanent criteria for this judgment, and whether a life such as Artaud's can really be called 'fulfilled,' his answer is hesitant: When the balance between body and mind, as Spinoza conceived it, is disturbed, it becomes difficult to speak of a fulfilled life, of course. “Health is not everything, but without it everything is nothing,” Schopenhauer emphasizes, and that society profits vampirelike from the failure of certain individuals, should likewise inspire in us a healthy distrust of romanticized suffering. Vincent van Gogh created great art and thereby contributed a bit to the fulfillment of other lives, but he destroyed

Senseless language

67

himself in the process. But only van Gogh himself can pass such judgement (and perhaps he did just that between his states of intoxication)!206

Artaud himself, who repeatedly argued against the prohibition of opium on the basis of the sovereignty of the self, would certainly agree (“…I am even more the master of my pains than the master of my death... Of that which is within me, I am the only judge” 207). Yet it is worthwhile to unpack Schirmacher's response – although we cannot expect the same measure of clarity and consistency from an improvised interview as we can from a written work, the very points that lack the seductive consistency of the written word may teach us a valuable lesson about the thoughts of the speaker in question. In the beginning of his reply, Schirmacher seems to intuitively step back from his insight into the self-generative nature of Homo generator: “...it becomes difficult to speak of a fulfilled life...” indicates an inclination to introduce a semi-external criterion for the assessment of fulfillment, i.e., health. Speaking of “the failure of certain individuals” Schirmacher reiterates this idea; the fact these individuals are designated as “failures” regardless of whether this designation accords with their self-examination seems part of the “defunct paternalism”208 that Schirmacher is up against, and that consists in judging the lives of others by standards they themselves have not proposed. But of course, in his short digression Schirmacher merely attempted to ventriloquize several dominant positions in order to distinguish himself from them; hence, he adds: “But only van Gogh [or Artaud, or anyone else] himself can pass such judgment (and perhaps he did just that between his states of intoxication)!” The ambiguity of this last phrase appears between its parentheses: “...perhaps he did just that between his states of intoxication.” Between: that is, everything but during. The implication is clear: while intoxicated, van Gogh cannot pass judgment on himself. And although I am the last to dispute this supposed inability to judge, it is worth

68


noting that this abjection of intoxication from the lawful sphere of rationality allows rationality to retain full judgmental liability over sober as well as intoxicated states.209 Of course, similar conceptions underlie the juridical discourse of diminished responsibility, and the fact that (like the insane) the intoxicated are excluded from a variety of activities that range from driving cars to getting married. Even the alienation of the intoxicated experience by positivist scientific discourse follows these lines that preemptively delegitimize the discourse of the drug user himself due to its supposed privation of truth. Only the sober have full jurisdiction over themselves, and intoxication is a sufficient disqualifying condition for selfexamination. Schirmacher's disavowal of intoxication might remind us of Foucault's reading of Descartes' disavowal of madness in the Meditations.210 For Descartes, dream and error only deceive the senses, leaving a residue of truth intact; madness, in contrast, renders the very process of thought impossible, so that the thinking subject is inherently sane insofar as it is a thinking subject. Even the evil genius can affect only the objects of our thought, not the faculty of thought itself. On this basis, Descartes excludes madness from his methodological doubt: “But such people are insane, and I would be thought equally mad if I took anything from them as a model for myself.”211 Of course, Descartes was looking for an indisputable foundation for knowledge rather than for the correct measure of a fulfilled life; a difference that may be indicative of our altogether more Epicurean Zeitgeist. Be that as it may, the effect of both disavowals is quite the same: rationality legislates its outside, precisely because its outside is not rational – where one prominent meaning of irrationality lies in this inability to legislate. Descartes' methodological doubt is premised on the sanity of the meditating subject; Schirmacher's self-examination presupposes sobriety. “But such people are insane, and I would be thought equally mad if...” “...and perhaps he did just that between his states of intoxication...”212

Overcoming the ego The fascist subject Schirmacher is not the only thinker who, with reservations, seems inclined to reject being-intoxicated as a negative mode of being that stands in the way of – depending on the thinker in question – liability, fulfillment, freedom, flight, collective action or meaningful language. In Ronell's reading of Heidegger, being-ondrugs is agonistic to freedom because it forecloses anxiety, which is a prerequisite for freedom.213 Agamben's remark that the fact Benjamin wrote something under the influence of twenty milligrams of mescaline does not make his observations any less salient implies the presupposition of its negative counterpart: ingesting twenty milligrams of mescaline tends to reduce the salience of our observations.214 And for Lacan, practically every signifying chain is relevant, except that of the drug addict: “Addiction (la toxicomanie) opens a field where no single word of the subject is reliable, and where he escapes analysis altogether.”215 Lacan's suspicion toward drug users is understandable in the light of the tension between his understanding of the subject and the tradition according to which some drugs may provoke the dissolution of the subject or the ego. The Lacanian subject constantly finds itself besieged by the threatening forces of drives, desires and jouissance. In order to prevent the “agressive disintegration” these forces might provoke, the I builds itself a fortress, which is often literally represented in dreams as a fortress or a stadium meant to protect the I from the destabilizing forces of the id.216 The modern subject armors itself against otherness within (sexuality, the unconscious) as well as without (subaltern populations – in Lacan's youth, especially the Jews). It is this paranoid, protective and exclusionary reaction that led Hal Foster to call the Lacanian subject inherently fascistic.217

70


Drugs inevitably pose an enormous threat to the I conceived of as a fortress. Over two centuries ago, Humphrey Davy experimented with nitrous oxide, the first dissociative anesthetic, a class of drugs to which the now popular ketamine also belongs. Davy's experiments resulted in a 600 page philosophical treatise called Researches Clinical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide and its Respiration (1798). (In the following century, both Benjamin Blood and William James wrote extensive philosophical tracts about this same drug.) In his work Davy described a state of being in which the ego “dissolves.”218 Unbeknownst to Davy himself, this seems to have been the beginning of a long tradition that perceives drugs as a Dionysian force (in Nietzsche's sense) leading to the dissolution of the ego – a perception we encounter in Baudelaire,219 Hofmann,220 Huxley,221 De Landa,222 Leary,223 Marcuse,224 and many other writers who touch upon the topic of narcotic experience. In fact, a whole therapeutic discipline is based on the premise that small doses of drugs may help dissolve harmful psychological tensions and cathectic investments: in socalled psycholytic therapy, popular in the 60s but now rarely practiced, lytic (or lysis) stands for the dissolution of tension in the psyche.225 Moreover, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, besides the famous passage on Homer's lotus eaters,226 there is one other passage in which Adorno and Horkheimer address the use of drugs, also employing the rhetoric of ego dissolution: Men had to do fearful things to themselves before the self, the identical, purposive, and virile nature of man, was formed, and something of that recurs in every childhood. The strain of holding the I together adheres to the I in all stages; and the temptation to lose it has always been there with the blind determination to maintain it. The narcotic intoxication which permits the atonement of deathlike sleep for the euphoria in which the self is suspended, is one of the oldest social arrangements which mediate between self-

Overcoming the ego

71

preservation and self-destruction – an attempt of the self to survive itself. The dread of losing the self and of abrogating together with the self the barrier between oneself and other life, the fear of death and destruction, is intimately associated with a promise of happiness which threatened civilization in every moment. Its road was that of obedience and labor, over which fulfillment shines forth perpetually – but only as illusive appearance, as devitalized beauty.227

While this passage should certainly remind us of the Lacanian conception of the formation of the I, Adorno and Horkheimer are not as outspoken as Lacan when it comes to the impossibility of losing the self. In Lacan, the absolute loss of the self is part of the notion of jouissance. Jouissance, however, is located in the unknowable preSymbolic that is inaccessible precisely insofar as it precedes the law that is always already there. In other words, jouissance is located in the Real, and as the Real is always already barred by the Symbolic, it cannot be said to have an accessible prediscursive existence. The Real does not exist, save for the series of effects it produces.228 For this same reason, Žižek wrote that “Jouissance does not exist, it is impossible, but it produces a number of traumatic effects.”229 230 So while within the Lacanian psycholoanalytic topology, there is absolutely no place for a dissolution of the self – a possible explanation for Lacan's violent suspicion of the addicted subject – Adorno and Horkheimer do not seem too eager to foreclose this possibility, rather postulating it as an ahistorical desire while leaving its feasibility in the open.

The schizophrenic subject Certainly the most powerful attack against the “fascistic”231 subject of Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis is Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism & Schizophrenia. But while, as Foster noted, the various

72


attacks on Lacan's paranoid subject have mobilized the very forces the fortress of this subject is meant to keep out (sexuality, the unconscious, desire, jouissance232), and Deleuze and Guattari have indeed developed an ontology based on desire to challenge microfascisms, paranoia, and Oedipal neuroses, they seem to share Lacan's suspicion of the drug user. This is all the more striking as a disproportionately large part of the authors they cite are somehow linked to drug use or propagation (Michaux, Artaud, Freud, Laing, Cooper, Foucault, and Ginsberg, among others), and their own writing has an undeniable narcotic quality.233 Indeed, the resonances between the ego loss Deleuze and Guattari are after and narcotic experience are clear enough for Mark Seem, one of the translators of Anti-Oedipus, to cite Laing in favor of the desirability of “ego loss”234 and to characterize Anti-Oedipus itself as “stoned thinking”235 in his introduction – an introduction he starts with the following quotation from Henry Miller's Sexus: “We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related.”236 It is not until A Thousand Plateux, however, that Deleuze and Guattari elaborate their views on drugs. First of all, these views are grounded on the classical fallacy according to which drugs are drugs, a clearly delineated and homogeneous set not in need of secondary distinctions. Deleuze and Guattari justify this generalization by stating that all drugs concern accelerations and decelerations (which is also their defining characteristic according to Jünger) and make the imperceptible perceptible in a molecular perception that is directly invested by desire.237 However far from being an unambiguous definition (which is, of course, the last thing they want to give us), this characterization does seem capable of grasping some fundamental aspects that pertain to narcotic experience. The generalization becomes problematic, however, when Deleuze and Guattari allow the entire concept to be distorted by the dangers that clearly pertain to specific drugs only:

Overcoming the ego

73

But if it is true that drugs are linked to this immanent, molecular perceptive causality, we are still faced with the question of whether they actually succeed in drawing the plane necessary for their action. The causal line, or the line of flight, of drugs is constantly being segmentarized under the most rigid of forms, that of dependency, the hit and the dose, the dealer. Even in its supple form, it can mobilize gradients and thresholds of perception toward becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, but even this is done in the context of a relativity of thresholds that restrict themselves to imitating a plane of consistency rather than drawing it on an absolute threshold. What good does it do to perceive as fast as a quick-flying bird if speed and movement continue to escape somewhere else? The deterritorializations remain relative, compensated for by the most abject reterritorializations, so that the imperceptible and perception continually pursue or run after each other without ever truly coupling. Instead of holes in the world allowing the world lines themselves to run off, the lines of flight coil and start to swirl in black holes; to each addict a hole, group or individual, like a snail. Down, instead of high. The molecular microperceptions are overlaid in advance, depending on the drug, by hallucinations, delusions, false perceptions, phantasies, or paranoid outbursts; they restore forms and subjects every instant, like so many phantoms or doubles continually blocking construction of the plane.238

Dependency, the hit and the dose, the dealer, hallucinations, delusions, false perceptions, phantasies, paranoid outbursts; these are the “abject reterritorializatons” that prevent drugs from being useful agents of deterritorialization and instruments for the construction of the plane. But while I agree that the use of drugs in a Deleuzian program of deterritorialization is

74


problematic at best, it is an obvious fact that only a small minority of recreational drugs lead to dependency; only very few drugs instate the enslaving “algebra of need”239 suggested by “the hit and the dose;” and a fairly significant amount of drugs is not legislated, and therefore not usually bought from a “dealer.” Indeed, while heroin addiction can be thought of as an “abject reterritorialization” – whatever the secondary deterritorializations in the domain of living space (homelessness) and sexuality (prostitution) it is often bound up with – this is clearly not the case with a non-addictive substance such as LSD. As to their critique of hallucinations and delusions, this is nothing but a repetition of the good old “simulacrum” argument that has often served to criticize drugs – an argument that is restricted to psychedelics and rests on a metaphysics to which Deleuze and Guattari's ontology could not be more foreign. While elsewhere they are clearly preoccupied with singularities and heterogeneity, Deleuze and Guattari's writings on drugs attest to little terminological rigor and are marked by a number of harmful homogenizations. The grouping together of non-addictive hallucinogenics and addictive stimulants and narcotics in their work is another instance of the discursive violence exerted by the “rhetoric of fantasy”240 that has colonized much of our thought about this sensitive topic.

Drugs without drugs In order to denounce drugs without foreclosing their associated intensities and deterritorializations, Deleuze and Guattari suggest it may be possible to “use drugs without using drugs.”241 While drugs may open certain lines of flight, these will eventually have to be pursued by other means in order to avoid the “booby-traps” and “black holes” (285) involved in drug use. Drug addicts continually fall back into what they wanted to escape: a segmentarity all the more rigid for being marginal, a territorialization all the more artificial for being based on chemical

Overcoming the ego

75

substances, hallucinatory forms, and phantasy subjectifications. Drug addicts may be considered as precursors or experimenters who tirelessly blaze new paths of life, but their cautiousness lacks the foundation for caution. So they either join the legion of false heroes who follow the conformist path of a little death and a long fatigue. Or, what is worse, all they will have done is make an attempt only nonusers or former users can resume and benefit from, secondarily rectifying the always aborted plane of drugs, discovering through drugs what drugs lack for the construction of a plane of consistency. (285)

Like Schirmacher and Baudrillard,242 Deleuze and Guattari recognize the fact that society may profit “vampirelike from the failure of certain individuals”243 – i.e., those individuals that chose the wrong molecules and turned what seemed to be a line of flight into a “line of death.” (285) This societal profit can be very real: in Deleuze and Guattari's words, the experimentation with drugs has “changed the perceptive coordinates of spacetime and introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which becomings-molecular take over where becomings-animal take off.” (248) In this constellation, where drug users are conceived of as guinea pigs, martyrs constructing the foundations of a new sensibility for society with their own consumed / consuming flesh, Deleuze and Guattari are on the other side, partaking of this secondary benefit based on self-destruction. Deleuze's response to Michel Cressole's highly critical book Deleuze indicates his awareness of the ethical ambiguity of this position: What you say is that I've always been trailing behind, sparing my strength, taking advantage of the experiments of others – homosexuals, drug addicts, alcoholics, masochists, madmen, etc. – and vaguely sampling their delights and their poisons without ever risking a thing. [… But] who cares about my relations with

76


homosexuals, alcoholics, or drug addicts, if I manage to achieve the same results as theirs by other means?244

Since, as Deleuze explicitly stated in conversation with Foucault,245 it has become impossible to speak for others, his insistence that he achieved the same results as these quite specific sections of the population without becoming part of them lacks solid foundation. Nonetheless, from the few things Deleuze has written on drugs, one cannot but get the impression that he believed to partake in lines of flight opened up by others, while resolutely rejecting their means. Deleuze's intoxicated undertaking of rewriting philosophy while subtracting its obsession with stasis was obviously conducted with a sober mind. In his essay about Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, Foucault reflects on the effects of drugs – a reflection presumably prompted by Deleuze's style rather than the subject matter of the books under consideration: We can easily see how LSD inverts the relationships of ill humor, stupidity, and thought: it no sooner eliminates the supremacy of categories than it tears away the ground of its indifference and disintegrates the gloomy dumbshow of stupidity; and it presents this univocal and acategorical mass not only as variegated, mobile, asymmetrical, decentered, spiraloid, and reverberating but causes it to rise, at each instant, as a swarming of phantasmevents. ... Opium produces other effects: thought gathers unique differences into a point, eliminates the background and deprives immobility of its task of contemplating and soliciting stupidity through its mime. ... Drugs-if we can speak of them generally-have nothing at all to do with truth and falsity; only to fortunetellers do they reveal a world “more truthful than the real.” In fact, they displace the relative positions of stupidity and thought by eliminating the old necessity of a theater of immobility. But perhaps, if it is given to thought

Overcoming the ego

77

to confront stupidity, drugs, which mobilize it, which color, agitate, furrow, and dissipate it, which populate it with differences and substitute for the rare flash a continuous phosphorescence, are the source of a partial thought-perhaps.246

In turn, the audacity of this passage prompted Deleuze to intrude into Foucault's text by adding a footnote that stated: “What will people think of us?” Which of course meant: “What will people think of you?” Lacan, whose most widely appreciated contribution to psychoanalysis consists in his conceptualization of the formation of the ego, refuses to talk to precisely those subjects that, if we accept one of the most dominant discourses on psychedelics, have gone through a dissolution of the ego and temporarily receded to this prior stage. Schirmacher resolutely rejects all external measures for the evaluation of one's life, but implicitly infers that an intoxicated individual cannot evaluate. And Deleuze and Guattari, always concerned with ways of moving away from dominant human-ness, foreclose a number of lines of flight because they might turn suicidal, neglecting the fact that the (physical and mental) health issues of most psychedelic drugs are limited to, in Lilly's words, “the risk of falling over.”247 It is hard not to suspect the arguments of these thinkers have been contaminated by the “rhetoric of fantasy”248 that surrounds drugs. That is not to say there are no valid grounds from which drugs should be rejected – my proposal is much more modest, consisting merely in my belief that some of the arguments against as well as for drugs are grounded in and consequently derive their credibility from an ontology that distinguishes between truth and simulacrum, being and becoming, consistently privileging the former category of these dichotomies, and that these arguments have to be rethought in order to retain their credibility in a new world where these ontological postulates have lost their unquestioned hegemony.

Drugs as intruder Dictation / possession As I have argued, drugs and reason are constructed as mutually exclusive fields of polarity: while reason must exclude drugs in order to be reasonable, intoxication always means the end of reason, which is sober by definition. In the arts, however, the lowering of reason's guards and the peeling off of the protective layers of the ego are often, perhaps always, seen to be a precondition for inspiration. Even Nabokov, an outspoken individualist, once described vorstog – the initial rapture of inspiration – as “the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away and the non-ego rushing in from the outside to save the prisoner.”249 For Avital Ronell too, writing is always haunted, and begins with the attentive listening and responding to a call that comes from elsewhere. 250 Agamben's short text about genius allows us to think this alienation or undoing of the individual, who is always accompanied or appropriated by his other. In the text in question, Agamben proposes the subject should be considered as a force field composed of two antithetical poles: the Genius and the Ego, where the Genius stands for the impersonal, pre-individual element, the zone of nonconsciousness that always accompanies and sometimes overtakes us.251 In this overtaking, the ego “looks on with a smile at its own undoing” (13) – a smile that may remind us of Adorno and Horkheimer's “euphoria in which the self is suspended”252 – and becomes the bystander of a life that no longer belongs to it. Agamben suggests that creativity begins with the presence of Genius: if the ego wants to write, this means that “I (Ego) feel that somewhere Genius exists, that there is in me an impersonal power that presses toward writing.” (13) The proximity between the dissolution of the ego in popular accounts of drug experience and its overtaking by the Genius in Agamben's topology of the psyche may serve

80


to explain why historically, one has often been mistaken for the other, and drugs have been employed as a source of inspiration in various artistic currents, even bringing entire artistic genres into existence.253 While we should be careful not to mistake Genius for its historical instantiations, Derrida has also noted that drugs have become an easily accessible method for provoking the originary alienation that underlies all writing: ...consider the figures of dictation, in the asymmetrical experience of the other (of the being-given-over-to-the-other, of the being prey to the other, of quasi-possession) that commands a certain writing, perhaps all writing, even the most masterful (gods, the daemon, the muses, inspiration, and so forth). These forms of originary alienation, in the most positive, productive and irreducible sense of the word, these figures of dictation – are they not drawn into a history in which drugs, following “the flight of the gods,” one day came to take a place left vacant, or to play the role of an enfeebled phantom?254

The metaphysics of inside and outside that underlies this passage provides the foundation for a number of disagreements surrounding drugs, the dispute whether drugs open us up to an outside or induce an altered perception from the inside being the foremost of them. Leary maintains that the root of narcotic experience lies inside of us: “Whether you experience heaven or hell, remember that it is your mind which creates them.” 255 Huxley, for his part, locates the source of narcotic experience outside the human mind: “Our linguistic habits lead us into error. For example, we are apt to say, 'I imagine', when what we should have said is, 'The curtain was lifted that I might see'. Spontaneous or induced, visions are never our personal property.”256 And this metaphysics of inside and outside does not only concern psychedelic drugs; addiction too has been conceptualized both as a personal fault originating in the subject and as a

Drugs as intruder

81

form of possession that allows a non-human other to parasitically overtake this very subject and compromise its autonomy. The word “addiction” finds its etymological origin in the Latin verb addicere, to give over something or someone by sentence of a court;257 the term addictus was also used to refer to someone awarded to another as a slave.258 While juridical discourse and the “Just say no” anti-drugs campaign of the 80s and 90s are clearly based on a commitment to subjective autonomy, the medical discourse about addiction does not take this autonomy as a given. In line with the term's etymological baggage, Burroughs sees addiction as the end of free will and subjective agency. For him, drug use leads to the abduction of a subject by an unrecoverable exteriority that goes beyond every economy of need based on a rational homo oeconomicus: My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations, with their dogmatic insistence that such manifestations must come from within and never, never, never from without. (As if there were some clear-cut difference between inner and outer). I mean a definite possessing entity. And indeed, the psychological concept might well have been devised by the possessing entities, since nothing is more dangerous to a possessor than being seen as a separate invading creature by the host it has invaded.259

Of course, the very possibility of this desubjectifying possession260 can be seen to stand in a tension with Burroughs' libertarianism, and in fact, the most powerful passages in his oeuvre are infused with the panic resulting from the irreconcilability between his love for liberal humanism and addiction's erosion of liberalism's foundations. The subject wants to close in upon itself, but cannot, being nothing but a “soft machine” 261 constantly invaded by drugs and technology,262 evil viruses and controlling agents;263 a “subject … riddled with

82


parasites.”264 There is an undeniable proximity between this porous subject of addiction that constantly needs to ward off the threat of his own non-subjectivity and the post-structuralist rejection of a clearly bounded self. As Ronell argues in Crack Wars, the logic of drug addiction can hardly be separated from the discourse on alterity. In addiction, she writes, You find yourself incontrovertibly obligated: something occurs prior to owing, and more fundamental still than that of which any trace of empirical guilt can give an account. This relation -- to whom? to what? -- is no more and no less than your liability -- what you owe before you think, understand, or give; that is, what you owe from the very fact that you exist.265 266

Metaphysics of inside and outside Placed in front of us, drugs are rarely recognizable; a little white powder, a tiny piece of paper, a vial of transparent liquid, a little brown resin. To unveil their effects, we must allow them into our bodies, often by unusual ways: through the nose, the lungs, the skin – sometimes even through the mucous membranes around the eyes and the anus. Once inside and taken up by the bloodstream, they make their way to the blood-brain barrier. Many molecules decompose on the way, but those that cross this final barrier enter the brain to provoke a destabilization of regular cerebral functioning, shuffling perceptual coordinates, “making phantoms appear.”267 Not only on this biological plane are drugs seen to come from the outside. Tripping out on acid or addicted to junk, when we see drugs as a figure of dictation (Derrida) or a possessing entity (Burroughs), the drug user is always alienated from himself, opened up to an alterity that may possess his interiority in threatening ways. The problem with this kind of representation is the metaphysics of inside and outside on which it relies. To my knowledge,

Drugs as intruder

83

Ernst Jünger was the first to hesitantly problematize this metaphysics: Formerly, in incantations, whether by means of asceticism or by other means, there was no doubt that something alien appeared. But today, thinking has attained a power in opposition to which this conviction is only defended by the rearguard. However, the meanings of something appearing from without or from within, something coming toward us from the external universe or from the depths of our own being, are really symmetrical. Not the origin of the probe, but its end-point matters. Here the appearance convinces with a strength that leaves no space, and certainly no desire, for the question as to its reality, let alone its origins. Where reasons, authorities or other resources of power are necessary to secure its reality, appearance has already lost its force; it now continues as a shadow or echo of what it once was... The question whether these effects are only triggered or whether they come toward us from outside goes beyond the problems of psychologists and scientists. If we recognize the plant as an autonomous force that enters to drive its roots and flowers inside of us, we remove ourselves from the oblique perspective according to which Spirit [Geist] is the monopoly of mankind and does not exist outside of him. A new world view has to succeed this planetary levelling; that is the task the next century will set itself. [My translation.]268

Jünger's awareness of the problematic nature of the distinction between inside and outside, 'auslösen' and 'hinzutreten,' is admirable, but his denial of the importance of the origin of Hinzutretendes (literally 'that which steps hither,' or, more colloquially, that which appears from elsewhere) in favor of its depth attests to a certain naïveté that consists in privileging experience at

84


the expense of thought. What Jünger fails to grasp is that the very distinction between inside and outside only makes sense from the perspective of the inside; were we to accept that whatever opens itself to our minds comes from without, there would be nothing but unmediated, prediscursive aletheia, in which the very distinction between inside and outside collapses. Our belief in the interiority of our mind and its generative powers from which certain apparitions may spring forward is premised on the diminishing power of conviction attributed to these apparitions. Only with the diminution of the power of the image due to reason's deterring/deferring intervention could the distinction between inside and outside emerge, and could our comfortable ratio attempt to tame said apparitions by attributing them to neurological aberrations. Only within the domain of reason's domination can the origin of apparitions be localized within or without; but as reason's imperialist ambitions encounter their limits in intoxication, the very attempt to localize these origins fails to make sense when we interrogate the metaphysical presuppositions on which the question relies. Reason constitutes the demarcation line between inside and outside; but as intoxication lies on the outside of reason, the very attempt to localize the origins of drug-induced apparitions can only turn these apparitions into something else. Within the more originary domain in which unreason retains its negative existence and intoxication is not reduced to the misfirings of the brain, there is no inside or outside, and 'auslösen' and 'hinzutreten' are the same. This is what allowed Derrida to write that “in the pharmacy [one cannot] distinguish the medicine from the poison, the good from the evil, the true from the false, the inside from the outside, the vital from the mortal, the first from the second, etc.”269 As an intruder, drugs show us that we have always already been intruded, that our insides have never been waterproof, that our life has never been truly ours: in Nancy's admirably concise formulation, that “autology is intrinsically heterology.”270 Our ego is never self-identical, and drugs interject themselves precisely in the equation

Drugs as intruder

85

ego = ego, shattering any egoistic pretensions of selfsufficiency. The drug user may still speak of an I, but depending on the drug and its user this I may be nothing more than the formal identifier of a series of events that never were under its control, and never will be. “The intruder exposes me excessively – it extrudes me, it exports me, it expropriates me”271, writes Nancy. And drugs extrude us even when they are naturalized and stop being an intruder – for while addiction leads drugs to dwell in the body of their user as if it is their proper place, the state of addiction may prevent this user from dwelling in the openness of being by replacing this openness with total subjugation to a clearly circumscribed alterity. What Burroughs calls “possession”272 is nothing but the irredeemable aperture of the ego to the inhuman Other that is junk. Nonetheless, since we are always already alienated, any argument that denounces drugs with reference to a full and self-constituting (that is, nonalienated) body or subject is idealistic and mystifying. The metaphysics of inside and outside is a metaphysics insofar as the boundary that separates inside from outside is a postulation, and nothing more than that. Not even the most paranoiac subject succeeds in closing in upon himself, and not even the most schizophrenic non-subject lives without interiority. The boundary between inside and outside is intangible and perpetually crossed, the outside is always already inside, and the inside constantly colors the without. In this context, drugs are merely the material exasperation of the openness that makes us human, precisely to the extent that it never lets us be (at one with) ourselves.

War against Enlightenment Politicized drug use As I noted above, the current meaning of drugs emerged in the late 18th century, and is primarily a decree – a term that derives its unity from the negative value judgment it contains. Derrida has noted that “[t]he Enlightenment (Aufklärung) ... is in itself a declaration of war on drugs.”273 The reason for this is twofold: firstly, the essentially public nature every act of reason assumes in the Enlightenment,274 and secondly, the Enlightenment's need to expulse that which is exterior to reason.275 While drugs have been conceived as the agent that induces an opening toward an exteriority understood as genius, inspiration, or possession, this has little to do with reason, which is selfcontained and rooted in the self-sufficient ego. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that there are more artists and musicians than scholars that openly use drugs. Whereas artists have often seen drugs as “a foreign body, or indeed a nutriment, [that] will provoke a state of productive receptivity [allowing] production [to] take place without effort,”276 drug use and reason are hardly reconcilable, drugs inhabiting reason's outside in our collective imaginary. Sartre, so they say, wrote Being and Nothingness on amphetamines; but this is nothing but a rumor, and more apt to endanger his reputation than to support it. In fact, in the 20th century, Benjamin, Jünger and Foucault are the only philosophers of importance that have written substantially about their drug use. Which is not to say they were not deferred by the dominant opinion of society: Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem that he “would like to be assured that this piece of information [about his hashish experiments] will remain locked up in the bosom of the Scholem family,”277 and Jünger postponed the publication of his book on drugs until his mother had died and public opinion had become more favorable (1970). Of the three thinkers mentioned above,

88


Foucault alone does not show any visible traces of shame for his drug use. In a 1971 conversation with high school students (!), Foucault annexes drug use together with sexuality and the overcoming of taboos to a methodology he proposes for the fight against the hegemony of the humanist subject. In this conversation, he defines humanism as “everything in Western civilization that restricts 'the desire for power'... [everything that] prohibits the desire for power and excludes the possibility of power being seized.” 278 At the heart of humanism lies the theory of the subject, and consequently our culture has rejected anything that might threaten the subject's hold. But through the limit experiences (Grenzerfahrungen) they can induce, drugs may expose the subject as the pseudo-sovereign phantom it is, and in this way prove to be a valuable weapon against the repressive nature of humanism and the Enlightenment. Foucault outlines a field of tensions in which humanism attempts to maintain its hegemony by excluding what it cannot tolerate: “The campaign against drugs is a pretext for the reinforcement of social repression; not only through police raids, but also through the indirect exaltation of the normal, rational, conscientious, and well-adjusted individual.”279 It is this repression he is challenging; while the Enlightenment may be “a declaration of war on drugs,”280 Foucault turns drugs into a war against the enlightenment. Leaving the dubious nature of this pedagogical program out of consideration, by inscribing drugs into a battle against a dominant culture that is seen as repressive, Foucault takes up another dominant understanding of drugs, according to which they may not bring us closer to truth (“Drugs – if we can speak of them generally – have nothing at all to do with truth and falsity; only to fortunetellers do they reveal a world 'more truthful than the real'”281), but at least closer to liberation. Here, the transgressive nature of drug use comes to occupy central stage; drugs instantiate one's opposition to a dominant culture whose anti-drug laws are merely one aspect of an

War against Enlightenment

89

assemblage that involves economy, labor regimes, politics, law, ideology, etc. In an era in which biopolitics has become the dominant mode of exertion of power, and sovereignty has dwindled in favor of governmentality, power's locus of application is life, or bios, itself. As Agamben theorizes, when life is thus politicized, the resistance to power may well be located in the very same domain to which power is applied, that is, in life and the body. In his proposal for a “minor biopolitics,” Agamben outlines a form of waging politics that radically rejects the very oppositions between public and private, biological and political, zoe and bios.282 Here, drugs and sexuality gain a political meaning; “lines of flight” and “desubjectification” are no longer understood as the privileges of those who can afford not to confront the “apparatuses of capture”283 lodged in the state, but a movement toward a new humanity that is not determined by these apparatuses.284 The battle is not between two different conceptions of state organization, but between the state and “whatever [quelconque] singularity.”285 In this context, every drug user is, like every madman in the words of David Cooper, a “political dissident.”286 Or, in the somewhat complacent formulation of political activist Abbie Hoffman: “Every time I smoke a joint is a revolutionary act.”287

New sensibility / new World The antagonism between drugs and the establishment has, at least since the emergence of 1960s counter culture, worked both ways. It is worthwhile to note that in 1970, Nixon called Timothy Leary (and not Fidel Castro or Leonid Brezhnev) “the most dangerous man alive,” 288 an epithet Leary may have earned with his belief that drugs, meditation and isolation tanks could make us overcome our ideological imprints. Another interesting position in this battlefield where drugs come to represent a set of political values opposed to those of the dominant culture is represented by Herbert Marcuse in An Essay on Liberation. In this essay, Marcuse argues that our

90


liberation from a repressive and wasteful system based on aggression and the exploitation of the poor cannot be seen apart from the development of a new sensibility – for our current sensibility, geared to a “continuum of aggression and exploitation,”289 restrains the “freedom of the imagination” (29) necessary to bring a new world into being. In this context, drugs can serve an ambiguous revolutionary function. Today's rebels want to see, hear, feel new things in a new way: they link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception. The “trip” involves the dissolution of the ego shaped by the established society — an artificial and short-lived dissolution. But the artificial and “private” liberation anticipates, in a distorted manner, an exigency of the social liberation: the revolution must be at the same time a revolution in perception which will accompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society, creating the new aesthetic environment. Awareness of the need for such a revolution in perception, for a new sensorium, is perhaps the kernel of truth in the psychedelic search. But it is vitiated when its narcotic character brings temporary release not only from the reason and rationality of the established system but also from that other rationality which is to change the established system, when sensibility is freed not only from the exigencies of the existing order but also from those of liberation. Intentionally noncommitted, the withdrawal creates its artificial paradises within the society from which it withdrew. (37)

Somewhat akin to Deleuze and Guattari's tendency to value the effects and results of drugs, but to condemn their use, Marcuse deems drugs to play a role in the necessary “revolution in perception” (37), but recognizes their fundamental inefficacy when it comes to constructing the imagined liberated world. Following Marcuse, by invoking


91

an epistemological crisis in the subject, conditioned by our anthropocentric, power-enamored Enlightenment, drugs may temporarily liberate the individual from the regimes of a restrictive rationality. However, this remains a strictly negative operation, a dislodging, and even when we leave the potentially more deadly regimes to which drugs subject their users out of consideration, it is clear that the positive operation of generating a new World demands fundamentally different means. In 1928 or 1929, Benjamin wrote in his notebooks: “Overcoming of the rational individual through intoxication – of the motorial and affective individual, however, through collective action: this characterizes the entire situation.”290 Bearing in mind that the subject is always open and exposed to extrinsic influences, we may understand how in Marcuse's view, the intrusion of drugs can serve to temporarily replace other intrusions, notably the intrusion of the reason and rationality of the capitalist mode of production. It becomes a question, then, to find the right intrusion – to be open not just to the self-inflating flash of drug experience, but to establish a new type of sensibility that may “accompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society.” Marcuse does not stand alone in his tendency to place drugs in opposition to a certain conception of subjectivity: according to Derrida, Artaud turned to Mexican drugs to “emancipate the subject, … to end its subjection to the very concept of the subject.” 291 Like Artaud, Marcuse believed that drugs could ward off other intrusions; but while this allowed him to see them as an instrument in the fight against a certain form of rationality overdetermined by the logic of capital, it is questionable whether being open (or subject) to drugs is that much better than being open (or subject) to this logic. While one party fights the Enlightenment with drugs, the Enlightenment fights back with all the means at its disposal. Beyond prohibiting laws, there are the 12-step programs, that always begin with a return to rational language in speaking a 'drunkologue' (in Alcoholics Anonymous) or drugologue – a Jeremiad-like monologue of repentance, in which the ego is saved from alienation

92


and restored to a rationality from which alcohol and drugs are excluded by definition (a rationality that is understood to be his 'natural' domain rather than an alienating intruder like drugs). As long as the former addict keeps repeating his story, he will not resort to drugs or drink, and he may joyfully celebrate the “triumph of the [rational] discursive over the [unwieldy] bodily.”292 The expulsion of drugs here means the return, if not to a full and selfidentical body, at least to a body whose intrusions do not consume it, because they dwell in it by nature. The lotus eaters have safely returned to the homeland, the only place where “happiness holds truth.”293 In this exclusive approach to openness, inextricably entangled with the wartime epistemology in which they are still caught up, drugs derive their entire value from their opposition to the logic that excludes them – they come to stand for the liberation from a repressive system, but a liberation that is fully determined by the repression it opposes. The critique of society remains in the sphere of society, belonging to this sphere, going beyond one term of the opposition without altering the position of the terms.294 Well aware of this problem, in his conversation with high school students295 Foucault privileges experimentation over utopian enterprise, implying his valuation of unpredictability over a predictability determined by the historical continuum preceding it. His propagation of drugs is not a propagation of drugs per se, but an attempt to facilitate new ways of thinking that have not been fully determined in advance by their conditions of emergence – in short, a desperate search for an outside to historical continuity on history's inside. As Foucault understood very well, there is little difference between propagating openness to capital or to its other (in this case, drugs) when this openness becomes exclusive. In this case, the openness we propagate is not open at all, but follows a logic of duality where the individual is captivated by or subject to his Other which comes to colonize the entire self. (Incidentally, this makes the very expression 'drug use' ambiguous to the extent it implies an instrumental relationship that leaves the subject intact – in the case of


93

addiction, this subject might just as well be said to be used by drugs.) Not every narcotically induced line of flight turns suicidal, but when its territorializing tendencies prevent it from opening up to other, non-narcotic lines of flight, this risk is very real. In this context, being enslaved to drugs is nothing better than being enslaved to a reason thought of as repressive, as both turn openness into 'Benommenheit,'296 or captivation, a term Heidegger uses to define the relation an animal has to its disinhibitors (the things that motivate it to act).297 Heidegger repeatedly writes that it is our dwelling in the openness of being that makes us human,298 but according to the dominant understanding of drugs in our society, for the drug user this openness is foreclosed by captivation. The Dasein that opens itself to drugs turns them into the objective correlate of a monomaniac subject that no longer dwells in the open, but in a relationship of duality that folds in upon itself, being exclusively occupied with cravings and hallucinations. Insofar as we define relations by their openness, this is not a relation at all, but a hermetic closure in which everything but the desired object is excluded from perception. It may be possible to see both drug addiction and our dependence on a restricted economy of sense as a destructive becoming-animal in which the subject is entirely possessed by the object world surrounding it. Although we do not live in Huxley's Brave New World, and both drugs and reason have left intact the indivisible remainder that refuses captivation, the recent extrapolation of the logic of addiction299 seems to be in line with the ever more restricted freedom of imagination300 and the ever more omnipresent ideological apparatuses 301 bemoaned by critical theory.302 There is no dwelling here, no openness, no World – there is merely captivation, in which the subject and its Other close in upon themselves, like a folded piece of paper, to the exclusion of everything outside this paranoid relationship.

Mourning the Death of God Outlining a set of general conditions for a use of drugs that is not suicidal is neither possible nor the purpose of this book. What I hope to have demonstrated above is that a lot of writing on drugs is still inextricably bound up with an ontology of substance and subject, inside and outside, truth and simulacrum. This is what underlies the deeper convergence between the apparent oppositions between those who find truth in drugs and those who dismiss all drugs as lacking truth, between the argument that rejects drugs for compromising the sovereign subject and the argument that mobilizes them in order to liberate the subject from a more harmful captivation. Superficial oppositions based on shared premises: the opposition of a truth that is one and undivided to numerous simulacra, the presupposition of a natural body that precedes its alienation by drugs and technology, the assumption that there is a qualitative difference between the captivation of drugs and the captivation of capital. The vast majority of all discourse surrounding drugs is based on this ontologico-ethical axiomatic, that allows drugs' proponents to think of drugs as a means to ascend from Plato's cave to a truer light, while opponents see this light as a deceptive simulacrum. Yet the question remains from which indubitable foundation the lights glimpsed by the drug user can be discarded as artificial. As Jünger correctly remarked, the drug user's private paradises are only artificial in relation to the true paradise promised by Christianity or any other eschatological religion: When the roads of access to paradise become artificial or close down entirely, the notion of 'artificial' paradises loses its meaning. They become more real than the traditional ones – that is, matter becomes more powerful than the idea... If there is no more war, then there is no more peace in the old sense; and there are no

96


'artificial paradises' where paradise itself has become illusory. [My translation.]303

Jünger's use of the notion of 'artificial paradises' refers to Baudelaire, who received a Catholic upbringing and, after substantial experimentation, decided to denounce drugs on the basis of their artificiality; hence the title of his book Les Paradis Artificiels. In this book, Baudelaire suggests that man always longs for the infinite, but is often mistaken in the means to achieve it.304 The pleasure of using drugs, he argues, is always temporary, and inevitably leads to a suffering that is greater than the pleasures achieved. Moreover, these pleasures (in his case, of hashish intoxication) lead to a demise of willpower and to a megalomaniac isolation in which the user comes to believe he is the ulterior motive behind all of God's creation, or, indeed, that he has taken the place of God himself. The hashish eater loses himself in dreams of paradise, but loses his power to act upon the real world surrounding him; he sells his soul by fleeing from his life. The paradise drugs buy is paid for with the soul. Like magic, drugs cheat on steadfastness and good intentions. They are too easy: the slow labor of thought and devotion are the only way to ascend the summit of the “Olympus of the Mind,” where art and religion may offer us a glimpse of the one true paradise that God permits.305 In denouncing all transgression as sin, Christianity obviously left little room for narcotics.306 It stands for work without play, taboo without transgression, religion without sacrifice,307 representing a set of convictions that denies the importance of probing into existential secrets using violent means. (“'Sucht' erinnert an 'suchen,'” “Addiction reminds us of search,”308 Jünger notes the phonomagical indication of the potential for drugs in this violent probing.) For Baudelaire, like any Christian subject with Christian taboos, there is but one true paradise: the paradise in heaven reflected in religion and art. Yet without this absolute reference point, we lack the stable ground from which artificial paradises can be denounced as artificial.

Mourning the Death of God

97

It may not be too far-fetched to understand drug use as a practice of mourning, meant to overcome the traumatic consequences of the Death of God and the closing down of the paradise in heaven.309 According to Freud, in the process of mourning the ego incorporates the lost other into its own structure, where the other is sustained through magical acts of imitation and identification. Characteristic attributes of the other are harbored within the very structure of the self so that a cathexis may survive the death of the object to which it was once bound. 310 Within this framework, we may understand the transcendental yearnings that pervade many writings on drugs as part of the mourning process after the loss of a real promised transcendence. Ronell described drugs as “undaunted suppliers of a metaphysical craving,” being intimately tied up with and redeemed by “conditions of transcendency and revelation”311 – a choice of words that unmistakably evokes the sphere of religion. Where God and a truly transcendental realm have disappeared, we reproduce its attributes in particular egoic (or, to be more precise, anti- or post-egoic) structures, hoping to find within ourselves what we have lost with our society's desacralization. More than anything else, drugs allow us to internalize transcendence, displacing the object of cathexis from the Christian Paradise in heaven to the chemical paradise in our heads by endowing the latter with the attributes of the former. This certainly accounts for the views of Aldous Huxley, who propagated psychedelic substances as “religion's chemical surrogates” allowing the masses “to transcend self-conscious selfhood.”312 In fact, the sacred nature of intoxication has been noted on more than one occasion,313 and a striving toward transcendence is an oft-noted reason for the use of psychedelics. When traditional religious transcendence loses its feasibility, drugs become a means to achieve some measure of transcendence, albeit desperately. And without a real paradise, every artificial paradise is real. Jünger's observation can be read as more than a mere destabilization of the notion of artificiality in a secularized age, however. For does not our binary approach to truth,

98


according to which something can either be true or untrue, not rest on an equally unrealistic foundation of Absolute Truth? If we extrapolate Jünger's remark from the domain of pleasure to the domain of truth – something Jünger would probably not have done – we may begin to see the difficulty underlying the denunciation of drugs' artificiality. I would not go so far as to say that truth does not exist, but it certainly does not stand above the conditions that allow it to establish its authority and on which its dependence is absolute. The problem is that these conditions do not lead an existence that is independent of the language games in which they are constituted; as Lyotard noted, legitimation is immanent, and linguistic pragmatics take center stage once we develop a healthy “incredulity towards meta-narratives.” 314 These language games take place within social interaction while at the same time forming the object of ongoing negotiations. Only transcendental Hegelian illusions can totalize the heterogeneity of language games into a real unity; but this is nothing but terror, 315 and so is the a priori delegitimation of the unusual truth conditions introduced by an intoxicated subject. While this subject may be considered the victim of solipsist delusions or a loner in denial of the with,316 there is no absolute foundation from which we can say that he is lacking truth. Seen in this light, Jünger's destabilization of artificiality becomes a denunciation of the Platonic basis of our resistance to drugs (which is not to say that it annuls all potential arguments against drugs). In an immanent ontology in which truth does not lead an autonomous existence, our objection “to a pleasure taken in an experience without truth”317 no longer holds, and it is disputable whether the clear-cut binary distinction between truth and simulacrum survives rigorous philosophical scrutiny. Foucault, for one, does not think so: It is useless... to seek a more substantial truth behind the phantasm, a truth to which it points as a rather confused sign...; it is also useless to

Mourning the Death of God

contain it within stable figures and to construct solid cores of convergence where we might include, on the basis of their identical properties, all its angles, flashes, membranes, and vapors... Phantasms do not extend organisms into the imaginary; they topologize the materiality of the body. They should consequently be freed from the restrictions we impose upon them, freed from the dilemmas of truth and falsehood and of being and nonbeing (the essential difference between simulacrum and copy carried to its logical conclusion); they must be allowed to conduct their dance, to act out their mime, as “extrabeings.”318

99

Narcotic thought Muteness A dominant discourse about drugs that can be seen to evade the ontology of truth and simulacra is the discourse that seeks to employ drugs in the fight against a repressive ego. According to this discourse, the temporary dissolution of the ego during a narcotic experience may invoke a resolution of paranoiac tension, or deterritorialization, in consensual reality. This discourse inscribes itself in a conceptual edifice in which the subject-object relation is less original than the self-transcendence by which Dasein opens itself to the world, and drugs may allow us to reach toward this more originary form of being – an experience that in turn may allow for a recalibration of our subjectivity. The problem here, however, is that language is rooted in the relation of subject to object, and whatever precedes this relation is fundamentally incommunicable – in Lacan, the individual's access to the Symbolic is predicated on castration, i.e., his departure from the Real; and in Heidegger, as Agamben so well put it, “Being can emerge only where the word is lacking, but the word is lacking only at the point at which one wants to say it.”319 Insofar as drugs allow us to experience a more originary Being, we will be at a loss for words, precisely because this more originary Being precedes language (where it should be noted one may easily confuse being at a loss for words with inhabiting a more originary Being). For Jünger, the final goal of his drug-induced Annäherungen (approaches) is nothing but “das Zeit- und Namenlose”320 – the beyond of time and language. But as this very term suggests, as soon as we have overcome our restrictive Egos, we have also lost our tongues, and begin to dwell in a form of unreason that, despite its supposed primacy, has a strictly negative existence. If we want to understand why drugs have come to occupy a position at the margins of society, and why these

102


margins have gladly embraced drugs in a gesture that rejects society's center, it may be helpful to consider the nature of this negativity. For, insofar as drugs are thought to be lacking language, they lack reason, and they certainly lack the reason of society. In this constellation, the argument that denounces drugs for lacking truth and the argument that praises them for their ability to dissolve the ego coincide – for from within the ensemble formed by reason, society and language, in which truth is only true insofar as it can be spoken, the absence of words that accompanies the dissolution of the ego is nothing but truth's absence. Besides the assumed privation of sense from the language of the drug user, it is this equation of silence and nothingness, upheld by the requirement of a positive and undivided truth, that has allowed the word “drugs” to acquire a certain degree of connotative (if not denotative) stability that forecloses the need for secondary distinctions. If the drug user speaks, his language is devoid of truth, grounded as it is in isolated simulacral experience; and if he remains silent, this only serves to prove that in his experience there is nothing to be spoken of. The speech of the drug user lacks truth, his silence has no meaning. It is this constellation of beliefs and presuppositions that allows reason – which is, in Kathy Acker's words, “always in the service of the political and economic masters”321 – to speak about drugs without listening to them. Moreover, this very same constellation (according to which reason and drugs occupy antithetical poles in a spectrum of truth and simulacra) underlies counter culture's attempt to endow drugs with a subversive potential. If drugs are placed in opposition to the dominant ideology, they can be mobilized to overcome the restricted reason this ideology imposes and break its purported monopoly on truth.

Intensity It is doubtful, however, whether drugs can be entirely subordinated to either a lack of truth or to truth's unspeakable presence. Regardless of whether they lead us

Narcotic thought

103

toward or away from understanding, it is possible to consider drugs from a radically different perspective – a perspective that foregrounds motion and intensity rather than wisdom and knowledge. “To understand, to be intelligent, is not our overriding passion. We hope rather to be set in motion,”322 writes Lyotard. Nietzsche proposed dance as a metaphor for thought 323 – a proposition taken up by Badiou in his essay 'Dance as a Metaphor for Thought.'324 The force of this metaphor lies in the absence of ulterior goals exterior to the movement itself. The essence of dance is a vertiginous movement that is selfcontained and self-sufficient, not subjugated to regimes of representation or signification, not inscribed within an external determination. For Nietzsche, thought, like dance, is an “intensification” rather than “a principle whose mode of realization is external.”325 This also means, however, that dance cannot be said to be true or false – or at least, that its potential cannot be reduced to its truth value. I would like to think the mental operations that occur during drug intoxication in a similar manner, suggesting that the interest of drugs does not lie in their being either outside or inside of truth, nor in their capacity to provide us with understanding, but in the libidinal intensities they are able to provoke. In a recent interview that immediately went viral and was viewed almost 10 million times in its first month on YouTube, Hollywood star Charlie Sheen candidly discusses his drug use with a reporter from ABC News.326 While the reporter attempts to confront Sheen with the “erratic” nature of his recent behavior, Sheen resorts to an Artaudian rhetoric of self-sovereignty to defend himself: “My passion... It's all passion... My brain... just fires in a way that is, uhm, I don't know, maybe not from this particular terrestrial realm.” When the reporter resorts to public opinion to justify her judgment (“Some are saying that you're bipolar”), Sheen radically dismisses the legitimacy of this foundation (“They're entitled to, I suppose, interpret stuff as they must... What's the cure, medicine? Make me like them? Not gonna happen... I'm bi-winning.”). Like a true Homo generator, beyond

104


socially accepted norms of morality, Sheen finds the criteria to judge his own existence in himself. The criteria Sheen uses to justify his drug use are clearly those of a libidinal economy from which he and others have extracted a substantial surplus value: You should've seen how I party, man, it was epic... The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards, all of them, just look like, you know, droopy-eyed armless children. [...] I'm proud of what I created, it was radical. [...] I exposed people to magic, I exposed them to something they're never otherwise gonna see in their boring normal lives, and I gave that to them; I may forget about them tomorrow, but they'll live with that memory for the rest of their lives, and that's a gift, man.

While Sheen's statements attest to a selfaggrandizement that borders on insanity, it is clear that his madness is of a fundamentally different nature than the madness of Lilly and Moore, with whom I began this book. Confronted with the public opinion that he will relapse into drug use, Sheen replies: “I'm not interested in what people believe; I'm interested in what I believe, and I believe in the truth, and that's what rules me.” In the face of the reporter's embodiment of those social values with which his lifestyle is at odds and her disbelief at his ability to stay clean, Sheen violently withdraws himself from the sphere of common sense, turning himself into the only measure of his life and his truth. This may be seen as a form of isolation or denial of Mitsein, but the important point is that despite his resort to the notion of “truth,”327 Sheen's isolation is not the isolation of the creature of the simulacrum living in his private hallucinated universe. When he speaks of the truth, he speaks of his truth only. While Lilly's and Moore's madness consisted in a mistaken appeal to some truth that hovered above them, Sheen's madness is nothing but intensity driven to the point of intolerability.328 This may be partially due to the fact that Sheen, like most of Hollywood, probably used cocaine

Narcotic thought

105

rather than hallucinogenics – another indication that the supposed unity of the category of 'drugs' is grounded in rhetoric rather than experience. Be that as it may, Sheen's delirium – if we hold on to this term – may hint at the possibility of thinking drugs in a way that radically departs from the dogged reference to truth and simulacra. As Jünger was beginning to discover, and Deleuze and Guattari affirmed, drugs have more to do with acceleration than with discovery. While the regimes of representation that constitute a domain of truth may be recontextualized within an accelerated or decelerated mode of perception, it is important not to see this as an indication of the close relation between perceptual velocity and truth. Indeed, it is doubtful whether acceleration has the inherent capacity to lead us toward (or away from) truth, or whether our metaphysics leads us to impose a regime of truth on acceleration. Narcotic intensities may be thought in various terminologies, and are not altogether irreconcilable with some elements pertaining to the rhetoric of fantasy I have attempted to disentangle. The dissolution of the ego may go hand in hand with an enormous liberation of libido, resembling the release of water from a water balloon bursting apart. The important point here is that the negative operations of the dissolution of the ego and the associated withdrawal from truth may also have a positive counterpart that is not conceptually distinguishable from these negative operations. The bursting balloon and the dispersing water are inextricably bound up in one and the same movement. It is this movement that discourses vested in the semiotics based on Plato's nihilism attempt to capture and reduce to intelligible signs – but intensities move below and through these signs while being absolutely irreducible to them. Intensity inhabits language, but many of the discourses discussed above are based on a mistaken belief in their congruence – that is to say, in the belief that the Symbolic can cover up the Real.

106


Communication Instead of the disintensifying language characteristic of the authors that stand by this belief, we may think of language as an intensive region: “The signs which the pen traces on the paper are not simply means of communicating an emotion which is outside them, and which would be, so to speak, lost due to the fact that it was written...”329 As the “libidinal band”330 is a single undivided surface without volume on which language and life converge, language is never intensity's representation, always its accommodation. This also explains why singularity is never isolated; it “forces itself to be communicated, because extreme pathos extends its empire to the skin of language...” 331 As Giambattista Marino found out on his death bed, language is not “a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents.”332 Yet this weakness of language is precisely its strength; for if it were a mirror, it could only reflect, which is not the same as to communicate, engender, speak, or envision. And if language were a mirror, it would only reflect intensities, instead of being perpetually made, unmade and traversed by them. As the libido invests unconditionally,333 Logos and language cannot be sheltered from the exorbitance of drugs and sexuality. “There is in every cybernetic system a unit of reference which allows the disparity produced by the introduction of an event into the system to be measured; then, thanks to this measure, this event can be translated into information for the system.”334 Cybernetic systems impose their regimes of translation in order to turn incommensurability commensurable – an insight that can be extrapolated to language insofar as it always strives to capture what threatens to elude its grasp, the “unit of reference” being what Lyotard calls the Great Zero 335 that grounds the compatibility between language and the world and endows language with a semblance of representation. The endless complexity of instantaneous occurrence is reduced to presence and absence, where representation stands for presence in absence – the absence of the Ding

Narcotic thought

107

an sich, eclipsed by the presence of its phenomenal counterpart. Nevertheless, the suggestion of a clear-cut separation between life and language is misleading, for although language is not life, life is always already signifying. “Looking out of my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see.”336 While we may not see the signifier “azalea,” the only reason we can say that an azalea is an azalea, and describe the particular sensory input that corresponds to our conception of the azalea as an azalea, is that the azalea in its brute materiality already signifies. Language's magical act of naming commands the relation between language and the world into being, and our being-based ontology and correspondence-based epistemology are secondary to the establishment of this relation. But language is not primordial, and rather than being a conquest of the world, it should be seen as a response to the world's calling. A response to something it is part of; for language is always part of life, as life lives on in language. True, they are not the same, nor are they isomorphic – but as Peirce knew well, life exhausts itself in signification, and there is nothing in the world that does not signify. There is no brute and inaccessible facticity that is occupied by the Symbolic in a disfiguring appropriative operation – Being is nothing but a sign that waits to be read and communicated. Even beyond representation and signification, intensities incessantly make their way into language, and as language is based on nothing but intensities, it will always let them in. If we consider communication not as the transmission of a message from sender to receiver, but as the movement and procreation of affects on the surface of the libidinal band, we may understand how the notion of an outside of language only makes sense with regard to a metaphysical conception of language that upholds the demarcation between language and the world. If we abandon this metaphysics of voluminous and bounded bodies in favor of an immanent ontology (without neglecting the undeniable value the mirror conception of

108


language may have in approaching certain problems), language can no longer be said to have an inside or an outside, to speak falsely or sincerely; it is just a surface on which intensities traverse. “Indeed, we all talk so freely about language, or languages, that we tend to forget that there are no such things in the world; there are only people and their various written and acoustical products.”337 What Davidson meant with this curious statement is that the very concept of language is derived from something fundamentally different from it, i.e., the sonorous manifestations making up what de Saussure called parole and its written counterpart. The thing we commonly presume to designate with the word “language” is itself a transcendental concept; and while langue may have acquired the semblance of an existence that is independent of its spoken instantiations, this is nothing but the illusory result of a repeated iteration. If we keep in mind the absolute reliance of langue on the unsystematic set of sounds that make up our parole, we can easily understand the absolute porousness of language – a porousness whose failure to keep narcotic experience outside is obvious from the very beginning, simply because language has no volume, and its outside, like its inside, does not exist. Foucault predicted that for future historians, Artaud would “belong to the foundation of our language, and not to its rupture; neuroses will be placed among the forms that are constitutive of (and not deviant from) our society.” On that day, all that we now still experience as “limits, or strangeness, or the intolerable, will have joined the serenity of the positive.”338 In a similar vein, we may predict a time when madness and intoxication are recognized as constitutive parts of language rather than leading a marginal existence on its outside. This will be the time when Michaux's intoxicated writing fully inhabits sense; a phenomenological sense not measured against a truth that hovers above it, a sense untainted by the remnants of Platonic thought. In his text on surrealism, after a digression on the pedagogical potential of hashish intoxication – which he considers rather limited –

Narcotic thought

109

Benjamin notes that thinking itself is “eminently narcotic.”339 Tucked away in parentheses and lacking further contextualization, this utterance seems almost ashamed of its audacity. Yet one day, when metaphysics and the need for Being, certainty and truth no longer stand in the way of thought, thinking may really be narcotic. In order to be able to truly think drugs, without expropriation or cowardly circumvention, we may first have to drug thought.

Notes

111

Notes Introduction 1

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, paragraph 86 Charles Ruas and Michel Foucault, 'An Interview with Michel Foucault' (1983), in: Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, p.185 3 In this respect, drugs are not unique among the spoils of our technological development. As Christina von Braun argues, our Christian heritage has burdened us with the incentive to know God without changing or replacing him, which makes our science into an impossible project that purports to know everything, but change nothing. And so we invent nuclear weapons and dangerous drugs, only to subsequently try to curb their circulation. Christina von Braun, 'Der christliche Kollektivkörper und seine >Sleeper

Drugs: Rhetoric of Fantasy, Addiction to Truth

The Truth About Drugs

The Truth About Drugs (Truth About)

Addiction

Hidden Truth About Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs

Neurobiology of Addiction

The psychology of addiction

Drugs and the Future: Brain Science, Addiction and Society

Rhetoric

Bridges to fantasy

The Psychodynamics of Addiction

Rhetoric

Sweet Addiction

Kristen's Addiction

Drugs

A Companion to Greek Rhetoric

A Companion to Greek Rhetoric

Addiction Neuroethics: The Ethics of Addiction Neuroscience Research and Treatment

Drugs

Sweet Addiction

Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy

Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy

Fantasy

Fantasy

Fantasy

Fantasy

Fantasy

Fantasy

The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

A Companion to Roman Rhetoric

Drugs: Rhetoric of Fantasy, Addiction to Truth

The Truth About Drugs

The Truth About Drugs (Truth About)

Addiction

Hidden Truth About Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs

Neurobiology of Addiction

The psychology of addiction

Drugs and the Future: Brain Science, Addiction and Society

Rhetoric

Bridges to fantasy

The Psychodynamics of Addiction

Rhetoric

Sweet Addiction

Kristen's Addiction

Drugs

A Companion to Greek Rhetoric

A Companion to Greek Rhetoric

Addiction Neuroethics: The Ethics of Addiction Neuroscience Research and Treatment

Drugs

Sweet Addiction

Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy

Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy

Fantasy

Fantasy

Fantasy

Fantasy

Fantasy

Fantasy

The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

A Companion to Roman Rhetoric

Recommend Documents