High Culture : Reflections on Addiction and Modernity

by Alexander, Anna; Roberts, Mark S.

• ISBN13: 9780791455531
• ISBN10: 079145553X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-01
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

This is the first comprehensive text to address addiction and its multiple effects on and extensions into art, literature, philosophy, and psychology. Most research into addiction has taken place within the disciplines of medicine, criminology, politics, and social psychology. When seen from a broad cultural perspective, however, addiction emerges directly alongside modernity, haunting its various discourses of digression, dissent, and the transcendence of the commonplace. Who could even imagine modern writing without the addictive, visionary excesses of writers like Baudelaire, DeQuincey, Poe, Burroughs, or Artaud? Or, for that matter, modern culture without its "outsiders, " its incorrigible addicts, its defaced subjects: smokers, users, overeaters, alcoholics, the insane?

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(18)
Anna Alexander
Mark S. Roberts
PART I. PHILOSOPHICAL AND LITERARY REFLECTIONS ON ADDICTION
The Rhetoric of Drugs	19	(26)
Jacques Derrida
Nietzsche's Dionysian High: Morphin' with Endorphins	45	(14)
David B. Allison
Ariadne's Thread: Walter Benjamin's Hashish Passages	59	(16)
Gary Shapiro
Profane Hallucinations: From The Arcades Project to the Surrealists	75	(20)
Alina Clej
Heidegger's Craving: Being-on-Schelling	95	(38)
David L. Clark
Trauma, Addiction, and Temporal Bulimia in Madame Bovary	133	(24)
Elissa Marder
Baudelaire, Artaud, and the Aesthetics of Intoxication	157	(16)
Allen S. Weiss
``Junk'' and the Other: Burroughs and Levinas on Drugs	173	(26)
Jeffrey T. Nealon
PART II. SOCIO-CULTURAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON ADDICTION
Socially Significant Drugs	199	(10)
Felix Guattari
Freud's Pharmacy: Cocaine and the Corporeal Unconscious	209	(24)
Anna Alexander
Schreber's Ecstasies, or Who Ever Listened to Daniel Paul?	233	(28)
Zvi Lothane
Smoke Screen: The Cultural Meaning of Women's Smoking	261	(18)
Lorraine Greaves
Love Junkies	279	(18)
Alphonso Lingis
Possession, Addiction, Fragmentation: Is a Healing Community Possible?	297	(12)
Bruce Wilshire
Gambling and Addiction	309	(30)
Jon Elster
Addicts Without Drugs: The Media Addiction	339	(16)
Mark S. Roberts
The Drug Addict in Absentia: Hidden Populations of Illicit Drug Users and the Gaze of Power	355	(22)
John Fitzgerald
Contributors	377	(4)
Index	381