crack wars

"Crack Wars. In an altogether uncanny manner, the polemics surrounding drugs historically became a War only when crack emerged. At this moment, drugs acquired the character of political question. Routinely associated with subversion, drugs, by means of crack, were escalated to the threat of revolution and a technological articulation of racial difference. Security was upped; civil liberties went down. Crack lost its specificity as merely one drug among others. As synecdoche of all drugs, crack illuminates an internal dimension of polemos – opening the apocalyptic horizon of the politics of drugs."

"where does addiction begin?"

"Edward Glover showed that anything could serve as a drug, and moreover Lacan was very explicit when he excluded drug addicts from the psychoanalytic scene, perhaps wrongly, given Freud's impressive though officially discarded texts on cocaine. But Glover showed that anything could serve as a drug, including, we could add, work, the "workaholic" syndrome, or athletic training, or piano practice, and anything that involves repetition, need, lack. I don't mean that a new characteristic of drugs as drugs is emerging - on the contrary, drugs respond to an internal appeal that is probably already present in all of us. One of my questions is: why are we equipped with receptors, as if built for drugs? In other words, we are all potentially subject to addiction, constructed as we are according to addictive qualities of attachment and need. What I find interesting are not only the abyssal nuances of desires, urges, or destructive jouissance, but also those of the seductiveness of technology and the often crushing ethos of work."

Madame Bovary

“Emma Bovary was apparently a grand self-medicator. Like others before her, she experienced the dangers of a belle ame: raptures that cut her off from reality, hallucinated plenitude and pure communication, a kind of hinge on transcendental telepathy. Everything she tried out – religion, reading, love rushes, getting dressed in the morning, had hallucinogenic, analgesic, stimulating, or euphorizing effects upon her. She would also experience tremendous crashes. The peak of drugs, as of love, was for her telepathy, a communication over distance….Shit was happening. God’s fundamental breakdown, His out-of-serviceness and withdrawal from the scene, meant she had to replace the emptiness with a symbolic authority. That’s when the panic set in, the emergencies that invaded the entire scene. Nothing else mattered; she needed her dose, and she started responding like an addict to the alarm signals proliferating around her, She didn’t care what she took.”