Deconstruction and drugs
a philosophical/literary cocktail
pp. 44-63
in: Nicholas Royle (ed), Deconstructions, Berlin, Springer, 2000Abstract
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It is such contingencies as these which determine whether drugs intoxicate, narcotize, energize, silence, make a person withdrawn and dreamy, talk their head off, suffer genital retraction or an inconsolable erection or just go plain crazy.