Copyrighted material 978 1 137 48765 0€¦ · the suddenly strange and defamiliarised sound of the Marseille dialect, as if it had become a barely discernible variant of French

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataLiterature and intoxication : writing, politics and the experience of excess / [edited by] Eugene Brennan, University Paris 13, France ; Russell Williams, American University of Paris, France.pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978–1–137–48765–01. Substance abuse and literature. 2. Authorship—Psychological aspects. 3. Literature, Modern—History and criticism. 4. Politics and literature. I. Brennan, Eugene, 1988– editor. II. Williams, Russell, 1977– editor. PN171.S83L58 2015809'.933561—dc23 2015017421

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v

Acknowledgements vii

Foreword: The Art of Hard Drugs by Andrew Hussey viii

Notes on the Contributors xiii

Introduction: Writing, Politics and the Experience of Excess 1Eugene Brennan and Russell Williams

Part I Cultural Histories of Intoxication

1 Writing and Intoxication: Drunken Philosophers, Crack Addicts and the Perpetual Present 25Russell Williams

2 The Green Jam of ‘Doctor X’: Science and Literature at the Club des Hashischins 52Mike Jay

Part II Poetic Intoxications

3 Mourning and Mania: Visions of Intoxication and Death in the Poetry of Georges Bataille 67Eugene Brennan

4 ‘Riding the Lines’: The Poetics of the ‘Chevauchements’ in Henri Michaux’s Drug Experiments 81Mathieu Perrot

5 Fabulous Operas, Rock ‘n’ Roll Shows: The Intoxication and Poetic Experimentation of Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison 97Alessandro Cabiati

Part III Dipsomaniacal Novelists

6 Tipsiness and ‘the Reigning Stupefaction’ in the British Fiction of the Late 1940s 119Joe Kennedy

7 ‘Drink, She Said’: Around the World of Durassian Alcohol 130Anne-Lucile Gérardot

Contents



Part IV Political and Theoretical Critiques of Intoxication

8 Intoxication and Toxicity in a ‘Pharmacopornographic Era’: Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie 147Joshua Rivas

9 A Systemised Derangement of the Senses: The Situationist International and the Biopolitics of Dérive 160Christopher Collier and Joanna Figiel

10 ‘Beau comme le tremblement des mains dans l’alcoolisme’: A Cavalier History of Drugs and Intoxication in the Situationist International 173Alastair Hemmens

11 Intoxication and Acceleration: The Politics of Immanence 185Benjamin Noys

Select Bibliography 203

Index 205

vi Contents



1

Introduction: Writing, Politics and the Experience of ExcessEugene Brennan and Russell Williams

Mundane sobriety is rarely enough. Throughout cultural history writ-ers and readers have time and again found themselves in a state of will-ing intoxication. For Friedrich Nietzsche a feedback loop of cause and effect is endemic to the artistic process: ‘the effect of works of art is to excite the states that create the work of art – intoxication’ (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 168). Intoxication has had a particularly prominent place within modernism, bound up with artistic creation. The artist must confront the overwhelming socio-historical changes and cultural anxi-eties informing his or her moment in history: post-enlightenment sec-ularisation with its effects of a de-sacralised and disenchanted world, the increasing precariousness of the figure of the artist within moder-nity, and the recurring feeling, paradoxically driving each modernist breakthrough, that art has in some sense reached its end and there is nothing more to say. Considering the task of the artist in such condi-tions, Maurice Blanchot describes modernist art as necessarily coming from a position of intoxication: ‘from now on deprived or freed of the ideal of some absolute meaning conceived on the model of God, it is man who must create the world and above all create its meaning. An immense, intoxicating task’ (Blanchot, 1993, p. 145).

For Walter Benjamin, the experience of modernity is also insepara-ble from intoxication, particularly in the paradigmatic modern figure of the flâneur. He wrote that ‘the intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity immersed in a surg-ing stream of customers’ (Benjamin, 2003, p. 31). Yet the inebriation of the flâneur is not a completely passive experience, as he notes of Baudelaire that ‘the deepest fascination of this spectacle lay in the fact



2 Introduction

that, even as it intoxicated him, it did not blind him to the horrible social reality’ (ibid., p. 34). As Benjamin’s own experiments with drugs in ‘Hashish in Marseille’ suggest, the experience of intoxication is pro-foundly connected with modernism’s critical potential to defamiliarise the everyday and the banal. Under the effects of hashish, he describes the suddenly strange and defamiliarised sound of the Marseille dialect, as if it had become a barely discernible variant of French. He notes that ‘the alienation effect that may underlie this, which Kraus once framed in the splendid sentence, “The more closely one examines a word, the more distant the look it returns”, seems to extend to the optical in general. At any rate, I find among my notes the wondering words, “How objects withstand one’s gaze!”’ (Benjamin, 2009, p. 124). The intoxication Benjamin describes points towards how such states can amplify the strangeness and jarring tensions of the modern world.

Following Benjamin’s lead, the essays collected in this volume pro-pose a radical re-interrogation of notions of intoxication. Focussing largely, although not exclusively, on modernist texts, this collection casts critical doubt upon its commonly perceived subversive poten-tial and upon excess as a value in itself. As a theoretical starting point for the analysis in the essays that follow, in this introductory chapter we will accordingly reconsider and problematise the counter-cultural valorisation of intoxication from a more critical perspective than has previously been offered. We will initially re-examine Nietzschean distinctions between Apollonian and Dionysian experiences, high-lighting a more complex entanglement of the two tendencies. With particular attention to the work of Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, we will trace a critique of intoxication up to the appropriation of excess within neoliberal capitalism. We will advocate a more cau-tious treatment of excess and reconsider the relationship between the Dionysian and the political within modernist literature and aes-thetics. Alenka Zupanc ic ’s re-reading of the Dionysian informs this reconsideration of intoxication in terms of equivocation, duplicity and antagonism, in opposition to other accounts of the Dionysian which traditionally advocate self-loss or affirmation of the world.

Dionysian modernism: when ‘one turns to two’

The cultural history of intoxication has largely unfolded under an opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian poles



Eugene Brennan and Russell Williams 3

of experience. For Nietzsche, the entire development of art was bound up with this duality. He described the two tendencies in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), as representing two separate art worlds of dreams and intoxication. The Apollonian tendency is based on appearance and light. It was associated with the art of sculpture as opposed to the non-visual Dionysian art of music, with its greater capacity for intensity.

‘Know thyself!’ and ‘Nothing in excess’ are characteristically sober Socratic and Apollonian dictums. However, Nietzsche repeatedly stresses the entanglement of the two tendencies. In Greek tragedy, ‘Apollo could not live without Dionysus!’ (Nietzsche, 2000, p. 46) and the Dionysian chorus depends upon the Apollonian world of images through which it is communicated (ibid., p. 73). Intoxication has commonly been understood in terms of an opposition between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, but the dichotomy underwent sig-nificant changes throughout Nietzsche’s work. The figures of Socrates, Christ and the Crucified came to occupy the place of Apollo and, while Dionysus was still associated with intoxication, he no longer primarily represented passionate self-loss but rather an affirmation of life: ‘Saying Yes to life’ is how Nietzsche defines the Dionysian in his later work (ibid., p. 72). Christ internalises the pain of life, putting the suffering of life in the service of an after-life, whereas Dionysus affirms life as it is, in all its suffering. Gilles Deleuze explains Nietzsche’s development out of this opposition ‘as that of the affirmation of life (its extreme valuation) and the negation of life (its extreme depre-ciation). Dionysian mania is opposed to Christian mania; Dionysian intoxication to Christian intoxication’ (Deleuze, 2006, p. 15). There are thus not only several types of Dionysian intoxication, but intoxication itself is not always exclusive to the Dionysian.

A tension between antagonism and reconciliation is at stake in Dionysian intoxication. Both the early Nietzschean account of intoxication as self-loss and fusion with a mystical oneness, or the later visions of the Dionysian as an unequivocal affirmation of life, often imply renouncing antagonism and a depoliticised reconcilia-tion with the world as it is. One might think of intoxication’s oscil-lation between antagonism and reconciliation in terms of Alain Badiou’s description of modernist aesthetics as an aesthetics of the Two, involving antagonism and internal conflict as opposed to the One, with its implications of reconciliation and unity. There is what



4 Introduction

Badiou describes as a ‘passion for the real’ at work in aesthetic phi-losophies of the One, an obsession with ‘unmasking’ the fake sem-blance to discover the truth content beneath (Badiou, 2014). This is a passion for authenticity and implies that critical reading entails little more than an act of destroying the surface to see the ‘pure’ truth beneath, as if, in the realm of tragedy, it is simply a case of discover-ing the Dionysian truth beneath the Apollonian semblance.

Zupanc ic similarly argues that the tendency ‘that ultimately iden-tifies the Real with some unspeakable authenticity or Truth is the nihilist tendency par excellence’ (Zupanc ic , 2003, pp. 129–30). As against the idea that the Real lies beyond language, or that the Real is undermined by the fact that everything is language, there is a ‘something else’ that exists besides this alternative, which is precisely a duality, a

duality that has nothing to do with the dichotomies between complementary oppositional terms (which are ultimately always two sides of the One): this duality is not (yet) multiplicity either. It is perhaps best articulated in the topology of the edge as the thing whose substantiality consists in its simultaneously separating and linking two surfaces. This specific duality aims at the Real, and makes it take place through the very split that gives structure to this duality. (Ibid., pp. 12–13)

The neat separation of the Dionysian and the Apollonian through-out cultural history has thus often posited Dionysian excess under an illusory self-presence, as if it is an experience more authentically real. Zupanc ic gives us a more sober reading of Nietzsche in which the Dionysian is not a realm of pure immersion but is characterised by tension and duplicity. The perspective of this volume, following Zupanc ic , problematises any neat separation of the Dionysian and its other, and questions the widespread implication that Dionysian excess provides access to a more authentic reality. In her account, which stresses the absence of any authenticating self-presence, the difference between the Crucified (the negation of life) and Dionysus (life’s beginning, its affirmation) is not as clear as it may seem. The difference between the two is rather, as Zupanc ic explains:

that Dionysus is himself this very split (between the Crucified and Dionysus). Dionysus does not come after the Crucified, as




something completely different. Dionysus is not simply the equiv-alent of new, different values; Dionysus is not the beginning of a new era, the morning of a new epoch after the fall of the old one. Dionysus is the beginning as midday, the moment when “one turns to two”, namely, the moment of the very split or “becoming two” as that which is new’. (Ibid., p. 25)

In this sense, a reading of modernism which still stresses the impor-tance of Dionysian excess would place less emphasis on Rimbaud’s ‘dérèglement de tous les sens’, with its implications of freedom from constraints and jettisoning of tension, with a reading of the Dionysian within modernism which emphasises internal conflict, duplicity and non-reconcilable tensions. Our view of intoxication’s place in modernism critiques its conventional role as what Badiou refers to as a philosophy of the One, a depoliticising reconciliation with the world through either obliterating self-loss or unequivocal affirmation of life as such. This collection advocates a more tempered view of intoxication, in which the subversive value of excess, or what remains of it, lies in its restraint and tension as against acceleration and self-loss.

Reconsidering intoxication

Intoxicated states have been described using a range of adjectives: drunk, stoned, high, wasted. In French usage, ‘intoxication’ chiefly describes poisoning (or brainwashing). Our use of the term in editing the collection, the proceedings of an international conference that took place in Paris in 2013, critiques the noxious potential of intoxi-cation, but likewise considers how intoxication can be ‘the action or power of exhilarating or highly exciting the mind’ or ‘elation or excitement beyond the bounds of society’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Sigmund Freud described certain psychic states, such as mania, as intoxicating. This collection similarly explores states of excess which do not always arise from an explicit intoxicant. Furthermore, our view of intoxication is a less celebratory or elated one than previous studies. While considering the subversive potential of a variety of forms of intoxication and its potentially enlightening effects, we will be sensitive to its complicity with global capitalism.

The transgressive appeal of certain kinds of intoxication has often resided in their negative relationship to society. While certain



6 Introduction

versions of the Dionysian may entail fusion with the world in self-loss, the embrace of intoxication has often meant saying no to the world as it is, rejecting the social order. For Freud the appeal of intox-ication was in the mixture of pleasure and independence from the external world. In ‘drowning our sorrows’, he wrote, we can ‘escape at any time from the pressure of reality and find refuge in a world of our own that affords us better conditions for our sensibility’. A grim picture of desperation and self-deluding escape emerges as he drily recounts that ‘anyone who sees his quest for happiness frustrated in later years can still find consolation in the pleasure gained from chronic intoxication, or make a desperate attempt at rebellion and become psychotic’ (Freud, 2004, p. 27).

The dangerous effects of intoxicants, for Freud, are that they ‘are responsible for the futile loss of large amounts of energy that might have been used to improve the lot of mankind’ (ibid., p. 19). Jacques Derrida similarly develops the threatening aspects of intoxication in an interview entitled ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’. While there are all manner of harmful intoxicants, such as cigarettes, alcohol and cof-fee, which are legally and socially permissible, Derrida notes that the threat of unpermitted intoxicants such as illegal drugs does not reside in either the potential harm or pleasure. What is forbidden is the solitary, desocialising world created by the drug user. Similar to the anti-social expenditure of energy Freud pointed towards, Derrida highlights the drug user’s exile from reality, far from the everyday life of the city and community, ‘into a world of simulacrum and fiction’(Derrida, 1995, pp. 234–6).

The modern experience of intoxication then turns over two oppos-ing visions of its relationship with the world, firstly in a total immer-sion with the world in Dionysian self-loss, and secondly in a total rejection of the world and retreat from it in the self-enforced exile of certain kinds of drug addiction. However, both instances might be seen as dialectical inversions of one another, two sides of the same coin. To pursue either path of valorising intoxication, as pure retreat or pure immersion, one disavows and represses the tensions between self and world in a quest for escape. Such unbridled embrace of intoxication renounces the antagonism constitutive of modernism as described by Badiou and Zupanc ic among others.

While Zupanc ic offers a valuable and politicised reading of the later Nietzsche, the apolitical implications of Dionysian intoxication




are most evident in The Birth of Tragedy, with the portrait of a quest for self-loss carrying a logic of renouncing antagonism. Nietzsche brings out the incompatibilities between intoxication and the politi-cal, writing that ‘one feels in every case in which Dionysian excite-ment gains any significant extent how the Dionysian liberation from the fetters of the individual finds expression first of all in a diminution of, in indifference to, indeed, in hostility to, the political instincts’. However he goes on to consider the co-existence of these incompatibles, how it was possible ‘for the Greeks during their great period, in spite of the extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political instincts, not to exhaust themselves either in ecstatic brood-ing or in a consuming chase after worldly power and worldly honor, but rather to attain that splendid mixture which resembles a noble wine in making one feel fiery and contemplative at the same time’ (Nietzsche, 2000, p. 125).

Bataille and excess

The co-existence of apparently incompatible elements, the Dionysian and the political, informs the thought of one of the twentieth cen-tury’s most important philosophers of excess, Georges Bataille. In the 1930s Bataille’s work turned over the fusion of religion and politics, arising from the deficit of sacred experience within rationalised modernity. For Bataille, the absence of the sacred within capitalism facilitated the rise of fascism and Nazism, and he argued that any anti-fascist politics must also weaponise religious impulses. His 1936 article ‘The Sacred Conspiracy’, for example, invites a turn to ‘ecstasy’ in rejection of the ‘world of the civilized’ (Bataille, 2013, p. 179). The question of the sacred was being explored during this period against the backdrop of contemporary political tumult by Bataille, Roger Caillois and many others at The College of Sociology, a public lec-ture series between 1937 and 1939 which brought together many of Paris’s most important intellectuals. Bataille’s vision of intoxicating politics opposed the world of tragedy to that of the military. Where the latter, associated with fascism and nationalism, externalised violence, the world of tragedy expunged its violence through inner conflict and divine intoxication. Fascism’s aggressive assertion of identity was countered with a political Dionysianism in which the basis of community was the negation of identity.



8 Introduction

Benjamin was a frequent attendee and unconvinced interlocutor at the meetings of the College. He had already written of a similar ‘dialectics of intoxication’ of the Surrealists in 1929, whose project he described as ‘to win the energies of intoxication for the revolu-tion’. Benjamin’s attitude towards the ‘dialectics of intoxication’ is not without equivocation however. On the one hand he praises the inebriating potential experienced when the lines between public and private are blurred. When new forms of collectivity and the negation of bourgeois interiority are glimpsed in the glass house of André Breton’s Nadja, Benjamin describes such deconstruction of the public and private as ‘revolutionary virtue par excellence. That too is a “high”, a kind of moral exhibitionism we sorely need’ (Benjamin, 2009, p. 147). However, he is simultaneously critical of a possibly, non-dialectical view of the nature of intoxication: ‘the aesthetic of the peintre, or poète, “en état de surprise”, of art as the reaction of one surprised, is enmeshed in a number of pernicious romantic preju-dices’ (ibid., p. 157 ).

Benjamin clarifies his dialectical critique by stating that ‘the most deeply emotional study of hashish intoxication will not tell a person half so much about thinking (a notable drug) as the secular illumina-tion of thinking will about hashish intoxication’ (ibid., pp. 157–8). In other words, Surrealism bared the traces of a nostalgic current of romanticism which fetishised the category of ‘experience’: the subject’s chance encounters displayed a dubious fetishisation for individual enchantment, and similarly a romantic vision of the role of the artist, ‘en état de surprise’.

The College of Sociology, consisting of many former Surrealists, was a disparate group of thinkers that held in common the Surrealist inter-est in the entanglement of intoxication and the political while reject-ing the individualist and aesthetic aspects of Surrealism implicitly criticised by Benjamin. However, Benjamin was even more suspicious about the College. For him, the affective politics of myth espoused by Bataille, Caillois, Klossowski and others risked playing into the hands of a ‘prefascist aestheticism’ (Klossowski, 1988, p. 389). For Alexandre Kojève, similarly, the wishes of Bataille and others in the College to reignite the sacred within contemporary society were comparable to a magician trying to fool himself into believing his own tricks.

During this period Bataille’s response to fascism’s sublimation of death was a will to communicate with death. The College was




dissolved on the eve of World War II and Bataille’s own work later displayed implicit self-criticism of his earlier focus on sacrifice and communication with death. As Jean-Luc Nancy has noted, Bataille subsequently came to understand ‘the ridiculous nature of all nos-talgia for communion’.1 The dubious outcomes of his Dionysian politics of the late 1930s with its valorisation of sacrifice, death and ecstatic self-loss illustrates the limitations of an unbridled embrace of intoxication.

While his political orientation changed and became increasingly ambiguous and disengaged, Bataille’s work was consistently centred on excess. With art and literature increasingly theorised as sources of the sacred in his later work, he explains the intertwinement of reli-gion and aesthetics in terms of a ‘divine intoxication’ as a challenge to rationalised modernity:

L’enseignement de Wuthering Heights, celui de la tragédie grecque – et plus loin de toute religion – c’est qu’il est un mouvement de divine ivresse, que ne peut supporter le monde raisonnable des calculs. Ce mou-vement est contraire au Bien. Le Bien se fonde sur le souci de l’intérêt commun, qui implique, d’une manière essentielle, la considération de l’avenir. La divine ivresse, à laquelle s’apparente le ‘mouvement prime-sautier’ de l’enfance, est en entier dans le présent. Dans l’éducation des enfants, la préférence pour l’instant présent est la commune définition du Mal. (Bataille, 1957, pp. 17–18)

[The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek tragedy and, ultimately, of all religions is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation can-not bear. This tendency is the opposite of Good. Good is based on common interest which entails consideration of the future. Divine intoxication, to which the instincts of childhood are so closely related, is entirely in the present. In the education of chil-dren preference for the present moment is the common definition of Evil. (Bataille, 1997, p. 22)]

This view of literature echoes Bataille’s theory of ‘general economy’ developed in La Part maudite (1949). In contrast to a capitalist system of accumulation, entailing the reinvestment of profit in produc-tion, he advocated a social order based on the useless squandering



10 Introduction

of excess profits and energy. For Bataille, a society ordered around utility or rational production is an enslaved one. Moments of non-productive expenditure in his ‘general’ economy negate this aspect of utility and subservience. These ‘sovereign’ moments of non-production are frequently described as ‘intoxicating’. This can be in the conventional sense of drunkenness, or the emotional and intel-lectual inebriation which he found in poetry, or in a combination of many experiences of intoxication in festivals.

However, Bataille’s politics of excess has lost much of its sub-versive edge when viewed from our contemporary vantage point where excess has become normative. Bataille’s conception of capi-talism was based on the Protestant ethic described by Max Weber, a utilitarian, highly rationalised one. Jean-Joseph Goux argues that Bataille’s critique of the ‘cramped, profane, narrowly utilitarian and calculating bourgeois mentality’ would find an unlikely accord with the abundance of unproductive expenditure and champion-ing of entrepreneurial risk in postmodern capitalism (Goux, 1990, p. 217). One could actually point to an ‘anti-bourgeois’ defence of postmodern capitalism which seems to reject the values of sobriety, calculation and foresight. Weberian capitalism was based on sobriety but Bataille would have found a hegemonic politics of intoxication in its postmodern variant. As Benjamin Noys, a contributor to this volume, notes in his extended critique of an accelerationist politics of excess, the problem with Bataille’s critique is not only that it has been outpaced by a capitalism that thrives on excess, but ‘the more damaging problem is that it conceives of this excess or waste as the site of a new production which hardly seems to break with capital-ism’ (Noys, 2014, p. 76).

It was perhaps partially due to the perception of these shifts of cap-italism into a post-Fordist economic landscape in the 1970s, where the desire for excess was being captured and appropriated, that lead to a diminution in Deleuze and Guattari’s embrace of excess between the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In Anti-Oedipus (1972), written against the backdrop of the events of 1968, they critiqued psychoanalysis, capitalism and the state for the recoding and restricting of desire within sober limits. Their account of capi-talism famously described a process of de- and re-territorialisations. While on the one hand it entails an uprooting abstracting process of urban migration and alienation, an erosion of human bonds and




identities, it also contradictorily reasserted identity in a variety of forms, such as reactionary nationalist values and the family for-mation. Deleuze and Guattari wished to ‘accelerate’ the process of deterritorialisation. They identified the figure of the schizophrenic as the revolutionary subject in dialogue with a number of avant-garde figures: ‘far from having lost who knows what contact with life, the schizophrenic is closest to the beating heart of reality, to an intense point identical with the production of the real’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2014, p. 107). Their quest for the liberation of desire immanent in all forms of social and cultural production generated a febrile and intoxicated form of philosophical writing. However, by the time of the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the tone was mark-edly more sober. The more cautious tone is particularly evident in their attitude to drugs. While drugs give access to deterritorialising lines of flight and experiment, they also stress that the experience of drugs is ‘constantly being segmentarized under the most rigid of forms, that of dependency, the hit and the dose, the dealer’. The threat of dependency as well as the spectre of the comedown looms over their discussion of drugs. ‘Drug addicts continually fall back into what they wanted to escape’ they remind us (ibid., p. 333).

Against the choice of either abstention or total immersion, Deleuze and Guattari advocated a balanced and tempered experimentation:

Is the mistake drug users make always to start over again from ground zero, either going on the drug again or quitting, when what they should do is make a stopover, to start from the ‘middle’, bifurcate from the middle? To succeed in getting drunk, but on pure water (Henry Miller). To succeed in getting high, but by absten-tion … To reach the point where ‘to get high or not to get high’ is no longer the question, but rather whether drugs have sufficiently changed the general conditions of space and time perception so that nonusers can succeed in passing through the holes in the world and following the lines of flight at the very place where means other than drugs become necessary. Drugs do not guarantee immanence; rather, the immanence of drugs allows one to forgo them. (Ibid.)

In searching for forms of libidinal intensity not trapped in the cycle of taboo and transgression, or highs and comedowns, they wish to disentangle the experience of intoxication from a material



12 Introduction

intoxicant. In seeking to avoid the traditional traps of embracing excess (in practice and theory), Deleuze and Guattari advocate forms of intensity that are durational, beyond the confines of a material stimulant, and this perspective informs their thought on a variety of levels. In discussing the dismantling of self-identity, for example, there is no rhetoric of Dionysian self-obliteration, but an advocacy of tempered and strategic experimentation, using drug-related meta-phors: ‘And how necessary caution is, the art of doses, since overdose is a danger … Dismantling the self has never meant killing yourself … you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality’ (ibid., pp. 185–6).

The threat of the comedown and the overdose which hangs over Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus similarly informs Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s grim and sober account of the post-1968 decline of the international Left, and capitalism’s appropriation of the values of the counter-culture.2 Berardi describes the shifts in dominant drug consumption and attitudes as increasingly de-socialising. Where the hallucinogenic drug-associations of the 1960s and the early 1970s counter-culture projected images of collectivity and utopian poten-tial, Berardi notes a dysoptian turn in drug consumption, moving with the mood of the times: ‘Between the 1970s and 1980s, the irruption of heroin into the existential experience of the post-urban transition was a part of this process of adaptation to a condition of excitation without release’ (Berardi, 2009, p. 91). Where the years of hippy culture ‘were centred around a project of eroticization of the social, of universal contact between bodies’, heroin in contrast ‘allows for a switching-off, a disconnection from the circuit of unin-terrupted overexcitement, a kind of attenuation of tension. The col-lective organism of western society looked for a slowing down in the massive consumption of heroin, or else, in a complementary fashion, looked to cocaine as a way of keeping up with the pace’ (ibid.). The rise of drugs like heroin and cocaine reflect increasingly bleak his-torical circumstances, offering little more than coping mechanisms in a grimmer social reality. By self-medicating we are also often self-disciplining. The use of cocaine in particular for Berardi attests to the subjugation of the human to the increasing demands of work and flexibility, demands which cannot be met by the merely sober.

Our more cautious interrogation of intoxication is concerned with capitalism’s appropriating and repurposing of the desires of the




counter-culture. The desire for flexibility and freedom from monoto-nous work, for example, has been perversely realised in the form of precarity and constant insecurity. Similarly, the demand for freedom of expression became turned into the compulsion to expression and the production of affect: we are all unremunerated employees of social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter invited to constantly express our opinions and generate value. This capturing of desire is how intoxication needs to be considered: the desire for liberation through intoxication became the necessity to either self-medicate in order to ‘keep up’ with the demands of contemporary capitalism, or to immerse oneself in a state of excess as an ‘experience’. A cultural repression of the desire for intoxication has been replaced by a cul-tural injunction to intoxicate, whether it be as a coping mechanism, or as part of what Slavoj Žižek often refers to as the super-ego impera-tive to ‘Enjoy!’, characteristic of late-capitalist ‘permissive’ society. In this respect Žižek has often written of the elevation of excess to a position of normality, and his critical suspicion of Bataille is founded on this appropriation of waste and excess. Paraphrasing Brecht, he asks ‘what is a poor Bataillean subject engaged in his transgressions of the system compared to the late-capitalist excessive orgy of the system itself?’ (Žižek, 2003, p. 56).

Needless to say, the appropriation of such desires should not lead to simply abandoning them. However, there is clearly a need for a more sober and critical re-reading of intoxication, as offered within this volume. A critical survey of intoxication in its various formats also raises a revised reading of its relationship to modern-ism and the avant-garde more broadly. Berardi draws a link between the experimental avant-garde’s legacy, which he characterises in terms of Rimbaud’s ‘dereglement de tous les sens’, and the economic deregulations of semiocapitalism: ‘dérèglement was the legacy left by Rimbaud to the experimentation of the 1900s. Deregulation was also the rallying cry of the hypercapitalism of late modernity, paving the way for the development of semio-capital’. In considering the opac-ity of contemporary capitalism where any discernible links between signifier and signified seems increasingly broken, Berardi extends his comparison:

the whole system precipitates into the indeterminacy as all cor-respondences between symbol and referent, simulation and event,



14 Introduction

value and labor time no longer hold. But isn’t this also what the Avant-garde aspired to. Doesn’t this experimental art wish to sever the link between symbol and referent? In saying this, I am not accusing the Avant-garde of being the cause of liberalist economic deregulation. Rather, I am suggesting that the anarchic utopia of the Avant-garde was actualized and turned into its opposite. (Berardi, 2009, pp. 124–5)

Berardi makes a valid point. However, his brief remarks on the Avant-garde suggest a one-sided, perhaps simplistic conception of modernism. While the desire to liberate the symbol from referent is certainly a key aspect of twentieth-century modernism, it is the dif-ficulty of complete liberation from such constraints, and the anguish and tension generated by those constraints, which has often lent mod-ernism its potency. An over-emphasis on modernism as Rimbaud’s ‘dérèglement’ risks reducing it to a simple teleological advance into greater and greater abstraction, into a space of the free circulation of signs, rather than marked by specific and complex tensions which problematise the embrace of abstraction. Alain Badiou’s account of Malevich’s painting White on White (1918) is illustrative here. Rather than reading it as a simple break into non-representational abstrac-tion or as an attempt to isolate the real, Badiou’s reading stresses that it creates a tension by accentuating the impossibility of ever access-ing a pure experience of the real. Rather than being a destruction of painting, Badiou explains it in terms rather of a subtractive assump-tion which ‘instead of treating the real as identity, it is treated right away as a gap. The question of the real/semblance relation will not be resolved by a purification that would isolate the real, but by under-standing that the gap is itself real. The white square is the moment when the minimal gap is fabricated’ (Badiou, 2014, p. 56).

The fabrication of a minimal gap which Badiou refers to is the crea-tion of division, scission and dissonance characteristic of modern-ism. Thinking in terms of tension and irreducible dissonance rather than a more libertarian pure destruction suggested by Rimbaud’s ‘dérèglement’ informs our more tempered perspective on intoxication and its relationship to modernism. Our insistence on the entangle-ments of the Dionysian with the Apollonian is also informed by Zupanc ic ’s perspective of the Dionysian as a ‘split’, an ‘edge’, or a jarring tension, a source of sustained antagonism.




The diverse range of contributions to this collection offer criti-cal inquiries which neither moralise nor glamorise. Our perspective breaks with the celebration of intoxication in the 1990s work of Sadie Plant and Nick Land. Where Plant’s Writing on Drugs was more open to the transgressive possibilities of drugs, our stance is more critical and sceptical. As well as seeking to avoid celebration we will also be avoiding any moralising dismissals of excess, with sensitivity to a wide variety of anatomies of intoxication. We will thus also unshackle intoxication from the conventional dyad it forms with addiction. In this sense our examination differs from other studies such as Marty Roth’s Drunk the Night Before: An Anatomy of Intoxication. Roth’s work considers alcohol as intoxicating but drugs, according to him, ‘are not intoxicating, just addicting’ (Roth, 2005, p. xvi). This tendency to locate subversive potential in the former while viewing the latter as solely debilitating results in a moralistic view that reinforces the state of permissive tension described by Derrida.

In a similar way, this volume differs from work (like Ronell, 1992) that blurs the boundary between intoxication and addiction. Our focus is on the insights stimulated by an experience of the former rather than the dependency and loss of control often associated with the latter. Stuart Walton notes that:

Two mythical notions have been brought to bear on all public discourse on the subject [of intoxication]: (a) the addiction model, under which all illegal substances are invested with the power to enslave the curious should they venture anywhere near them, and (b) the slippery slope narrative, which warns that the seemingly less dangerous drugs are really gateways to harder, more injurious substances, the process itself having a fatal inevitability about it that entraps even the most iron-bound will in its tentacles. (Walton, 2001, pp. xxi–ii)

While we’ve taken a more critical perspective on the subject in this volume, we concurrently share Walton’s resistance to the moralising narratives he refers to above and share his suspicions of the auto-matic link many make with addiction.

As noted above, this volume takes a broad approach to the forms of intoxication it examines. Given the breadth of potential scope, and given the rubric for our original conference, the focus is mainly



16 Introduction

on literature originally written in French. It thus seeks to refine the broad scope of Barrière and Peyrebonne (2004) who explore intoxi-cation which ‘se caractérise par sa nature contradictoire: elle est tout ensemble instrument et vecteur d’exclusion recherché ou subie, abolition de soi dans la beuverie ordinaire et accès à la transcendance, égarement des sens et de l’esprit et lucidité suprême, effusion et invasion, se résout en immobilité et en mouvement’ (p. 11).3

The volume opens with a chapter by Russell Williams which places the collection in the context of French writing. With reference to a broad range of sources, including Rabelais, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola and Frédéric Beigbeder, Williams considers how forms of intoxi-cation have preoccupied the French literary imagination.

While this volume at times reconsiders the potentials of intoxi-cation, it also offers unique insights into the deeply problematic social and political implications of the embrace of excess introduced above. In this respect Benjamin Noys here offers an insightful cri-tique of the politics of excess. The theoretical tendency known as ‘accelerationism’ celebrates the experience of drugs as one compo-nent in an embrace of the nihilistic and exhilarating elements of capitalism as a means of surpassing the more conservative tenden-cies. Noys analyses two manifestations of this line of thought, the writing of British philosopher Nick Land, and queer activist Beatriz Preciado’s text Testo Junkie (2008). In an approach also considered in this volume by Joshua Rivas, Preciado attempts to undo the binding of gender and capital through the ‘gender bioterrorism’ of taking testosterone. The ‘self’ is treated as a platform that can be negated. Land embraced a similar erasure of self in alignment with the intoxicating elements of capitalism coupled with the belief that embracing such tensions could paradoxically bring about the dissolution of capitalism. Where Noys shows how these different manifestations of the politics of intoxication frequently reinforce the most conservative and reactionary tendencies of the social order they claim to be transcending, Rivas’s exploration of Preciado’s text complements this critical perspective with a reminder that our position of critical ‘sobriety’ is necessarily compromised in the ‘pharmocopornographic era’ where we are all locked into biopoliti-cal libidinal economies of pleasure to some extent. Rivas’s chapter thus entails a deconstruction of the division between intoxication and sobriety while examining the disparity between the avowed




anti-capitalism of the ‘testo-junkie’ and its comprised position of consumerist complicity.

Joanna Figiel and Chris Collier here analyse similarly problematic complicities between intoxication and contemporary capitalism. In looking at the avant-garde group the Situationist International (SI), they refer to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Profane Illumination’, a secular ver-sion of religious intoxication. As mentioned above, political revolu-tion could be imagined as a shared intoxication, though Collier and Figiel expand upon the need for a dialectical view. Intoxication is frequently imagined as a ‘loss of self’. They consider this in relation-ship to neoliberalism where, as highlighted by Foucault, the self is malleable. This is even more evident today where we can construct different identities across different social networks and are increas-ingly demanded to be flexible in the ways described above. Thus, with a tentative appreciation of the liberating potentials of intoxi-cation, Collier and Figiel also analyse its complicity with forms of biopolitical power.

Alastair Hemmens also examines the SI but takes a broader the-matic approach and focuses on the differing attitudes towards drugs and alcohol within the group. While leader Guy Debord was a notori-ous drinker, and the group often celebrated intoxications of different kinds, they were nevertheless critical of the emerging glorification of drugs by the international counter-culture in the late 1960s. In par-ticular, they were disdainful of the hippy culture’s approach to drugs which the SI saw as encouraging a passive submissive state towards their social conditions since their critique was specifically targeted at transforming such conditions.

While offering different cautionary notes to uncritical celebrations of intoxication, and highlighting its dormant political implications, this volume is also concerned with the question of how to describe an ‘intoxicated’ literary style. In this sense, the volume challenges many of the assumptions of what constitutes intoxication. Speed and extremity, for example, are traditional barometers of transgressive excess. Where one finds alcoholic excess leading to transcendental epiphanies in the likes of modernist texts by Joyce, Joe Kennedy examines a different kind of intoxication evident in late modernist fiction in England and France, emblematic of what Sianne Ngai has called ‘stuplimity’ (Ngai, 2007, pp. 248–97). This is associated with a sense of tipsiness, a sluggish prose style which weaves poetic texture



18 Introduction

out of a morbid, heavy language. Such a style ‘threatens the limits of self by challenging its capacity for response’ and thus offers a dif-ferent anatomy of intoxication defined by sluggishness rather than speed. Kennedy’s examination of ‘stuplimity’ in these texts extends our re-reading of intoxication within modernism as an experience of jarring dissonance and tension, as opposed to pure excess or immersion.

Alcohol also here operates as a palliative, deepening individual resistance to fast-moving consumer society. Anne-Lucile Gérardot considers a similarly dipsomaniacal writer in an essay that resonates with Kennedy’s contribution. Her work explores Marguerite Duras’s relationship with drink. Specifically, she strives towards a ‘cultural geography’ of alcohol in Duras’s work and explores the drunken experiences it evokes, demonstrating the complex and reciprocal relationship between booze, space and time.

A more deeply canonised approach to intoxication is here con-sidered by Alessandro Cabiati, who considers how Rimbaud’s avoca-tion of sensory disorientation, as noted above, is interrogated and practically applied in his creative work. More unconventionally, and taking a broader cultural focus, Cabiati extends his analysis to the work of rock performer Jim Morrison, most typically and notoriously celebrated for his Dionysian drink and drug excesses as lead singer of The Doors. Cabiati demonstrates the extent to which Rimbaud was a profound influence on Morrison and argues that the latter’s ‘poetic practice’ can be located in his fusion of life, music and writing, all distinctly inspired by the approach of his French forebear.

The systematic self-experimentation associated with Rimbaud and Morrison is also taken up in the contribution by Mike Jay, cultural historian and curator of the Wellcome Trust’s 2010 High Society exhibition that considered the roles of drugs and drug culture in soci-ety. Jay here argues that the nineteenth-century self-experimentation with cannabis by Jean-Jacques Moreau and his fellow members of the Club des Hashischins, including Baudelaire, has set a precedent for more recent counter-culture and avant-garde intoxicated inves-tigations. Subsequent self-intoxication as pseudo-experimentation has included the approach of Henri Michaux, here considered by Mathieu Perrot, who ingested mescaline in order to explore its influence on his painting and writing in what Perrot described as a blurring of scientific and artistic methods. Drawing on Michaux’s




Misérable Miracle (1972), Perrot describes such overlaps or chevauche-ments within his poetry and explores the specificity of this as a poetic concept in his work.

As this collection strives to think about unconventional, sometimes metaphysical, forms of intoxication, Eugene Brennan locates a strik-ing and unusual path to such states in the little-known poetry of Bataille. Known as a theorist and novelist, his poems have received scant critical attention. While his ‘general economy’ advocated festivals of excess, and the theme of drunkenness is omnipresent in Bataille’s fiction, his poetry points towards the intoxicating pos-sibilities afforded by abstinence and absence. Referring to the recur-ring theme of mourning and loss in his poetry, he illustrates tensions between conflicting conceptions of intoxication in Bataille’s work and criticises the nostalgic and outmoded forms of excess that sometimes emerge from Bataille’s austere, minimalist and anti-aesthetic poetry.

The analyses of intoxication in this collection are necessarily varied and sometimes even conflicting. This is in accordance with our insistence on a dialectical and reflexive approach to the subject matter. This volume offers a typology of intoxication that both challenges previous moralistic perspectives which either condemn intoxication or too readily separate it from addiction, as well as more pointedly challenging uncritically accepting celebrations of Dionysian excess. Any one examination has to consider the social backdrop in which it’s written, and the broader historical and politi-cal factors in addition to the stylistic specifics. These are all shape-shifting circumstances, hence any one analysis demands a degree of critical reflexivity. Our sensitivity to the shifting conceptions of intoxication and sobriety is thus informed by Walter Benjamin’s observation that ‘the dialectic of intoxication is indeed a curious thing. Maybe any kind of ecstasy in one world is shameful sobriety in the complementary world’ (Benjamin, 2009, p. 147).

Notes

1. For an elaboration on this point see Chapter 3.2. For a more thorough examination of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of

intoxication see Chapter 11.3. ‘Is characterised by its contradictory nature: it is equally an instrument

and a vector of exclusion aimed for or endured, self-extinction through banal bingeing and a route to divine transcendence, confusion of the



20 Introduction

senses and the spirit and supreme lucidity, outpouring and occupation, resolving itself in both immobility and movement’. Our translation.

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205

Index

Abstinence, 28–30, 189Addiction, 6, 15, 19, 34–5, 37, 40,

47, 108, 138, 154, 173, 178–80, 188, 189

and intoxication, 15, 19Alcohol, 26–35, 46–67

absinthe, 100–2and animal imagery, 29, 30and individual will, 31and space/time, 130–42beer, 44, 127, 135Campari, 130, 138drunkenness, 10, 18, 19, 25–7,

32, 47, 68, 77, 97–101, 106, 119–29

ether cocktails, 174manzanilla, 130, 138whisky, 124, 125, 134, 138,

140, 148wine, 7, 26, 27, 29–31, 33, 35, 53,

55–6, 99, 130–4, 160, 174Apollo, 2–5Aragon, Louis

Le Paysan de Paris (1926), 163–4, 176

Artaud, Antonin, 90, 110 Les Tarahumaras (1947),

81–2Assassins, 54

Badiou, Alain, 3–5, 14, 185Balzac, Honoré de, 56Barrière, Hélène, and Nathalie

Peyrebonne: L’Ivresse dans tous ses états (2004), 16

Barruel, Abbé: Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire du Jacobinisme (1797), 54

Barth, John: ‘A Few Words About Minimalism’, 121

Bataille, Georges, 7–10, 13and alcohol, 68, 77and Laure (Colette Peignot), 72and sacrifice, 67–68, 70–1, 75–8and torture, 70‘Douleur’, 69–71, 74‘Rire’, 75–6Inner Experience (1943), 72L’Érotisme (1957), 133, 137La Part maudite (19 49), 9–10 poetry, 67–79

Baudelaire, Charles, 1, 29, 32–3, 40, 47, 54, 56, 61, 99, 162–3, 166

‘Du Vin et du hachish’ (1851), 29–31, 56

Les Paradis artificiels (1860), 31–2, 56, 61, 106

Beckett, Samuel, 121–4, 127Beigbeder, Frédéric, 38–44

Nouvelles sous ecstasy (1999), 39–4199F (2000), 41–3Un Roman français (2009), 39–40

Benjamin, Walter, 1–2, 8, 19, 164, 170, 185, 192

Berardi, Franco: ‘Bifo’, 12–14, 168–9Berloiz, Hector, 61Biopolitics, 147–59, 167–70, 195–200Blanchot, Maurice, 1, 76, 163Breton, André, 111, 160

Nadja (1928), 8, 176Broissard, Fernand, 54, 56Buck, Paul, 69Buddhism, 93Burroughs, William, x–xi, 25, 188–9

The Naked Lunch (1959), x–xi, 191Butler, Judith, 151–2, 158Butler, Samuel, 90

Cale, John, ixCaillois, Roger, 7–8



206 Index

Capitalism, 5, 10–13, 71, 156, 161, 165, 194, 195, 199

Carlat, Dominique, 120Chen, Mel: Animacies: Biopolitics,

Racial Mattering and Queer Affect (2012), 152–3

Chtcheglov, Ivain, 164, 169Cixous, Hélène: ‘At Circe’s, or the

Self-Opener’, 129 (1)Clerc, Thomas, 45Club culture, 45, 192Club des Hashischins, 32, 40, 52–61Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 60College of Sociology, 7–8, 71Consumerism, 35–8, 40–1Crary, Jonathan: 24/7: Late

Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), 169

Cruickshank, Ruth, 133Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit

(CCRU), 190–4, 196–7

Davy, Humphry: experiments with nitrous oxide, 60

Dancing, 45–6Death and dying, 36, 67–78Debord, Guy, 108, 161–2, 165, 168

Commentaires sur la Société du Spectacle (1988), 181–2

Panégyrique (1989), 165, 177–8Delacroix, Eugène, 56Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 123, 138, 187–8,

198Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari,

10–12, 169, 191, 193–4, 199A Thousand Plateaus (1988),

11–12, 186, 188, 197Anti-Oedipus (1983), 187–9What is Philosophy? (1994), 190

Demosthenes, 26–7Dérive, 161–7, 176–7Derrida, Jacques

drugs as pharmakon, 186‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’, 6, 37, 185–6

Despentes, Virginie, 157Dickens, Charles, viii

Dionysus, 2–5, 25, 166drugs

and animal imagery, 84, 181and speed, acceleration, 87–8,

185–200and space, 89–92cocaine, 12, 38–44, 157, 188,

193–4, 195crack, 37–8ecstasy, 39–41hashish, 2, 29–32, 52–63, 81, 160,

175; and individual will, 31; and poetic insight, 31; use in Egypt, 57–8; medical use of, 58

heroin, ix–xLSD-25, 81, 90, 97, 108, 111–12,

187mescaline, 18, 82, 83, 85, 88–92,

175, 180, 183morphine, viiiopium, viii, 160, 187peyote, 82psilocybin, 81reading as a ‘drug’, 40speed, 195Testogel, 147, 150–4, 156–7

Ducasse, Isidore (Comte de Lautréamont), 163

Dumas, Alexandre, 32Le Comte de Monte-Christo (1844), 52

Duras, Marguerite, 130–42‘L’alcool’ (1987), 137La Danse de mort (1984), 134Dix Heures et demie du soir en été

(1960), 138–9Emily L. (1987), 134, 140Hiroshima mon Amour (1960),

135–6Les Impudents (1943), 130–2Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952),

139–40, 141Moderato Cantabile (1958), 133–4,

136, 137Dustan, Guillaume, 44–6, 148

Esquirol, Jean-Étienne Dominique, 57



Index 207

Fascism, 7–8Feher, Michel, 167–8Fisher, Mark, 192flâneur, 1, 162–3 Flaubert, Gustave

‘La Spirale’, 56Madame Bovary (1860), 36–8

Foucault, Michel, 158, 167–8, 187Fowlie, Wallace, 97, 107, 112Freedom, 41Freemasonry, 54Freud, Sigmund, 5–6, 82, 188

‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 73, 77–8

Gautier, Théophile, 32, 53–6Gibson, William: Idoru (1997),

196‘Gonzo’ journalism, 55Green, Henry: Back (1946), 123–6Grindon, Gavin, 162

Hallucinations, 54, 57, 59, 60, 83–6, 98, 101–2, 105–6, 113, 187, 189–90

Hammer-Purgstall, Chevalier Joseph von: History of the Assassins (1835), 55

Hamilton, Patrick: Slaves of Solitude (2006), 123

Head, Mick, xiiHormones, 147, 150, 151Houellebecq, Michel, 38, 46–8Hugo, Victor, 56Hussey, Andrew, 178, 179Huxley, Aldous: Doors of Perception

(1954), 82, 94 (4)

Isou, Isidore, 166Ivan, Gilles, 183

Jameson, Fredric, 43–5Jappe, Anselm, 166–7Jay, Mike, 32

High Society (2010), 29Jorn, Asger, 165–6, 170, 180

Joyce, James: Ulysees (1922), 120–1, 125

Kavan, Anna, xiKlossowski, Pierre, 8

Lacan, Jacques, 43–4, 199Laing, R. D., 187Land, Nick, 15, 75–6, 78, 190–5, 197Lazzarato, Maurizio, 168Leary, Timothy: The Politics of Ecstasy

(1998), 111–2Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 82Lefebvre, Henri, 183Lowry, Malcolm: Under the Volcano

(1947), 119–120Lovecraft, Howard Phillips, 197Lyotard, Jean-François: Libidinal

Economy (1974), 192, 194

Madness, 56–7, 59–61, 86, 89, 90–1, 93, 98–9, 182

schizophrenia, 11, 43–4, 181–2Malevitch, Kasimir: White on White

(1918), 14Mension, Jean-Michel: The Tribe

(2002), 165, 174–6Michaux, Henri, 81–94, 180, 190

and travel, 81Déplacements, dégagements (1985), 87L’Infini Turbulent (1957), 84Misérable Miracle (1972), 81–94

Miller, Henry, 11Modernism, 1–5, 14, 37, 113, 119–29Monomania, 57, 123Montaigne, Michel de: Essais (1588),

27–8Moreau de Tours, Jacques-Joseph,

18, 56–61Du Hachisch et l’Aliénation Mentale

(1845), 58experimentation with hashish,

58–60 Morrison, Jim, 97–8, 107–14

‘As I Look Back’, 107‘Celebration of the Lizard’, 109



208 Index

Morrison, Jim – continued‘The End’, 108–9The Lords: Notes on Vision (1970),

107Wilderness (1989), 111

Mourning, 67–78Muray, Philippe, 46–7Murphy, Steve, 100, 101, 113

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 9The Inoperative Community, 76–7

Nerval, Gérard de: Voyage en Orient (1851), 32, 56

Ngai, Sianne, 17, 121–5‘stuplimity’, 121–7

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1The Birth of Tragedy (1872), 3–4, 7

Noys, Benjamin, 10, 170The Persistence of the Negative

(2010), 121, 129 (3)

Paris, 27, 32–3, 35, 42, 44–5, 131, 165, 174–6

boulevard Saint Germain, 174hotel Pimodan, Île de St Louis, 54rue Galande, 175

Plant, Sadie: Writing on Drugs (1999), 15, 187, 193–4, 200 (2)

Poe, Edgar Allen: ‘The Man of the Crowd’, 162

Postmodernity, 43–4Preciado, Beatriz: Testo Junkie (2008),

147–50, 195–8Proust, Marcel, 126

À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), 135–6, 143 (7)

Psychogeography, 162–70

Quincy, Thomas de, viii, 60–1, 200 (1)

Rabelais, François, 26–7and Islam, 27

Rancière, Jacques: The Politics of Literature (2011), 129 (1)

Reed, Lou, ix–x

Rimbaud, Arthur, 97–107, 110–14, 129 (2), 162, 166

‘Âge d’or’, 102–4‘Barbare’, 105–6‘Comédie de la soif’, 101‘Délires II’, 101–2, 112dérèglement de tous les sens, 5,

13–14, 98–9, 101, 108, 112–13, 176

Derniers vers (1872), 101, 104Illuminations (1886), 104–5, 110‘Le Bateau ivre’, 99–101‘Matinée d’ivresse’, 99, 105–6, 113verbal alchemy, 101, 103–4, 112

Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 121–2, 123, 126, 127, 128

Ronell, Avital, 15, 37–8Roth, Marty: Drunk the Night Before

(2005), 15

Sacy, Silvestre de, 54Sagan, Françoise, 42Sansom, William: The Body (1949),

126–8Sex, 151, 157Situationist International (SI), 160–70,

173–83Southey, Robert, 60Stevens, Elizabeth, 157–8Surrealism, 8–10, 82, 92–3, 98, 111,

113, 160–6, 176Sweedler, Milo, 76

Temperance, 28–30, 189Trocchi, Alexander, 173, 179–83

Cain’s Book (1992), 180

Vaneigem, Raoul, 170, 176–7, 181Velvet Underground, The, ix–xVerlaine, Paul, 97, 162Voltaire, 26

Walton, Stuart, 15Wark, McKenzie, 166Weber, Max, 10Williams, Alex, 193



Index 209

Young, La Monte, ix

Zimmermann, Laurent, 26Žižek, Slavoj, 13

Zola, ÉmileL’Assommoir (1877), 32–7Le Roman expérimentale (1881), 32

Zupanc ic , Alenka, 4–5, 14



Documents

Copyrighted material 978 1 137 48765 0€¦ · the suddenly strange and defamiliarised sound of the Marseille dialect, as if it had become a barely discernible variant of French