Review Article

Addicts, Edicts, and Empty Infinities:

The Rhetoric of Drugs from De Quincey to Derrida
ROBERT MORRISON

Marcus Boon. The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs

Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Uruversity Press 2002

Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield, editors.

High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction
Berkeley: University of Califomia Press 2002

Anna Alexander and Mark S. Roberts, editors. High Culture: Reflections on

Addiction and Modernity
New York: State University of New York Press 2003

Thomas De Quincey first tried opium in 1804 for the relief of 'excruciating
rheumatic pains of the head and face.' The results were miraculous. The
'negative effect' of his physical suffering was 'swallowed up in the
immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me.' Qpium
bestowed upon him enormous spiritual joy. 'Here was a panacea,' he
proclaimed. 'Here was the secret of happiness.' Over the next eight years
De Quincey set himself the task of exploring the drug's 'abyss of divine
enjoyment,' and committed a series of well-planned opium debauches as
a means of heightening his pleasure in music, conversation, books, and
solitude. Yet all the while the drug was tightening its hold on him, and in
1813 it pulled him under. His rheumatic body was usurped by an addicted
body, and the escape from physical pain that the drug had previously
permitted now rebounded in the fiercer agonies of withdrawal: 'the
stomach... often in great pain: unceasing restlessness night and day: sleep
1 scarcely knew what it was ... Lower jaw constantly swelling: mouth
ulcerated ... violent sternutation ... impatience and hideous irritability.'
Relief came only with the consumption of more opium. His intake levels
shot upward. He determined on temperance. The grim cycle began again.
For nearly fifty years De Quincey's drug habit imposed a highly predict-
able grid upon the utter chaos of his life.

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De Quincey's detailed account of his opium experience - the euphoria,

the seduction, the sickening despair, the overconfidence, the profound
confusion - stands as one of the seminal narratives in the literature of
addiction. The patterns and ideas he examines generated fervent debate in
his lifetime, and seem even more complex and relevant in ours. In How to
Stop Time: Heroin from AtoZ (1999), Ann Marlowe praises 'De Quincey's
brilliant, unsurpassed Confessions ofan English Opium-Eater,' and notes that
'ever since I read De Quincey in my early teens I'd planned to try opium.'
After kicking her habit, she tellingly observes that a 'novel about heroin is
weighed down by the inherent consistency of everyone's experience of the
drug in a way that a novel about love or revenge is not; those experiences
are universal but not identical. Few writers are skilled enough to overcome
this obstacle. So heroin demands nonfiction, memoir, truth-telling, but even
here the trick is to outwit the drug, to introduce what the drug will not:
surprise.' Marlowe devours De Quincey, and then De Quincey's drug, in
a failed quest for transcendence that is scarred by consumption, consumer-
ism, disembodiment, and deadening repetition.
Yet while in Marlowe's summary heroin addiction produces few
surprises, drugs and addictive behaviours have been the subject of a great
deal of scholarly attention in recent years, and bave become central to
postmodern articulations of identity, alterity, desire, transgression, and
control. The most important recent studies extend from Avital Ronell's
Crack Wars (1992), Richard Klein's Cigarettes Are Sublime (1993), and
Richard Rudgiey's Essential Substances (1994) to Bruce Wilshire's Wild
Hunger (1998), Sadie Plant's Writing on Drugs (1999), Mike Jay's Artificial
Paradises (1999), Lawrence Driscoll's Reconsidering Drugs (2000), and
Rebecca Sharmonhouse's Under the Influence (2003). The three new books
considered here draw extensively on previous scholarship, and examine
the paradoxes of drugs from a wide variety of perspectives, including the
criminal, medical, philosophical, artistic, political, sociological, and literary.
Some chapters are damaged by unevenness and awkwardness, but all three
volumes contain shrewd insights, valuable new information, and remark-
able case studies. The finest assessment in the area, however, remains
Derrida's 'Rhetoric of Drugs,' which moves from AIDS to Zola, and which
inverts the De Quinceyan abyss: 'when the sky of transcendence comes to
be emptied,' Derrida remarks, 'and not just of Gods, but of any Other, a
fatal rhetoric fills the void, and this is the fetishism of drug addiction.'
In The Road of Excess, Marcus Boon examines the connection between
drugs and writers, and devotes chapters to narcotics, anesthetics, cannabis,
stimulants, and psychedelics. He makes no distinction between 'high' and
'low' cultural texts, and ranges impressively from Boswell, Blake,
Baudelaire, Benjamin, The Beats, and The Beatles to the Ecuadorian
geographer Manuel Villavicencio, the Hungarian short-story writer Geza
Csath, and the former CIA director Allen Dulles. Boon observes, somewhat

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disconcertingly, that he has written his history 'without relying on a

particular conceptual framework beyond that of a set of names of sub-
stances arovmd which stories, texts, practices have clustered, and that of
chronology, which I have used for convenience.' The lack of a theoretical
structure means that Boon's account occasionally dwindles down to plot
summary and what amounts to a list of writers who ingested a particular
substance. But in the vast majority of instances his innovative and sub-
stantial research pays large returns. Literary experimentation with drugs
had its birth in the friendship between Humphry Davy and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge 'and the momentary possibility of a rapprochement between
experimental chemistry, German Idealism, and Romantic poets.' All drugs
are technologies: 'We can speak of opiates as technologies of pleasure,
cannabis as a technology of dreaming, anesthetics as technologies of
transcendence.' In Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
(1971), 'the neon-saturated night of Las Vegas is just as much a hallucina-
tion, a myth, a product of the imagination, as any vision triggered by LSD.'
Amidst texts that are so often overheated and excessive. Boon concludes
with admirable sanity that 'the most promising solution to the "drug
problem" is neither negating or affirming drugs, but learning to discrimi-
nate between different drugs through unbiased studies of how human
beings interact with them, and, at a deeper level, opening up new realms
of excess so that drugs no longer carry the whole weight of our legitimate
desire to be high.'
Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield's High Anxieties is a collection of
ten essays which argue for 'connections between our notions of "addiction"
and "culture" that go far beyond the commonplace that addiction, like any
representable entity or event, is a phenomenon with a cultural side to it. As
presented here, addiction and culture become concepts that float and
overlap, refer to and interfere with each other.' The two chapters on virtual
reality are not well integrated into the collection, but there are solid
discussions of victimization in the Gothic narratives of De Quincey, drugs
in Victorian detective fiction, and the early and enduring relationship
between drugs and film. Nicholas Warner examines alcoholism in the
novels of James Fenimore Cooper, and the ways in which the Native
American consumption of firewater 'absolved the whites for the extermi-
nation of tribal culture precisely because, so the argument ran, that
culture's decline was the ineluctable result of the Native American's own
nature. Thus the "drunken Indian" gave white imperialism the perfect
formula for conquest without guilt.' Timothy Melley explores the
debilitating paradoxes at the centre of William Burroughs's 'logic of
addiction': 'Burroughs's nervousness about the erosion of individual
autonomy stems from the same contradictions that have produced the
contemporary culture of addiction: only by assuming that individuals
should owe nothing to the "outside" for their actions and identity can

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Burroughs sustain a panic-stricken vision of the individual as a total addict

and the world as a hostile place full of controlling agents.' As a whole, the
collection endorses Brodie and Redfield's assertion that addiction 'insinu-
ates itself into the fabric of what we call "identity" and becomes insepara-
ble from the history of the individualized, pathologized subject, and from
that of collective or systemic (national, racial, sexual, and so on) forms of
identification and subjection.'
In High Culture, editors Anna Alexander and Mark S. Roberts divide
seventeen essays into two groups, one dedicated to 'Philosophical and
Literary Reflections' and the other to 'Socio-Cultural and Psychological
Reflections,' though there is a good deal of traffic between the two sections.
Some of the essays in the volume accomplish less than they promise, and
typos and poor copy-editing create additional problems. But Alexander
and Roberts justly observe that 'the works collected here belong to a
language of (by and about) drugs that ranges from the literary to the
scientific, the intimately personal to the generally collective, and that spans
more than a century of often scandalous, often electrifying, discourses on
the subject of addiction.' The volume features essays on trauma and
bulimia in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Artaud on the aesthetics of intoxica-
tion, Freud on cocaine, and Levinas on addiction, freedom, and fraternity.
David L. Clark's searching discussion of Heidegger on Schelling posits that
'"man" and "animal" share a desirous origin in addiction, an irresolvable
dependency on themselves - or rather, as themselves - which uncarmily
repeats an always prior dependency on the craving that originarily
dispossesses God.' Jon Flster's investigation of gambling and addiction is
indebted to Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French inventor of both
roulette and probability theory, and a cogent analyst of ennui: 'so wretched
is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness from the
peculiar state of his disposition; and so frivolous is he that, though full of
a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards
or hitting a ball, is sufficient to amuse him.' Roberts examines the 'media
addict,' who 'does not seem to carry out his or her murderous, antisocial
or depraved gestures as a direct result of reverie, imagination, denial,
obsession, childhood trauma, conflict, projection, delusion, and so on.
Rather, he or she is obsessed by a desire to serve as a kind of anonymous
monitoring screen of the hyperreai.... In short, the media addict craves to
become the medium itself.'
One of the chief reasons for the burgeoning scholarship on addictions
is the widely held conviction - expressed often in these volumes - that in
a consumer society we are all addicts. 'Addiction,' remarked social
psychologist Stanton Peele in 1975, 'is not, as we like to think, an aberration
from our way of life. Addiction is our way of life.' The drug addict is
driven by his or her infinite desire for the next fix: 'I never had enough

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junk,' Burroughs writes. 'No one ever does.' The consumer is similarly
bound to the seductive and highly repetitive seriality of commodity
production. As Eve Sedgwick notes, in contemporary American society 'it
has now become a commonplace that ... any substance, any behaviour,
even any affect may be pathologized as addictive.' We consume - and are
consumed by - Game Boys, sex, shopping, work, booze, exercise, food,
poker, relationships, and so on. Messaging, marketing, and merchandising
constitute mind-altering drugs that engender within us a desire for endless
consumption, even of what we do not need or want. 'Advertising is a
racket, like the movies and the brokerage business,' F. Scott Fitzgerald once
observed. 'You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive
contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.' Its influence, however, is
insidious and omnipresent. 'I watch these infomercials late at night,' Jerry
Seinfeld remarks. 'If it gets late enough the products start to look good to
me.... "I don't think I have a knife that can cut through shoes."' Consumer-
ism is addiction. Buy, Buy. We are all enslaved to junk of one kind or
another. 'Fascism and Stalinism were collective hard drugs,' observes Felix
Guattari. 'Consumer society shortens the road to passivity and death.'
At issue in these various declarations are notions of individual agency
and will, and the contravening threats of parasitism and infestation. In
Martin Heidegger's formulation. Do we live the world, or are we lived by
the world? Do we write, or are we written? The user begins by ingesting
the drug, but before long the drug is ingesting him. We fracture: in Piti-
grilli's Cocaina (1921), the hero states that 'the two persons inside me
criticize each other, corrode each other, in a way that results in my hating
myself.' De Quincey presses the same disturbing insight even further: what
if 'the dreamer finds housed within himself ... not one alien nature, but
two, but three, but four, but five'? Our selves are not deep and coherent,
but slack and permeable. Eventually the drug takes over: 'You couldn't
have called her that. ... It must be the booze ... talking.' What is more, as
several critics have pointed out, narratives of possession are a particularly
apposite way of emblematizing the mechanisms of addiction, for they give
the actions of the drug to a person with invasive designs of his or her own
- a vampire, a mesmerist, a parent. 'Representing desire as a circuit that
bypasses the subject completely,' writes Stacey Margolis in High Anxieties,
'the possession story creates a world in which it is possible to have a desire
outside the organizing framework of the self, to experience a self without
the burden of desire.' The conflict is seen in its peculiar intensity in the
writings of Burroughs. 'First, Burroughs views junk less as an inert
commodity (something that must be bought and consumed by active agents)
than as a parasitic organism (something that invades and controls the bodies
of unwitting individuals),' Melley observes. 'Second, while he imagines a
worldwide conspiracy producing the junk virus, he views the conspirators

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themselves as "control addicts." This tautological concept - the "control

addict" - embodies precisely the tendency... in which assertions of will or
control are understood as addictions.'
Why do we take drugs? The most obvious answer is, 'for transcen-
dence.' The issue has been approached from many different angles. Keats
wrote eloquently of 'The feel of not to feel it, / When there is none to heal
it.' In Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Freud emphasized that the
'service rendered by intoxicating media in the struggle for happiness and
in keeping misery at a distance is so highly prized as a benefit that
individuals and peoples alike have given them an established place in the
economies of their libido. We owe to such media not merely the immediate
yield of pleasure, but also a greatly desired degree of independence from
the external world.' Wilshire intensifies a similar logic when he notes that
addictions are 'powered by a hysterical hunger for ecstatic enlargement, for
relief from nattering fears and frustrations.' Boon points out that the 'waves
of socio-technical transformation striking America in the 1960s required
some form of anesthesia' to allow the success of what Marshall McLuhan
calls 'social surgery.' Yet while drugs often enable a swift and radical
escape from the world, they do not simply push in one direction, for they
also promote a more hostile and brazen engagement with the world. In
Aleister Crowley's Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922), the narrator. Sir Peter
Pendragon, observes that 'cocaine gives a person the same courage that the
British used to gain their Empire.' Similarly, Burchill and Parson theorize
speed as a social mobility drug. It is the only substance, they write, 'that
can make a prole realize that to make it you don't need more intelligence,
just the confidence to flaunt that sharpness in the faces of those who would
have dismissed you because of your background, the confidence to look
down on them. Speed is the only thing that can take the place of elocuation
[sic] lessons.'
The price of artificial paradises or intoxicated aggressions is often
exorbitantly high. To be sure, these volumes contain impassioned defences
of addicts and addictions. At the soft end of dependency, Helen Keane in
High Anxieties attacks 'the Puritanical and fascistic forces of anti-smoking'
and attempts to make the case for 'the virtues of cigarettes' without a word
about what it costs the rest of us in second-hand smoke and burgeoning
health-care expenditure. One thinks of Blake: 'all Act is virtue' but 'to
hinder another is not an act; it is the contrary; it is a restraint on action both
in ourselves & in the person hindered.' Much more substantial are Lorraine
Greaves's concerns in High Culture about the ways in which patriarchy has
exploited women's smoking as a form of social control. 'When women
suppress negative emotions, there is a clear benefit to society,' Greaves
writes. As long as women'suck back their anger' through smoking, men
can remain 'comfortable and complacent.' The implicit encouragement of
women's smoking 'is a form of social control' Meanwhile, at the hard end

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of addiction, Guattari argues for 'a free distribution of drugs' and something
that seems to resemble vigilantism. An 'unequivocal decriminalization of
drugs' is essential, he states, and 'if this cannot be obtained from the
political authorities - at the level of personal consumption and petty
dealing - it may be necessary for a number of militant groups and
associations to take responsibility and organize alternative forms of
distribution.' Boon's response seems more sensible: 'To describe repeated
acts of human self-destruction, such as can be found in the history of
morphine and heroin, without commenting on them would be dishonest
- a form of intellectual posturing.' Even Guattari concedes that, though
'happy addicts' exist, their condition 'is more often wretched, indeed,
tragic' From infinity, 'life telescopes down to junk, one fix and looking
forward to the next,' as Burroughs describes it in Junky.
Baudelaire knew drugs were a cheat. So did Emerson: 'the spirit of the
world, the great calm presence of the Creator, comes not forth to the
sorceries of opium or of wine.' What drugs promise in the moment is not
what is available when the moment passes. De Quincey convinced himself
of his ability to create vast intellectual systems, but came to the bitter
realization that the opium-eater's 'intellectual apprehension of what is
possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of
power to attempt.' An unsigned letter in the Psychological Review, probably
by Oscar Wilde, describes a more risible example of the same chemically
sponsored confidence. 'My God! I knew everything!' Wilde wrote
ecstatically of a dental anaesthesia experience. 'I seemed to have reconciled
Hegelianism itself with all other schools of philosophy in some higher
synthesis.' But when he regained consciousness, the sublime was the
ridiculous. 'That would have been a tough job without the elevator,' he
shouted at the 'little pink man' who was the dentist. Aldous Huxley's
psychedelic experimentations seek intellectualism but find only a kind of
precious banality. 'More even than the chair, though less than those wholly
supernatural flowers, the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged
with "is-ness,"' Huxley coos. 'To what they owed this privileged status I
cannot say.' The day tripper may have a good reason for taking the easy
way out, but too often s/he returns empty handed.
For Derrida in 'The Rhetoric of Drugs,' first published in 1989 and
republished as the lead essay in High Culture, there is 'not any 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 tum is not that of
Coleridge nor of De Quincey.' But there are commonalities. What do we
hold against drug addicts? It is that they cut themselves off, that they have
a taste for simulacrum and hallucinations, that they undermine community
and the social bond, that they choose solitude and torpor over the very
world which is the world of all of us. 'Drugs in general are not condemned
for the pleasure they bring, but rather because this aphrodisiac is not the

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right one/ Derrida argues: 'it leads to suffering and to the disintegration of
the self, in short, it desocializes. It belongs to that diabolical couple,
pleasure and suffering, denounced in every indictment of drugs.' Addicts
are exiles, and prohibition is necessary. 'Our society, our culture, our
conventions' require it. 'Let us rigorously enforce it.... By prohibiting drugs
we assure the integrity and responsibility of the legal subject, of the citizen.'
Work is the most productive and enabling response to addictive threats.
Writers often thematize drugs as a source of effortless creativity and
spontaneous inspiration, but the 'transcendental-imaginary discourse
(imaginary for anyone who would profess it as well as for anyone who
might hope to unmask it)... is what is condemned by a society based on
work and on the subject answerable as subject. A poem ought to be the
product of real work, even if the traces of that work should be washed
away. It is always nonwork that is stigmatized.'
Throughout these three volumes, drugs are presented at the centre of a
wide-ranging series of discourses. They are simultaneously poison and
cure, public and private, paradise and prison, natural and artificial. 'Like
any good parasite,' Derrida observes, they are 'at once inside and outside
- the outside feeding on the inside. And with this model of feeding we are
very close to what in the modern sense of the word we call drugs, which
are usually to be "consumed." "Deconstruction" is always attentive to this
indestructible logic of parasitism ... itself a device parasitic on the subject
of the parasite, a discourse "on parasite" and in the logic of the "superpara-
site."' In consumer society, drugs are the ultimate product. They sell
themselves. 'The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy,' as
Burroughs luridly puts it. 'The junk merchant does not sell his product to
the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product.' We are right to seek
transcendence. Longings prove us to be more than merely human. Desire
is inextricably bound to our notions of alterity and identity. But the sufferer
who cannot bear the illusions of the lotus-eaters is justified. 'The luminaries
of the Enlightenment,' Derrida concludes, 'identified essentially by the
motif of publicity and with the public character of every act of reason, are
in themselves a declaration of war on drugs.'

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