Avital Ronell asks why there is no culture without drug culture.
She deals with the usual drugs and alcohol (and their celebrities:
Freud's cocaine, Baudelaire's hashish, the Victorians' laudanum),
and moves beyond them to addictions that are culturally
accepted--an insatiable appetite for romance novels, for instance,
and romance itself. or counterculture deeply saturated with drugs,
but such modern cultures needs subcultures, and need drugs on every
level. Culture defines itself, its classes, its power structures,
and its economy in terms of how it allows and encourages drugs to
circulate. If drugs are dangerous, that danger seems to increase
their appeal for millions. If drugs are unnatural and addictive,
gasoline is a drug. What is art but a kind of drug, and what is art
criticism but a kind of criticism of drugs and drug-induced states?
Avital Ronell asks why there is no culture without drug culture.
cocaine, Baudelaire's hashish, the Victorians' laudanum), and moves
beyond them to addictions that are culturally accepted--an
insatiable appetite for romance novels, for instance, and romance
itself. It is a commonplace of modern culture to presume that there
is a subculture or counterculture deeply saturated with drugs, but
such modern cultures need subcultures, and need drugs on every
level. Culture defines itself, its classes, its power structures,
and its economy in terms of how it allows and encourages drugs to
circulate. If drugs are dangerous, that danger seems to increase
their appeal for millions. If drugs are unnatural and addictive,
gasoline is a drug. What is art but a kind of drug, and what is art
criticism but a kind of criticism of drugs and drug-induced states?
Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary takes up the problems of drugs and
addiction in numerous ways, which Ronnell unpacks and presents as
examples of the safe and unsafe. From Emma Bovary's romantic
hallucinations to her suicide by arsenic, she moves through this
realistic novel constantly reaching for the unreal. For Ronell,
Emma Bovary
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