Deconstruction and Drugs: A Philosophical/Literary Cocktail

Abstract

Short-circuiting the exasperating detour of communication, or more generally suspending the pro-active expenditure of the will’s energy as it works to fuel its own consciousness, is the mark of an urge to a junkie-like descent into a silence which few people at some point in their lives wouldn’t admit to craving — if not at some point every day. But drugs and their effects are always a matter of the mix, the concoction or recipe, the purity and the impurities, as well as of the ‘set and setting’, as Leary and his coterie never tired of saying; and with street drugs, there is also the matter of all the unknown ingredients, the precipitates of amateur chemistry, or whatever was to hand to give bulk to the stuff as it changed hands on its way to market. It is such contingencies as these which determine whether drugs intoxicate, narcotize, energize, silence, make a person withdrawn and dreamy, talk their head off, suffer genital retraction or an inconsolable erection or just go plain crazy.

Nick had a deprecating little laugh that he used for punctuation. Sort of an apology for talking at all in the telepathizing world of the addict …

William Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p. 170

‘You’re feeling it, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah, I am actually.’

‘It’s quite impossible to describe, isn’t it?’ ‘Yeah, it is.’

Martin Amis, Dead Babies, p. 87

Sometimes ah think that people become junkies because they subconsciously crave a wee bit of silence.

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting, p. 7

He couldn’t tell at first but he was dancing like a maniac … they were all going crazy.

Irvine Welsh, Ecstasy, p. 27

No doubt we should have to make some distinction between … drugs, but this distinction is wiped out in the rhetoric of fantasy that is at the root of the interdiction: drugs, it is said, make one lose any sense of true reality.

Jacques Derrida, ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’, p. 236