ABSTRACT
In his essay on ‘Surrealism’ Walter Benjamin states that ‘The reader, the thinking one, the waiting one, the flâneur are as much types of illumination as are the opium-eater, the dreamer, the drunken one.’1 Since this initial exploration, the issues surrounding the rhetoric of drugs can be found scattered throughout the margins of contemporary theory. Virilio’s discussions of speed, narcosis and technology; Jameson’s theorization of postmodern ‘intoxication’, Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions of becoming-other and their discussions of William Burroughs, psychedelia and alcohol in The Logic of Sense, Derrida’s reading of the pharmakon and Foucault’s discussion of opium and LSD in ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’ are all indicators of a structuring presence within European and American theory concerning the question of ‘drugs’. In The Epistemology of the Closet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has added to this debate by suggesting that ‘[t]he “decadence” of drug addiction, in…late nineteenth century texts, intersects with two kinds of bodily definition [and that] the integrity of…national borders, the reifications of national will and vitality, were readily organized around these narratives of introjection.’2 Ronell’s text seeks to enter into this theoretical milieu by setting out to expose our total investment, and implication in, the rhetoric of drugs. If Ronell’s previous work, The Telephone Book, set out to establish the relationship between technology, thought and addiction, then in Crack Wars she has expanded her philosophical enquiry by addressing what is intoxicated in literature and what literature ‘becomes’ when it is intoxicated.
