Drug is the Love: Literature, Psychopharmacology, Psychoanalysis

SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature Charles Shepherdson, editor INHERITANCE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS EDITED BY Joel Goldbach and JamesA. Godley Sllff p,, (; :I Contents Cover image: Salvador Dali, "Morphology of Skull of Sigmund Freud" © Salvador Dali, Fundaci6 Gala-Salvador Dali, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016. Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2018 State University of New York All rights reserved Acknowledgments Printed in the United States of America Introduction: Inheritance in Psychoanalysis James A. Godley No p,ilftof thJs 1->oo'k m;11• be llS!l'ilor reproducedin any n11mntt whatsae\rer wlthout writtl!'D perrr.iisslon . Nopsrt of this book mny be.!>tured i.i'Iii retrieYlll$)'Stemor mlllsmltte:d in 11.i1y form or by any mea1lslncluoing elecil'onic,ekctro:;1:ailc;, magnetictape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the pri or NATURAL INHERITANCE permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY 1. www.sunypress.edu Production, Jenn Bennett Marketing, Michael Campochiaro vii Against Heredity: The Question of Causality in Psychoanalysis Samo Tomsic 2. Lacan with Evo-Devo? Lorenzo Chiesa 3. The Late Innate: Jean Laplanche, Jaak Panksepp, and the Distinction between Sexual Drives and Instincts Adrian Johnston 23 44 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goldbach, Joel, editor. \ Godley, James A., editor. Title: Inheritance in psychoanalysis / edited by Joel Goldbach and James A. Godley. Description: Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, [2018] \ Series: SUNY series, insinuations: philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature \ Includes bibliographical references 4. and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017004237 (print)\ LCCN 2017012794 (ebook) \ ISBN 9781438467894 (e-book) \ ISBN 9781438467870 (hardcover: alk. paper) 5i 85 Hegel's Mother Frank Ruda 5. Biopower in Lacan's Inheritance; or, From Foucault to Freud, via Deleuze, and Back to Marx A. Kiarina Kordela Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis. Classification: LCC BF173 (ebook) \ LCC BF173 .!464 2018 (print) \ DDC 150.19/5-dc23 109 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004237 CULTURAL INHERITANCE 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 6. 7. Drug Is the Love: Literature, Psychopharmacology, Psychoanalysis Justin Clemens Testament of the Revolution (Walter Benjamin) Rebecca Comay 137 HU CHAPTER 6 Drug Is the Love Literature, Psychopharmacology, Psychoanalysis Justin Clemens How does opium induce sleep? "By means of a faculty;' [... ] replies the doctor in Moliere [... ]. But answers like that belong in comedy. - Friedrich Nietzsche 1 The Current Dominance of Psychopharmacology in Mental Health Evflqi:body knows tha ,t the prognos is for ps)•choanalys.is today is dire. Perhaps not everybod y is as forthright as the English p:syqi.oll.!:l alyst Dar · ia11 Leader , who has famo usly announced t h.at psychoanalysts tod.ar are "mutants scavengi ng aftera nuclear holocaust."~Bur the consensus is patent. Moreover, the dia~ose.s of the h istorkal preconditiom for this sJtuation seem always to finger the satn.e malevolent culprits. Take Kate S.r.::hechter's recenun:thropo logy of Chicago analysts.,Illusionsof a Future.:.As Sdtech ter drtails, we live in a time in v.•hich the dream of tedmologkal .i;oJutions to mental d isorders dominates the govern.me-ntal-corporale -me dical pro - vision ofservice-s..hence the ubiquity ofpsychopharni ac-01og'ical treatments range of disorders, dispensed by a ran15eof state -ratified for an enoITI10Us medical officials (from general practitioners to high-end psychiatrists) and supported by a wide and powerful range of institutions (from private research bodies and universities to governments, the mass media, and Big Pharma itself). HS Chapter 6 Drug treatments are pragmatic, not exploratory, and biotechnical, not personal or sodo log:lcal;above all.they are directed at neutralizing sets of psychophysical symptoms, not towards illuminating and transforming analytic structures. So-called evidence-based medicine has trumped the qualitative narratives of psychotherapy; automated management tools have increasingly taken over the burden of diagnosis and prescription for the ever-shorter faceto-face sessions available to practitioners; and commandments issuing from the insurance industry more and more determine the micropractices of psychiatrists and psychologists. Given their clear and present supremacy in the treatment of all sorts of alleged disorders, the new-generation management strategies for mental illness have utterly overrun psychoanalytic methods of diagnosis, treatment, and theory. The latter now appear protracted, expensive, unstable, and untestable-if not downright noxious. It is certainly not the case that the domination of Big Pharma has gone unnoticed. On the one hand, there is a slew of popular books that itemize the effects of such domination upon economies, mental health provision, and individuals globally; on the other hand, there is a barrage of technical, institutional studies mapping the consequences. 4 As Emmanuel Stamatakis and his collaborators have announced, [t]o serve its interests, the industry masterfully influences evidence base production, evidence synthesis, understanding of harm issues, cost-effectiveness evaluations, clinical practice guidelines and healthcare professional education and also exerts direct influences on professional decisions and health consumers. There is an urgent need for regulation and other action towards redefining the mission of medicine towards a more objective and patient-, population- and society-benefit direction that is free from conflict of interests. 5 One can immediately see how this global domination of the pharmacological industry entails a new kind of total corruption, in which there is no significant countervailing agency able to produce counter effects. In sum, one can see how, since the 1950s, mental health has been reconceptualized as part of general health. As a consequence, mental health has been linked to economic productivity and, thus, to industrial and labor relations within a global frame. As part of general health, mental health can be subjected to the same sort of governmental attentiveness already familiar in, say, epidemiological affairs. Diagnoses are "manualized" according to dominant institutional taxonomies (for example, the Diagnosticand StatisticalManual of Mental Disorders,fifth edition [DSM-SJ), and technological innovations Drug Is the Love L39 (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging [fMRis]). Treatment is now predominantly pharmacological. Prognosis is linked to the ongoing management of symptoms, including the management of the so-called side effects of treatment itself. S0ren Kierkegaard once wrote that "[t]he more profound the anxiety, the more profound the culture;' and " [aJnxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not in necessity, but in itself' 6 This is not at all a popular opinion in either the official or unofficial worlds of mental health, in which vast investments require happy results. On the contrary-and this is itself a significant development- "anxiety and depressive disorders" (the two now often produced and confounded together) have become the contemporary targets of political, medical, and chemical interventions, that is, deleterious symptoms to be mitigated and monitored. That such a program of eradication may well help to spread the symptoms of anxiety and depression further and further afield is clearly no argument against it. As Mikkel Berch-Jacobsen noted over a decade ago, [a]dmittedly, SSRis [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors J sometimes lead to diminished libido and even, among men, to impotence, but that is surely a small price to pay for a restored capacity for happiness. Twenty million people worldwide are thought to be taking Prozac, and we are hearing reports of a new era of "cosmetic psychopharmacology;' in which drugs will be used to treat not only depression, but daily mood swings and existential angst. So farewell Kierkegaard and Heidegger.7 This is not even to mention the serious politico-scientific issues around prescription, testing, and governmental ratification. As Peter Kramer notes (surprise, surprise!), "drug companies manage the information about antidepressants, promulgating positive studies and suppressing evidence of harm or failure. [... ] It turns out that drug companies are shockingly inept at testing their own products."8 Yet, for Kramer, the paradox is that drugs may turn out to be even better than their manufacturers claim; moreover, such a situation puts paid to the old-style talk for good. We will return to Kramer shortly, as his own writings proved to be prominent propaganda for the emergent, personalized drug therapies of the 1990s and 2000s, and precisely as an assault against talking cures. I believe these transformations express the force of a desire. For my purposes here, I will reduce this desire to a formula: Thereshould be an end to 140 Chapter 6 talk. All of the features of contemporary psychological politics I have already elaborated bear integrally upon this desire. There is general agreement that "depressive" and, to a lesser extent, "anxiety" disorders are the greatest threats to personal and social well-being in the current dispensation of mental health; concomitantly, enormous resources are poured into the study and fabrication of "positive emotions" -happiness, for instance. There is general agreement that the most promising research into the causes and solutions for these disorders come from psychopharmacology and the neurosciences. There is general agreement that psychoanalysis and its offspring-including versions of family therapy-have little or nothing to contribute to either research or solutions. These features have a variety of consequences. In the new world of descriptive psychiatry, affects such as anxiety are at best symptoms of biochemical imbalances (genetic or physiological); they are neither irreducible affects nor guides toward truth and freedom but symptoms of the aforementioned imbalances or disorders, themselves now most likely biophysical, if not "genetic :' 9 If psychoanalysis was invented in an encounter with hysteria, and if problems of psychosis and perversion came to occupy psychoanalysis in the wake of its Freudian origins, psychoanalysts seem mainly at a loss to know how to situate themselves with respect to these new disorders. For reasons that will hopefully become clear, I want to reexamine this situation from a slightly unfamiliar angle, by way of a modern genealogy of drugs. This will involve examining the relation between psychoanalysis and drugs, a relation that is not merely contingent but rather goes directly to an issue that persists at the heart of psychoanalysis and its institutions . I will suggest that the present dispensation of drug therapies was established not by research chemists and pioneering doctors but in a literary register by William Shakespeare . Thereafter , the modality of drug therapies was forwarded in an aesthetic register by the great Romantic writers and in a governmental register by plumbers .10 The subsequent development of drug treatments undergoes four further major shifts. From its origins with Shakespeare, there is its subsequent extension by the Romantic litterateurs; drugs are then subjected to medico-moral scrutiny; thereafter , they are subjected to repres- sive stateapparatusesanda logic of e:>..'pulsion; and, finally.in oui:own limes, drugsare subjectedto admi:nistrativecontroland marketrestriction.a Having brie:{lysketchedthis gmcalogy,I will focus upon an influential populartext by Kramera.bouttherelati.om; between mental.health, ?"S}'Choanaly5is, and drugs in order to show now the uew regime of personal psychopharmacologywas accompaniedibyspecialist publicityexpressly:tlnwd agalostpsychoanalytictheoriesandpractice:.. In so doiilg,I will suggesthow Drug Is the Love 141 commonplace UJ1derstancUngs of the .relation be ew~n psychoanalysis and drugs fail to recognize certain.Cfl.lclalantagonistic complicities bc,twe-enpsychoanalysisand drug therapies. These solidarides also provide, as w~ shaU see, an unfamiliar angle from whichlo rebroach the ancie nt .squabblewithin psychoanalysisio. regards to its relation to science. J ,.,.illol'ferseveral prOJJositiorn;about this; relation, suggesting Lhat a particular concept of the place, an t to suggest that temporality, and powers ofJanguage is at stake. Finally,I \<,1 the "real enemy" of psychoat11a.lys ls-if this phrase has any sense- is not. the neurosdences or psych ophannacofogy per ~. but rather the expl'Opriati.on of language itself as an indepe nd ent force that underpiru, all of the preced ing conditions. Indeed, if psychoanalysis is to survive, it shouJd perhaps forge a compact with other treatments that sharl! the following fundamental ax!o.m: Languageis not simply'1 technology.As I will try to show, something troubling remains about psychoanalysis that cannot be dispensed with, even fur and by p ersons who are deeply against i:t.I..'.! Love's Drugs in Shakespeare and Freud A Midsummer Night's Dream opens with a tormenting imbroglio oflove and marriage . As the besotted Lysander declares to his paramour Hermia, whose father Egeus has promised her to Demetrius, Ay me , for aught that ever I could read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth . 13 Never did run smooth~A Midsummer Night'sD'tl?amhenceforth shuttJe5 and stutters between the town and the woods, betweenthe high- and lowborn, the naturaland supematural,the waking and the drearued,the reaJ and the pantomimed, and l:heking and the ass. Moreover,as Lysande:r 's own impassionedd.i.scourse suggests, the unquiet course offove is so deepJy bound t-01angnage's own counics and curses- for whkh stories oflm•e not onlyprovide the matter but also the form of story itself-that, at the Jimit, loveand languagethreaten to become coextmsive \'lith <meanother. Shakespeare was writing the comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the same time as the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, where we also finddespite the severe generic differences marked by the ancient names of "comedy" and "tragedy"-much ado about love. On the one hand, misfortune, multiple deaths, and other disasters befall all of the noble families in the 142 Chapter 6 Drug Is the Love play, through the escalations familiar to us from revenge drama: the Montagues lose Romeo and Montague's wife; the Capulets lose Juliet and Tybalt; and the Prince loses Mercutio and County Paris. What A Midsummer Night's Dream had comically figured in its Ovidian transmogrifications and in its 0 playawithin-a-p]a.y- as Theseus advist!sBottom, Never .excuse; for when the players arc all dead , there need none to be blamed""- Romeoand Jidfet p,resents as a real triple death ln the family crypt. On the other hand, the play hinges upan what is essentiallya comedy of misrecogniiion Md ends with recondliat.io n . The Montagucs and Capulecs offer each other their hands, while golden ~tatue-Sof the "'star-crossecf' lovers are erectod as a memorial and compact. The civil rift in the city is healed. For Sigmund Freud, precisely along the lines established by Shakespeare, psychoanalysis is a theory and treatment of the constitutionally ambivalent vicissitudes of love, in and by love itself. Above all, psychoanalysis considers love as the primal operator of inheritance and inheritability, a course that can never run smoothly. Just as for Shakespeare, love in psychoanalysis must pass through wild contingencies, prohibitions, misrecognitions, repetitions, and dissimulations as a matter of course. Love binds the most intimate affects to affairs of state. Love is a vital disorder that, reciprocally, inscribes and inspires personal and political disorder. Love's work is at once the passage and the impasse. This situation is especially clear in Freud's writings on technique, where the transference is expressly identified with the work oflove in the practiceof psychoanalysis. Moreover, as Freud underlines, transference-love acquires a notably puzzling character. "Firstly;' Freud notes, we do not understand why transference is so much more intense with neurotic subjects in analysis than it is with other such people who are not being analysed; and secondly, it remains a puzzle why in analysis transference emerges as the most poweiful resistanceto the treatment, whereas outside analysis it must be regarded as the vehicle of cure and the condition of success. 15 I would like to underline not only the remarkable intensity and resistance that Freud assigns to love in the clinicalmoment of psychoanalysis but also the fact that, in being condemned to such struggle, the course of psychoanalysis must never run smoothly. Why not? Because Obertragungor transference in psychoanalysis at once constitutes a repetition, an analysis, and a detournement of the paradoxes of inheritance. The famous Oedipus complex is only a synecdoche of l43 these paradoxes. Each person is formed by infantile experiences, of which they are thereafter the inheritors. The infantile experiences are themselves destined by a kind of eternal struggle upon two fronts, between the claims of biology, on the one hand, and the social, on the other, each of which is fur- ther $plit Regarding the biologjcaJ,we :nod a kind of developmental slnguJa.ntydividedbetween the use of an oi-ganand the survivalof the organism in which tb.einfant~.experienceof its own organsis inhe1'eotlysplit between pk-asureand necessity.Thepleasureof suckinga nipple,fo.rexample,which providesthe neonate with its vital nutrition,,is also inherentlylinke<Iwith the pleasureof suckingper se. Regardingthe soda!, we fiud a.kind of.ethical dress.ageboond to the spe~M'1c:ity of the infant'sfamilial.site, wherebyth.e corillk.tingpressuresof the carers'oo1.rn sexual,f-an1ilial, , and socialpositions come to be directedtowardsLhechild,wherethey are takenup accordingto ,a rangeof symptomaHcmodaliti1?£ . lhe vital riftbetweenorganandorgan_1srn . pleasure'and survivaJ,.is doubled and compounded bya rift between the orianjsm and its contingent situation. between thc-individual and Its education. As Freud consistently notes, the structural frustrations of this situation are supplemented by hallucinated wish fulfillments that become the fundamental elements of fantasy. Finally, the individual "adult" finds itself caught up in, and as the aftereffects of, this double distress, according to the logic of deferred action. It is this triple deadlock of inheritance-subsistence through a pleasure that constantly tropes away from survival, the enforced inculcation of actions through mimetic antithesis, and the achronia of the aftershockthat transferenceat once exemplifiesand repeats. Freudcanbe exceptionally dear upon the matter, particula.dywhen discussingtechmque.Transfere nce revivifiesa s.equenceof earlieridentincatioruand cathe.l[esin the-analysand (an d in the analyst, too, under .s.omedescriptions!), which, though o~ssar ilyunknown to the analysandand,.despitebeingpatentlyprepost.eromrontex.rually, are non~t:hclessdesperatelypumpoo out by the publishlog hous.E: of the unc:o.nsdousas facsirn:ilesof v:rryinglyreliable quality.1~ The me:ta~ phor of the facsimileor reedltlonis, freucl'sown and implie.i:,among other things,that the tmQonsciousdoes everythingnot to stop not :readingwhat it sees fit to print.r,Ther.e ls no news but old news fo:rthe unconsciouswhich does not read its own work. One inherits as and through the failures of inheritance. The emphasis upon transference as an instrument and the exposition of the constitutional failures of multiplying inheritances should alert us to the fact that psychoanalysis is first and foremost an ethics,in a very ancient sense of the word. It is not just a theory of human behavior and motivations Chapter 6 but an ethical modality in and for which theory and practice are indi ssociable. And one of the many crucial features that separate psychoanalysis from its ancient philosophical and cultic forebears is that, in concert with its postscientific status, it integrally acknowledges its own rebarbative and unwelcome nature . This is true to the extent that Freud will end by having to admit that psychoanalysis is, strictly speaking, impossible .18 In so doing, psychoanalysis emerges as a new kind of i.nstilution, that is, as a form. of organization that binds economy, practice, theory, training, and transmission under the rubric of impossibility. It is necessary to note here that it is no coincidence that Shakespearewhose plays Freud of course cites and analyzes often and enthusiastically-is also strictly contemporary with the emergence of the epoch of modern science . Even if one fails to believe that Francis Bacon is the author of Shakespeare's plays, and even if one takes Shakespeare's probable ignorance of the emergent new sciences seriously, one has to take the contemporaneity of Shakespearean theatre and Galilean science seriously. Indeed, one might also note the determining roles that friars, apothe caries, and their fabular counterparts, spirits such as Puck and Ariel, play throughout Shakespeare's work as the often-unwilling agents of the crossed subroutines of narrative fate. The "distilling liquor" 19 that simulates death and the magical ointment that induces transspecies desire-whatever their characterological, thematic, and technical differences-share at least three crucial features in the current context . First, as redirectorsof affect,they incarnate the irreducible ambivalence of the pharmakon, the poison-cure, at once quotidian and spiritual powers, simulators and real dealers of death. 20 Second, as generic devices,they are necessary conditions and operators that broach and break the theatrical narratives themselves . They open and reroute narrative and, thus, the temporality of narrative as such. Third , drugs and love are intricated yet antithetical powers, opposed upon the grounds of the will. Whereas drugs in Shakespeare already amount to an attempt at the technical seizure of affect by individuated will-which might have quite varied comedic or tragic effects-love is what objects to such a seizure. If drugs immediately and artificially shut down the claims of inheritance , love opens a space wherein inheritance and individuation duke it out at the limits of both. It is for such reasons that the suggestively paradoxical terms of the cross, crossroads , and crossing-the cross as simultaneously torture device and emblem of salvation , the crossroads as a place of decision and destiny, and the crossing as the fateful encounter of the heterogeneous-are regularly belabored by both Shakespeare and Freud alike. Aside from Romeo and Juliet's celebrated "star-crossed lovers;'21 we find Hermia responding to Lysander: Drug Is th e Love 145 If then true lovers have been ever crossed , It stands as an edict in destiny. Then let us teach our trial patience, Because it is a customary cross, As due to love as thoughts, and dreams, and sighs, Wishes, and tears, poor fancy's followers.22 One can see how tempting it might be, following Harold Bloom, to take psychoanalysis as an immense and detailed gloss upon Shakespeare's plays, even if Freud himself would perhaps have preferred to advert to a distinguished philosophical inheritance for his theses. 23 As Freud famously writes in the preface to the fourth edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, "as for the 'stretching' of the con cept of sexuality which has been nece~sitatcd by the analysis of children and what are called perverts , anyone who looks down with contempt upon psycho-analysis from a superior vantage-point should remember how closely the eul.argedse..'l:uali.ty of psycho-analysis 4 coincides with the Eros of the divlne Plato:>1 Psyc.hoanafysi:s,i:11other words, authors the Symposium of scientific modernity. But perhaps the "superior vantage-point " of which Freud speaks here should best be considered the rim of a volcano, given that he would later invoke the pre-Socratic Empedocles as another august forefather . In ''.Analysis Terminable and Interminable ;' Freud writ es that "[t]he two fundamental principles of Empedocles-cp1Ma and vt:fxo<;-are,both in name and function, the same as our two primal instincts , Eros and destructiveness,the fust of whi ch endeavou.r£to combine what exists into c~er greater uniti.es, while the second endeavours to dissolve those combinations and to destroy the structures to which they have given rise:' 25 Yet, as Freud ambiguously notes, "we should be tempted to maintain that the two are identical, if it were n ot for th~ difference.that lhe Greek philosophe r's theory is a co~mk phantasy while ours is content to claim biological vaJidity:Dl.<'i Of course, the difference loses "n1uchof its impartanc-e'.,insofar as those principles can uow be regromidcdbiologkally.Nonetheless,what breaksthe c.ontirmity with the ancie n ts .b the verypractice of modern science- Copernican . Galilean, Baconian,to advertto the standardrefercnce$ - to whichFreud him.self was expressly committed. I have argued elsewhere that psychoanalysis is an antiphilosophy insofar as it emerges by injecting poetic elements into science. 27 I do not wish to further rehearse my arguments here, except insofar as they bear upon the thematic of transference as an expression-treatment for the deadlocks of inheritance . In this context, this requires revisiting the changing relationship 146 Chapter6 Drug Is the Love between drugs and love in modernity in order to show how psychoanalysis at once conforms to certain of this episteme's ground-features as it attempts to depart from them -or, at least, to leverage them against itself. Drug Archaeologies of the Modern Episteme Let me now suggest that there are five key dispensations of drugs in the modem episteme. 28 I will denominate these as follows: (1) theatrical monstrosity, (2) romantic imperialism, (3) medico-moralizing, (4) legislativerepressive, and (5) administrative decriminalization. Each of these dispensations is marked by particular internal antagonisms, which condition the production, distribution, and uses of "drugs"; these antagonisms are not simply neutralized or supplanted in the shift to the next dispensation but continue to actively interfere with one another. However, despite its integral (if complex) relations with theatrical monstros ity, certain Romantic tropes, modem science, and modern forms of governmentality, psychoanalysis itself moves transversally to the logics of these dispensations. If I begin by summarizing what I see as the essential characteristics of these dispensations, it is ultimately to show how psychoanalysis fails to conform to the dominant modi operandi. 1. Theatrical Monstrosity. I have already noted this phenomenon above with regard to Shakespeare. The key point is that love and drugs are there understood as metastable generic elements bound together in their role of affect redirectors yet opposed according to their relations to volition. If drugs, as technologies of will, essay to short-circuit the powers of inheritance, love takes the latter to their limits. 2. Romantic Imperialism. Often themselves explicitly drawing from the genius of Shakespeare, Romantic litterateurs set the stage for all subsequent 29 re-visionings of the relation between drugs and the human sensorium. Writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Love Beddoes, and, above all, Thomas de Quincey invent the still-contemporary image of the addict as an ambivalent hero of subjectivity. Associated with one of the first recognizable modern drug subcultures, the "Pneumatic Drug Institute;' which included the scientist Sir Humphry Davy among its members, these writers take drugs for a number of interconnected reasons: (1) fun, (2) medical complaints, (3) subjective experimentation, (4) political motivations, and (5) ontological-metaphysical enthusiasm. In their experiments with drugs, these writers generate a number of tropes around drug use that remain active today. Drugs are at once a source of what Walter Benjamin would 0 147 later call ~profaneill:ru:n.i.11ation~ and addiction, that ls, a pure reduction to transarti:ficial biophysical necessity.Drugs. set their subject 1nmotion; tm,r.airds the border~of social.space. whe.rethe drug-subjects,viii e-ncoui-1ter, Io lin1inaland degr-J.ded zonc.s, other unacceptablefigures(prostitutes,the destitute, petty c:riminals,and so on).30 Onttiexisting theologicaJdiscourses of sin, these writersgtaft the extreme consumptionof psychofogicallyand physicallrd,erangingoommodities.1 1 Drugs are no.t,it must be remembered.ill.egalatthis hi:s,torical mon1ent~ their circulation is .not restricted by the i.'tate . Nor are they m any way immoral.On the contrary;ihey are quotidian,wtd~y availab]e, and entirely acceptablecorumodities.As Victoria Berridge and GriffithEdward5point out in their classic text Opiumand the Reopk, using a phrase that is now somewhatcommonplace,iu the ninete--enth centltr}\ religionwas not, as Kad Marx suggested, ''the opium of the people":qOpium it~elf was the 'opiateo the people:"'l This iiumediate:lypoints us tm!/'ards an apparent pamdr:»:: in theliterature: to what is one confossingwhenorie confessesto taking drug.s? If de Qaiioceyi~ addictedto drugs.it is-ru:it simplyas a dekteriousphyskal are produc~.das a compulsionbut as ~ incitement to discourse.N.m-atiw~s rupturewith dm_gs., wfthout 11:!ve:r ab.solutdydepartingtheir ambit, For theRom.antlq,drugs are technologies that undermine their own therapeutic oases, while languageis a technologythal permits thetr:msmi.ss ion of this fiillu.re , At the same time, howc\ ru , both drugsand languageart in ex:cessof technology lo the extenl that they areassoci.ated with noniostrumentaland, thus, metaphysically interesting-activities. In the terms that the Romantics themselves forged, it seems that inventive uses oflanguage become a treatment-and not simply a cure-for drug addiction. The Romantic addict unveils an immanent toxicity of the will, the will itself as a rapacious drive to toxicity.33 Moreover, from the Romantics to the present day, such writers are obsessed with drugs as somehow providing the truth of the social body. That this is done in a literary fashion is paramount. The antihero in narratives of addiction is integrally a figure that short-circuits medical and literary genres. 34 Not only does the Freudian unconscious find itself prefigured by Romantic writers, but so too does the death drive, in both its dominant acceptations as destructive aggression and pure repetition automatism. That this happens upon the terrain of drugs is, as we shall see, particularly significant. It should also be remembered that opiate products are widely available because of European imperialism. Britain fought two opium wars with China, making Queen Victoria the most powerful drug baron of the nineteenth century.35 And this imperial expansion returns as a question of nation 14-$ Chapter 6 within narratives of drug abuse-de Quincey's title is, after all, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. 36 But there is another point to be made here concerning the problem of contagion. Early nineteenth-century Europe was periodically ravaged by such highly infectious diseases as typhoid, smallpox, 37 and cholera, which "were almost entirely traceable to bad sanitation:' Barbara Hodgson, the author of a bo.ok on opium, h.ts r-emarkedthat . when she was going tlwough newspaper objtuarles in the 1820sand 1830s,she found, 1 among all the cholera deaths, a scattering of deaths attributed to opin111use. ' Opium, in other words, "Na& literally holding early nineteenth-century Westm Europe's.shit together; If political th.t.mrlstsoften continue to speak of the ~:sodal cantrac?' and the "social.bond," one would luive to say that the real bonding technology of European societies of the late eighteenth to the midnineteenth centuries is opium. The drug is the bond-but also the rupture of the bond. As Jacques Derrida puts it, in a perhaps surprising allusion to Jacques Lacan, "you might even say that the act of drug use itself is structured like a language and so could not be purely private:' 39 Or, as de Quincey puts it in a deidealizing note, "[i]n the whole system of houses, to which this house is attached, there exists but one Temp/um Cloacinae. Now imagine the fiend driving a man thither thro' 8 and 10 hours successively.Such a man becomes himself a public nuisance, and is in some danger of being removed by assassination:'40 Drugs are liable to create a public social nuisance, even in the most private, biological functions of life. As such, they do not merely open onto transcendence but also parasitize the subject, who is thereby revealed as the voiding effect of primordial, meaningless, and physiological repetitions. This exemplarily Romantic relation to addiction (and shit) provides a useful transition to our second dispensation, which, against the dark revelations of the Romantics, aims at cleanliness, order, and sanity. 3. Medico-moral. The isolation of the figure of the addict by the Romantics renders it susceptible to immediate recodification by discursive regimes with very different political agendas. The major interlocking developments include the following: (1) a new dominance of urban planning, especially s.,ewage.foI which Baron Haussman's rebuilding of Paris is -emblematic.; 41 (2) the transformation of dye companies into chemical companies; (3) the rise of so-called social purity movements in modern European democracies;42(4) the development of modern scientific specializations, notably organic chemistry; 43 (5) a new bond between medical professionals and the state;44 and (6) developments in medical technologies, such as the hypodermic method. Rather than Romantic writers, it was plumbers such as Thomas Crapper who opened the possibilities. 45 If the early nineteenth century had seen the first isolation of active substances (in 1806 Friedrich Serti.irner Drug Is the Love l.119 isolated morphium from opium, an event that was followed by the isolation of emetine, strychnine, codeine, caffeine, atropine, quinine, and so on), it was not until after mid-century that synthesizing really began to get underway, including, for example, the synthesis of heroin at St. Mary's hospital in London in 1870. This is the era in which addiction is crystallized as a viable medical category. One immediately sees the relation to Michel Foucault's "history of 46 sexuality:' On the other hand, and unlike sexuality, addiction arises out of nowhere, so to speak. Unlike sexual acts, which had always been policed in one way or another, and have always been the subject of possible socialeven sovereign-intervention, drug taking has never been subject to the law in the same way, and the addict "himself" is hardly susceptible to the same sort of scientific etiologies as those of supposed sexual deviants. Rather than a pervert of nature, as it were, the addict is considered to be in direct rela tioo to technology, a synthetic production, .and not ,ecyro,hl prindpJe, ~oa as a med"natural~ being. Theaddict_isa pervertof technology.·:l\ddiction," jcal category,js directlygeneratedom of state.restrictions:Lfponcommodity availability, industrial. synthesis,and controlof contagionsbyoroananewal. . LegisJativtt-Repres~fve. lt wasnot until the 1860sfn EnglandI.hatopium was restricted,and it was not until much laterthat drugs were bannedanywh.e:re .~7 The Pure Food and Dmg Act of 1906 in the United Staresonly restrictedthe importationof coca Jeavesandrequiredall medidne..sconralning cocaine or opium to be properly labeled. Indeed, into the twentieth century,one could still h11yfancymorphine injectingkits at majordepartment m11.de greal gifts: Gakrfe-s stores woddwicle.Theywould have presu111ably Lafayettemight have even wrappedtheln for you, Significrunly,the United States1ed'thewa}';,moving to rendercocaineillegal, beforerapklly progressing on to ak.ohoJ,n:iarijuaoa,and opiates in subsequentdecades-,Manyof the playerswe haw. alreadyenco11ntewj played a dete:rmining role in this shift: moral campaigners,Litemedical profe.ssion{which became the only legal traderin drug-li in the modern state), organizedcrime rm~ , and,above all, !awenforcementageoctes.ln thi...diiipensatinn , drugswere crlmirntlized, and unauthorizedusers were to be dealtwithb}r whM:lollis Althussercalled police, cot.1.rts, and prisOJJs .48 The twenrepFessiv:e stateapparatuses (RSAsJ: tieth centurywas mm;dyQrgan.ized by :anaccordbetween medicaland Iegal fn. whicl1drug-S wereillegal,addictswere side and arms of governmenta.l.it:y. perverted, and the only people who stood up for drug takers were radical literary types. 5. Administrative Control. We are today at the limit of the sequence that I have suggested begins with Shakespeare, having reached a limit in the 150 Chapter 6 aims, methods, and institutions that take mental healch as their object. This shift has been underv.,aysince the 1950s.David H~y h as denominated chis period ~the psychopharmaco logical era";~ it has witnes"Sedunprecedented .investment in the developmentc;,ftechnologies , exemplartly chemical techn ologics (but also itnagiog tnnovatioos, st1cba,sfMRI), for the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders . Ihe psyc;:bo_pharmaco logical era. in short, names the emergence of a new alliance between multinational chemical companies, research scientists. and the stale in an attempt to manage the competing exigen cies oflate capitalist profitability , scientific lcnm~•ledge, and the governmental control of vast populations. Listening to Prozac Accompanying this shift has been a concomitant underplaying of the role of "talking cures" -emblematically, psychoanalysis-as legitimate, useful methods of mental health. The triumph of psychopharmacology seems to have been sealed in the 1990s with the extraordinary international public enthusiasm for Prozac. Prozac and the new, "clean'' generation of SSRls, despite their well-known drawbacks (for example , sexual dysfunction, statistically significant rates of suicide. evidence th.at 'they are no t, in the final analysis, more effective than psychotherapies, and so on), indicate that "anhe donia:' for instance, may be the mere consequence of a serotonin imbalance and nothing to do with dysfunctions in infantile relations with the mother. If one refers to such texts as Kramer's massive bestseller Listeningto Prozac, one discovers that Prozac reveals there is not a single aspect of experience chat can or should be e."\'.empteo from technological mrunpulation. It is crucial that the dlagnoses of this new di,spensatio1;1 are very different from those of previous eras. On tlJ.eone han d , we find a L'a.XQllOmlcescalation of t:hose capacious grab bags of "anrlcty aud depressive disorders" I have invoked above; on the other hand . we find an extraordinary proliferation of a.thou sand tiny mental disorders (as evide nced by the ever-exp.m.dinggenerations of the DSM). Moreover, and according to the besl authorities, sti.Uno one is certain why these:d11.1~work- or, more accurately, fail to work. pharmac.euAt exactly the same moment officially ratified big busines--s ticalsare proposed as the magic bullet that v.rillfinally put the werewolf of mental disorders to rest, an unforgiving public ~'ar is underway to ob,li:te:r:a.te the purveyors of these drugs.outside the realm of daylight markets. The two great metaphors that regulate tlus tropology are those of epidt:mic and war, organizi ng l'wo ine<locible but indi1sociable registers of cultural respo n se. Drug Is the Love lSI Such drugs-heroin, cocaine, crack, meth, and so on-are, like terrorism, persistently figured as proliferating virally, integrally threatening the integrity of the social body, against which an unforgiving and endless "war" is allegedly the only possible response. That this rhetoric is at once contradictory and coherent should come as no surprise. Why listen when you can simply dispense? Daily papers are filled with articles about medical drugs, with headlines such as "Doctors 'Forced' to Overprescribe Antidepressants:' ''.Antidepressants Seen as Effective for Ado; lescents:' and "Large Study on Mental Illness Finds Global Prevalence:' 50 It is with this context in mind that I want to reexamine Kramer's massive bestseller Listeningto Prozac.I take this book at once as part of a concerted propaganda program on the part of Big Pharma and as a symptom of the abiding difficulty of psychoanalysis (in both subjective and objective senses of the genitive). Note how Kramer's title attempts to reconfigure the distinction between listening and dispensingin favor of dispensing: Prozac is a wonder drug precisely because it is the drug that overcomes the very distinction-to the point that one now listens to it as if it were the true subject of depression. 51 As Kramer puts it in the conclusion to the book, [h]aving seen people not unlike ourselves respond to medicine, we experience angst and melancholy differently-our own and others'. Perhaps whatCamus' Stranger suffered-his anhedonia, his sense of anomie-was a disorder of serotonin . Kierkegaard's fear and trembling and sickness unto death are at once spiritually significant and phenomenologically unremarkable, quite ordinary spectrum traits of mammals, affects whose interpretation in metaphysical terms is wholly arbitrary.52 This is an extraordinary statement, one that it is almost worth reading closely for its significant rhetorical moves. "Having seen people" -the visual metaphor is not just another metaphor in this context. After all, the book is called Listening to Prozac, and so the fact that this grand finale makes an unexpected swerve towards the regime of the visible should strike us as at least a lit'tle odd Next, "nol unlike''-a syntagm of indetinlte re-semblanc which seetn5di:fticultto pin down. In ,,;hat ,,raysare they not unlike. cXactzy , Sillce,after all, Kram.eris a psychiatrist and his patie nts are not?'Are they all middle class? All sick~All basicallydecent human beings.?Actually.it turns out that tlus not unlikeness i~more a question .of personality, Kramer (nates it directly: They are not unlike ~ourselves."Ag.ain, who?He has moved out of 151 Chapter 6 Drug Is the Love the first-person voice of his account to include the innumerable, nameless readers in his warm and capacious embrace. The circularity of this rhetoric cannot be overlooked. For example, if psychoanalysis means anything, it is that we cannot recognize ourselves , and that such an affirmation of not unlikeness must therefore be the index of a fantasy, an illusion, rather than a firm evtdentiary basts for knowledge. Leaving psychoanalysis aside, what are ou.cvisions of others nol unlike ours.elves actually m~ant to be of, according to Kramei:? We- who, agai.n?have seen them "respond" to "medicine}' 1n the bcgln_ning was the magic bullet. That is, the very responsiveness of others to drugs shows us that their "being' ' is a contlngen.cy that can and, indeed, should ht rectified in the most e:ffident ways possible. What Pi;ozac teaches U,!i-and Kramer's is in.deedan cthko -pedagogical trac~ as well as a superbly successful marketing c.xercise-Is that there is not a single aspect of our lives that we should confrom medical e._xpertise and pharmacologica1 int ervention. I: sider e._xcmpt Im.manud Kant's thumbnail form ula for morality was You can be"1use yau nnist!the ethi1."alimperative of our ,era ha~become We rmJStbecausewe can For KrameT,th~ other is a mirror of the self and Prozac is its Mr. Sheeo.~3 l t is all lhe more interesting that Kramer then invokesliterary and philo- sophic-al models as his targets.Thi.s rsintere.,;tingfor al I.castthree reasons. First of all. Kramer himself began his training as a wannabe littemtus, befriending I.ion.clTrilling (one of the greatest American literary critics of his generation), as we.I!as writing short stories and crltidsm. Second, Kramer does not mention psychoanalysis,,du.ch,given the context, would have to be the real target of bis critiq ues. Literature and phJlosophy are thus stand ~ins for the re:a.lenemy. That.they can be so suggests,finally,that contemporary tedmicll and accompanying ldeol<,>gies of sdentism take it as absolutely necessary to proclaim that these older therapeutic practices have neither epistem ological traction nor psychological effectivityin the brave new world of chemicaltreatments (yes, a literary allusion , to the d.rug~popping Aldous Huxley). Rather than "experlenc[ing] angst and mclan .choly diffa.rently" after me'dlta.ting,ipon Albe:rtCamus~ literary figures, we nov.• do so after watching others responding to drugs. What humans say is corralled here at the level of mere spiritual significance-having oothiag whatsoevt1rto do with the brute, physicochemical fact of a determining biological substrate. Reading itself-or the affects and thoughts generated by listening to others-has somehow become just a reflex of "quite ordinary spectrum traits of mammals;' and the most intense affects can therefore supposedly be interpreted only in "wholly arbitrary" terms. At base, contemporary drug therapies p:resent tht! very possibility of divergent interpretatfrms as a nonscientific 153 phenomenon, simultaneously presenting themselves as absolutes.That new "generations" of drugs are already being packaged seems not to vitiate each new drug's absolutescientific, materialist basis. But what if that is precisely the point? Th,at a mammal can and would make a specific a1fectan index of divinity, and then make that very attribution, in all its arbitrariness, count fur other mammals of the same:sp-e· c1esin an Unexpected, unp recedented way, should suggest that the putatlve respoo siv-enessof such minds to cl.rugsjs a direct attack upon what used to be called imagination, nanie.ly;lht abiUtyto synthesi7,ethe diversil,' o experience fnto an unprect:dented fom1. one that has in no way been given with the given.~ Rather than peopJe not responding t-0Jlter.uure and phi Josophy, the problem for Krru:ner is that they do not respond in the right way1 dlat is, they (madly)n..fusethe work-ready functiooa1Hy(not to mention happiness) that he , as a doctor, ha ~ to offer them in the form of an authorized representativ-c of a global, pharm,acc:utlc:aJcorporation. How dare th~)r! One might wonder whether Kramers phr ase Kw-holly arbi,tn1r-y " betrays a certain anxiety: If he had Just Written "ai.'bitrary,~would we susarbitrary pect that that n1eant "just a bit arbitrary," "not really arbitrary," or M in a specific way that is not ~ctually arbitrary"? many case, it is krdevant: Drugs will sol\.ethe problem of aUof our intc:rpreta tive diffe.nmdsby quash~ fng the conflict of our inheritances. For the Love ofTechnology ThekettJe logics at work in the formations rhav:t e.>;:amined upon th.epolitlcosde ntitic status of psydiopharmacology express the force of a desire. This desire is that the1·ebt! an end to talk. As 1 have outlined, there are several conn ected features of •contemporary psychoJogicaJ politics thru:bear i.nte$fallyup-oll this desire. First, there is a general agreemt.nt that ':clcpressiv;e" and. to a lesser enent, ~anxiety"c:Us.orders are the greatest th;reatsto personal and social well-being in the current di,spensarioriof mental h,ealth. Second, there ls a general agreement -i:hatthe most promi5ing research into t:hecauses and solutions for these disorders come from psychophannaco logy and the ill'UroSciences.Thinf,there.is a general agreement that psychoanal;.rsisand its o:ffspring- induding versioru. of family therapy-have Jinle or nothing ro coutribute to either research or solutions. As Bernard Stiegle.rfrequently argues, part of the problem for the global p1-esen1is that it is a regime of ~psychopower:• which "conltol.$the individual and colle.c:tivebehaviour o; c.onsumers by channeling their libidinal energy toward commodities.''» Y,et, L Chapter 6 Drug Is the Love something troubling remains about psychoanalysis that cannot simply be dispensedv,'ith,even for and by sden,tists who are deeplyagainst it. One of the notev.'Otthry features of contemporarypsychoanalysisis that, to the extent thatit survives at all, it has b,ecomewhatLa.cancaI1ed a uunlversttydiscnurse,''~ an.dnot just .in the particular structuralsense Laai.ndescribes,but In the empiricaland sociological sense of a predominantly humanities discourse. Tbis makes psychoanalysisa question of a teachingof the i.nheritan.c--e of psychoanalysisthatis a!rnost entirelyseparatedfrom its practice-t hat is, counter to its origins as a practica1psychology-whic h therebyrenderspsychoanalysisa bundle of doctrines and authorities that can be compared an d contrasted with others., rather than the practice of an urgency of addr ess towards the symptoms of desire, Yet, this separation and diminution also allows something essential to emerge about psychoanalysis that its practical aspect tended to occlude, namely, the properly poetic nature of its intervention into a properly scientific frame. Psychoanalysis is an antiphilosophy insofar as it interrupts science by literature in order to create a techne-that-is-not-one. This techne is transference-love; it is arrayed against physiochemical reduction; it requires a trial of inheritances, in which the singular deadlocks of a subject's coming-to-be are revivified in a temporally extended and affectively ambivalent form; and it expressly runs the risk of its own intransigence, impotence, and impossibility. But it is also because the era opened by Shakespearean-scientific modernity .is now in lts closure that something of ilie complicated genealogyof the relation between dn 1gs and love in mo<lemitycan reemerge again. As I have tried to show, psychoanaly sis takes up what was in Shakespeare already a triple, theatr:icalmonstrosity of drugs in orde r lo connect it directly with the sdeni;;es in a way that is at once consonam with, yet irreducible to, a1lof tb.e majorgenealogicalshiftssiJ.1CC. 1hishas meant leveragingthe very·diffic.ulties of subject-formation into the treatment for their own consequences, a paradoxical and painful process. Now that technology in the form of pharmacology rules the roost, it is the task of psychoanalysis today to reconnect its self-realization as a discourse of failure, hesitancy, and unhappiness to the real lives of people. Freud-who, lest we forget, was himself euthanized by the new drugs under the direction of his personal physician-knew it too. When Martin Heidegger, confronting what he called "theplanetaryreign of technology:' offers the notorious formula that "[o]nly a god can save us" (Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten), the poetic melancholy of Friedrich Holderlin remains paramount to his attempts at a postphilosophical "other thinking:' 57 For his 155 part, also confronting-if in a very different frame-the problem of technology, Freud finds himself compelled to invoke another great litterateur. "We can only say;' he writes, citing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, "'So muss denn <loch die Hexe dran!' [We must call the Witch to our help after all!]-the Witch Meta-psychology." 58 It seems the witchcraft of a love for the literary must today form our last bastion against the totalization of drugs in the marketplace-and, if this will be done, it will require tangling again with the deadlocks of inheritance. Notes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophyof the Future,trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York:Penguin, 2003), 42. 2. See Susanna Rustin, "Getting in Touch,"Guardian,January 26, 2008, http:// www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/jan/26/familyandrelationships.fami!y1. 3. See Kate Schechter,Illusionsof a Future:Psychoanalysisand the Biopoliticsof Desire(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 4. For an interesting instance of a popular critique, see Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us:The Globalizationof the American Psyche(New York:Free Press, 2010). 5. Emmanuel Stamatakis, Richard Weiler, and John P. A. Ioannidis, "Undue Industry Influences that Distort Healthcare Research, Strategy, Expenditure and Practice: A Review,"EuropeanJournalof ClinicalInvestigation43, no. 5 (2013):469. 6. S0ren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple PsychologicallyOrienting Deliberationon the Dogmatic Issue of HereditarySin, ed. and trans. Reidar Thome in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980),42, 49. 7. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, "Psychotropicana," London Review of Books, July 11, 2002, http://www.Jrb.co.uk/v24/n 13/mikkel-borch-jacobsen/psychotropicana. 8. Peter D. Kramer, "Should Teenagers Take Drugs? Prozac, Paxi!, and Teen Depression;' Slate, June 4, 2004, http://www.slate.com/. As Kramer continues, ftJhe pharrnaceuticaJ comparuesdo sbod dy re.qea.rchon lhc <lrugs'clfkacy. .Becaure the paten ts on medication have a.limited dm-<1-tion, the corp-oratfons are always in a .rush to bring drugs to market The companies pre.ssure thtt subcontractors that perform the studies., dema:nd.ing that they gather research snbj1."C ts fast There-cru.itersthen stretch d iagno.sric:criteria, signlng u.ppaci~nts who may llO( have the dJs~se in question. Studiei; ofteri includepeop le \vith a host of shiftingcomplaims,many of wh.ichilfe basedIi::;son acute illnesstfi a.n on personality style. The result is a group with poorly defined conditions and 156 Chapter 6 Drug Is the Love high placebo response rate s-enough static to drown out whatever effects the medication s have on substantial disease. Nevertheless , Kramer points to the following: Oddly, then , in the "rush to market," drug company studies tend to hide the efficacy of the wry medications that the oorpora:tLonshope to promote. It is th e rule , not the exception, for similar medications to fare poorly in drug company trials but to fare well in subsequent (presumably disinterested) governmentsponsored research. The NIMH-supervised research on adolescent depression has not been published, which means that it has not undergone its final peer review. But it is known to be well-designed and carefully executed. Oliver Bennett, citing Arnold Relman , the former editor-in -chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, notes that, since the 1970s, there had been an erosion of medical ethics as physicians and researchers increasingly entered into financial arrangements with drug manufacturers and investor-owned health -care facilities. Clinical investigators, for example, were holding equity interests in companies whose products they were testing; others were serving as paid consultants or scientific advisors ; respected academic s v.'l!te being hired by drug. companies io give lectures. or write; articles about the manufacturers' new products; and physicians were investing in health-care facilities to which they could then refer their patients . Bennett, Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 121. 9. See, for example, Eric Laurent, "Desangoisser?" Mental 13 (2003): 21: "Il va de soi, en .medecine, que le symptome est quelque chose qu'il s'agit de faire disparaitr e. rang oisse est un ~yrnptome coJ11.meun autre ;i. faire dispara.itre.'.' We can see the shift towards the symptomization of anxiety in the work of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). According to Aaron T. Beck, for instance, anxiety and depression are characteri zed by a "negative cognitive shift:' See "Cognitive Therapy: A 30-Year Retrospective;' American Psychologist 46, no. 4 (1991), 369. 10. Hence, psychoanalysis has always been the close associate of various waste disposal experts: s.ewageengineers,plumbers, maids, n10ther.s, and so on. A.side from Freud and Lacan's remarks upon the topic of waste, see Dominique Laporte, History of Shit , trans . Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). !57 11. Psychoanalysts themselves often seem to demonize drug treatments in a way that elides certain essential complicities. See, for example, Elisabeth Roudin esco, ''A:Rti-FreudianRevisionism Triumphant in th~United States," Virtuosity: The Newsletter of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy 4 (1997): 4; Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1995), 106; and Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 116, 252n70 . 12. "According to his own declarations, Popper constructed his falsificationist epistemology to the sole end of establishing a demarcation between science and political discourse-in the occasion , Marxism, put at the service of a world-view. [. . .] One will note that Popper aligns Freudian psychoanalysis with politicized Marxism. Pure and simple prejudice: it is, on the contrary, completely obviou s that Freud is an illustration of falsificationist epistemology. See, among other examples, the introduction of II beyond of the pleasure principle u11the hasw;of fuJsJfyrng experience : the Fort-Da:' Jean-Claude Milner, Les noms indistincts (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983), 92-93; my translation. 13. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, in The Norton Shak espeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: WW Norton, 1997), 1.1.132-34. 14. Ibid., 5.1.341-42. 15. Sigmund Freud, "The Dynamics of Transference;' in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter SE), ed. and tran s. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-19 74), 12:101; emphasis in original. 16. I use the word preposterous advisedly in the current context. As K. K. Ruth ven points out, the term can mean "ridiculous" or "nonsensical" and can refer to a temporal or hierarchical inversion. See Ruthven, "Preposterou s Chatterton, " ELH 71, no. 2 (2004): 345-7 5. 17. See Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria , in SE 7:116. 18. See Freud, "Preface to Aichhorn's Wayward Youth," in SE 19:273; and "Analysis Terminable and Interminable;' in SE 23:248. 19. Shakespeare, The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition , 4.1.94. 20. For a brilliant reading of "Plato's Pharmacy;' see Jacques Derrida , Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61-171. 21. Shakespeare, The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, l.1.6. Chapter 6 l58 Drug Is the Love 159 22. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.150-55. 23. See Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: the only true "subject of consumption," the only one who consumes himself utterly, to his very death, in his unbound jouissance. [... ] Riverhead, 1998). 24. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in SE 7:134. 25. Freud, ''Analysis Terminable and Interminable;' in SE 23:246; emphasis in Today's preoccupation with drug addiction as the ultimate danger to the social edifice can be properly understood only against the background of the predominant subjective economy of consumption as the form of appearance of thrift: in previous epochs, the consumption of drugs was simply one among the half-concealed social practices of real (de Quincey, Baudelaire) and fictional (Sherlock Holmes) characters. original. 26. Ibid., 245. 27. See Justin Clemens, "Introduction: Psychoanalysis Is an AntiphilosophY:' in Psychoanalysis Is an Antiphilosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 1-16. 28. This claim develops work originally done in collaboration with Christopher Feik. See Clemens and Feik, "The De-moralisation of the Drug Debate?" in Heroin Crisis: Key Commentators Discuss the Issues and Debate Solutions to Heroin Abuse in Australia, ed. Kate van den Boogert and Nadine Davidoff (Melbourne: Bookman Press, 1999), 18-23. 29. The literature on this question is now vast. See, among others, Charles J. Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Elisabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and Kub/a Khan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1968); M. H. Abrams, The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934); and Susan M. Levin, The Romantic Art of Confession: De Quincey, Musset, Sand, Lamb, Hogg, Fremy, Soulie, Janin (Columbia: Camden House, 1998). 30. See Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia;' in Selected Writings, 1927-1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Edmund Jephcott, vol. 2, pt. 1 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), 207-21. 31. In this regard, Slavoj Zizek is simply restating the Romantics' case when he writes that [p ]erhaps the best illustration of the way this reflexivity affects our everyday experience of subjectivity is the universalized status of addiction: today, one can be "addicted" to anything-not only to alcohol or drugs, but also to food, smoking, sex, work. ... This universalization of addiction signifies the radical uncertainty of any subjective position today: there are no firm predetermined patterns, everything has to be (re)negotiated again and again. [... ] [This is evident in] the different versions of the attempt to restore the premodern sovereign gesture of pure expenditure-recall the figure of the junkie, Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (New York: Verso, 2001), 27, 44, 260n31; emphasis in original. 32. Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People:Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1981), 37. 33. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Epidemics of the Will," in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 130-42. 34. This short-circuiting is critical to the present day, such that-from de Quincey, through Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. JekyU, Dorla.1:1 Gray,AleisterCrowley, JeanCocteau,and WlUiamBIJ[roughs, to the charactersof lrvine Wdsh'sTrtlimpotting- ~reality"aod afiction'' ar-ethon:mghly rn:ifuunded.A~ Nigel Leask pu~ it, "[aJlthoughthe Cr:mfr,ssfo11S hadfirst appeared in a li:terary jou..mal,and was clearlythe work of .a rnaaaf Jettc.:r5l, ..i, contc;mpo · rary readerstende.dto take:it at its word by reaad ing ft as a medicalarn;iunt of opium addlction and an interventi<m i.n a CU.t'l'ent debate abom the therapeutic value o opium." Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 172. See Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (New York: Penguin, 2003 ); Theophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, Hashish, Wine, Opium, trans. Maurice Stang (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972); Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend (San Francisco: Weiser, 2010); Claude Farrere, Black Opium, trans. Samuel Putnam (San Francisco: And/ Or Press, 1974); Jean Cocteau, Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure, trans. Margaret Crosland (London: Peter Owen, 1990); William Burroughs, Junky (New York: Penguin, 1977); Kevin Mackey, The Cure: Recollections of an Addict (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1971); and Melvin Burgess, Junk (London: Penguin, 1997). 35. The "wars" were fought from 1839 to 1842 and from 1856 to 1860. See Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975); and Paul C. Winther, Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire: Malaria, Opium, and British Rule in India, 1756-1895 (Lanham: Lexington, 2003). 36. See John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas de Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Alina Clej, A Chapter 6 J60 Drug Is the Love Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1995); Josephine McDonagh, De QuincDlsc1plines(Oxfor d: Clarendon Pre..~~.1994} an d "Op ium and the Impe rial Imagination;' in Reviewing Romanticism, ed. Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis (London: Macmillan, 1992), 116-33; and Leask, British Romantic Writers and eys the East: Anxieties of Empire. 37. Wallace Reyburn, Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper (Clifton-upon-Teme: Polperro Heritage Press, 2010), 29. Cholera had spread to Europe from India in the 1820s, and there were further epidemics in Britain in 1848- ! 849, l8S3-1854, an d 1866. 38. She m entioned this durin g a s.essionat the Melbourne Writers.'F-€stiva l in 1999. See also Barbara Hodgson, Opium: A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1999). 39. Derrida , "The Rhetoric of Drugs," in Points ... : Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Michael Israel (Stanford: Stanford University Press , 1995), 250. 40. Quoted in Paul Youngquist , "De Quincey 's Crazy Body;' PMLA 114 ( 1999): 356. 41. In 1859, J. R. Geigy established a dye company and Alexander Clave! founded the company that would become Ciba; in 1862, Jean Gaspar Dolfus set up what would become Sandoz : 11were <lyeproduce.rs.Ciba only produced its firsl pharmaceuticalpreparation in 18.89;Sandoz produced a medical remedy for the first time in 1921 and Geigy i.n1940 (althoughthe kercompourldsfromwhich thepsyd,otropi drugsw~te late:rlO come had all bt-eniiyntbc~i:,..e d by the tum of the i:enru.ry). After WorldWarI, allthl'l't'of the~ecompaniesbnrnchedout into textiles and ln the 1930s into plastic:;and inscc.ticides. ln addition_to setting up a home bhil.$e,all lh.reequicklymoved 10 set up br-anchesoutside Switzetland,c:.sta lishing the basis for later multinational developments.There were a 11um.ber f reawns for doing thiJ;.; one was Lo ciramwent patent laws, another to avoid import duti~ or expo1tt-ax. DavidHealy,711eAntitkpressant Era (Cambridge; Delivered before the Christo-TheosophicalSociety, December 18th, 1890 (St. LeonJ.F.Nock, 1890); Counselto Parents on the Moral Education of Their Children, in Relation to Sex (London: Brentano's Literary Emporium , 1879); How to Keep a Household in Health (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1871); The Human Element in SeA;Beinga Me4ia1I J11qrciiJ' into th!!R.elatiori of Se~/ Physiologyto Christian Morality (London: J. and A. Churchill , 1894); and The Laws of Life, with SpecialReferenceto the PhysicalEducation of Girls (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852). ards: 43. "Organic chemistry is often regarded as having been clearly established as a separate field with the publication of Marcellin Berthelot's Chimie Organique,in 1860:' Healy, The Antidepressant Era, 18. 44. In England, it was the 1858 Medical Act that "established for the first time tbe starumry tMin[Uo11of a medical practJtioner , together with a reglstt-r and a. General Medical Council to watch over condu ct and education." fra nk Mort, Dangerous&xualitif!S: Medico-moralPoliticsin Englands1111:e 1830,2nJ eel (New York:Routledge, 2000), S2. Or, ln Berridge and Edwanls' ter-m.s,"l dJocto~ and ph a.nn acists, unti l m id-cen tury al leas;. htcl<:ed the orga.nl1.ationaJ ~tn,crures a.ndprofessional standing even to begin to define opiu.m usi: a.">solely a medical malter.n Berridge und Edwards, Opium ,md the Peopfo-: Opiate V.s~In NineteenthCentury England, 62..Thelocus classkm o.frhJs devdopment appears i.n Gt1$ta,•e Flaubert's Mada.mr: Bovary,exernp larilyfo the relation oetwee:nMomieur Homais and Char les Bovary.Se¢ Avita]Roncll'sreadJflg ofi•(adame-Bavary in Crack Wats: Literatcm, Addiction, Mr;nfa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). 45. ''It was no wonder thl!l.tChelsea pro\'Ed ~llcch a magnet to artists and writers, :,ucb as.1\itnt>r,Le.ighHwit and Thomas Carlyle. There is no recor d of Crapper clearing a clogged drai.n for Swinbume, repairing a kitchen tap for Whistler or instalUag a; bidet for Chrbtina Ro!>.S-etti . But he might ,-eryweU liavc done ~o. for they all lived a mere stone's throw from him and when they had the l'le,-dof a plumber the re is no reason why a mald!ll."t\':ant.4hould n()t ha.vebeen dispatdled to fetch Crnpper .nReyburn, Flush~dwftJ1Prid~>; 1he Story of Thomas Crap-per,12. 46. See Mkhe l FoucuuJt,11tl!. Historyof s~uality:. A.11 Imroduc.tio11, tra.ns.Rob-ert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1978); and "Introduction, " in The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure,trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 2 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 1-32. Harvard University Press, 1997), 19. 42. The social purity movements in England bespeak radical middle-class women's rage over the Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, which placed both police and medics under control of the War Office, not local government. Elizabeth Blackwell's work is exemplary here, fusing moral and medical concerns in an image of "Christian physiology:' See Christianity in Medicine: An Address i6J 47. See the essays collected in Heroin Crisis: Key Commentators Discuss the Issues and Debate Solutions to Heroin Abuse in Australia, ed. Kate van den Boogert and Nadine Davidoff (Melbourne: Bookman Press, 1999). 48. See Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism:Ideology and IdeologicalState Apparatuses, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2014). 49. See Healy, "The Psychopharmacological Era: Notes toward a History ," Journal of Psychopharmacology4(1990): 152-67. 162 Chapter 6 50. I draw these examples from a decade ago partially to suggest how the public circulation of such sentiments has escalated as it vanishes into normality in and by that very escalation. See Sarah Baseley, "Doctors 'Forced' to Overprescribe Antidepressants;' Guardian, March 30, 2004, http://theguardian.com/; Gardiner Harris, "Antidepressants Seen as Effective for Adolescents;' New York Times, June 2, 2004, http:/ /nytimes.com; and Donald G. McNeil Jr., "Large Study on Mental Illness Finds Global Prevalence," The New York Times, June 2, 2004, http:/ /WWW .nytimes.com/. 51. Kramer's book (and others like it) has inspired some extreme and bilious responses. See, among others, the dialogue between Zoe Heller and Roy Porter, "The Chemistry of Happiness;' in Mind Readings:Writers'Journeysthrough Mental States, ed. Sara Dunn, Blake Morrison, and Michele Roberts (London: Minerva, 1996), 165-75; and Healy, Let Them Eat Prozac:The UnhealthyRelationship between the PharmaceuticalIndustry and Depression(New York: New York Uni- CHAPTER 7 Testament of the Revolution (Walter Benjamin) RebeccaComay For Carsten versity Press, 2004). 52. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Penguin, 1993), 296. 53. Mr. Sheen is a popular brand of cleaning materials created in Australia in the 1950s.-Eds. 54. See, for instance, Tean-Fran~ois Lyotard, Lessonson the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 55. Bernard Stiegler, "Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-Based Capitalism and Libidinal Dis-economy;' New Formations 72 (2011): 150. 56. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of JacquesLacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). 57. Martin Heidegger, «<Only a God Can Save Us': The Spiegel Interview (1966);' in Heidegger:The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent Press, 1981), 57. This is Heidegger's final interview, conducted in 1966 but not published in Der Spiegeluntil after his death in 1976. 58. Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable:' in SE 23:225. I have often thought it odd that the posterity of the Frankfurt School has always measured itself in terms of generations- first generation, second generation, and so on. (By some counts we are now up to the fourth or even fifth generation, which means that they must breed them very young.) While feminism surges forward in waves (first-wave, second-wave, third-wave), and Hegelians procreate through mitosis, splitting off horizontally into rival wings, or factions (left and right), or vertically (young and old), critical theory, for some reason, seems to want to propagate dynastically along patrilineal lines. I am not sure where exactly Walter Benjamin fits into this line of filiation or if he is even really part of the family. Is he a father, a son, a sibling, a foster child, a cousin? Is he one of those uncles who you never even knew existed until one day he le.a1res you. a bequest that you do not quite know what to do with? The genealogical lines had always been a little tangled- benveen BenjamiQ and "lhe odor Adorno, for e.."{ ample,. or bet.ween Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, to narnejust two af the mant d ajmants swan nin g around Benjamin's legacy. Both functioned variously- sometimes as .Benjamin's mentor, s-0metim e5 follower; sometimt s e~~ utoc of the estate, wmetim es heir apparent. The setup has some of the complexity of the strange scene of inheritance Jacques Derrida explores in The Post Card when he contemplates the picture of an aged Plato standing behind-that is, genealogically before-a youthful Socrates, who is shown sitting at his writing desk, taking Chapter 16 34.6 See also "No: Foucault;' in After the "SpeculativeTurn":Realism, Philosophy,and Feminism, ed. Katerina Kolozova and Eileen A. Joy (New York: Punctum, 2016), About the Contributors 71-93. 14. Lacan, Television,in Television:A Challengeto the PsychoanalyticEstablishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michel- son (Ne'!"'York:W.W. Norton, l 990), 30. I~. Sec.mparticular.MichelFoucault.TheHistoryof Sexualit;~An fotrodriction, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 82-83. I().Freud,BeyondthePleasurePrinciple,in SE18:36. 17. Xavier Bichat, PhysiologicalResearchesupon Life and Deoth,tran$. Tobias Watkins (Philadelphia: Smith and Maxwell, 1809), 1. 18. See Copjec, "The Sexual Compact;' 34. 19. Lacan, The Seminar of JacquesLacan, Book XX: Encore,On FeminineSexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge,1972-1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 11. 20. See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in The Marx-EngelsReader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 70-81. 21. See Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004), 81-84. 22. See Lacan, The Seminar of JacquesLacan, Book XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge,1972-1973, 3. 23. See Lacan, "Kant with Sade;' in Bcrits:The FirstCompleteEdition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 645-68. 24. Lacan, The Seminar of JacquesLacan, Book XX: Encore,On Feminine Sexu- ality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge,1972-1973, 3. 25. Aristotle, The Politics,in "ThePolitics"and "TheConstitution of Athens," ed. Stephen Everson, trans. Jonathan Barnes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1258b6. 26. Ibid., 1258b8. 27. Ibid., 1258b7. 28. Lacan, The Seminar of JacquesLacan, Book XI: The FourFundamental Con- apts of Psyci1oa.nalysis, 198. 29. Lacan,TheSemi,uuofJacqiusLaca.a, BockXX: Ern:ore,OrrFemfnimi Sa,.;:ality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge,1972-1973, 2. 30. Ibid., 3. lorenw Chiesa is dire.ctorof the Genoa.School of Humaniciesin Italy.He is theauthozof Subjectl\tiry• nna Otlu.mi~·s·; A Philosophic ~al Rec.dingIJfI.Arnn; ThtiNot-Two;Logicand God in la{'An;and TheVirtualPoint of.Freedtmr.. He iii also a coeditor(wi.thAlbertoToscano)of TheItalianDifference: Betwee11 Nihilismand Biopolitics , and editorof Italian111ouglu Today:Eio~ecmwmy, HumanNature. Chri.stiq,iityandLncanrmdFhilo:sophy: 17reNew Gem:mtfrm. ftu,tinClemens is MniorJecturerin the School of Cultureaad Collllllan.f· cationat the Universityof Melbournein Australia His ma;,rrecentboob incfodePsychoanalysisIs rm Antiphlfosophyand {with A. J.BartlettandJon Roffe)Lacan Deleuze.Badiou. He i~ also the editorof numerousbook collections, including (wllb RussdJGrigg)}act:J«es L,mm and the Other Side of Psychoanqlysk Reflectionson Seminar XVII; (with Paul Ashton and A. f. Bartlett) ThePraxis of A~in .Badfau.; and(with .Ben Naparstek} The/tu:que- lfne RoseRe:(lder. Rebecca Comay is professor of philosophy and comparative literature and director of the program in literary studies at the University of Toronto in Canada. She is the author of Mourning Sickness:Hegel and the FrenchRevolution; coauthor (with Frank Ruda) of The Dash: The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (forthcoming); editor of Lost in the Archives; and coeditor (with John McCumber) of Endings:Memory in Hegel and Heidegger. Joan Copjec is prof es.so.rof modern cultun and media at Brown Univer~ sity..Sht is the author of Rend My Des.ire: Lo.amRgainst the.Historici5tsand lmagi11eTh~rl:'sNv Woman. Eihicsr.md Sublimalio11.She !$ .ilia th~ editor of nwne ·.ro:usbook collection:;, including (with Annette r,.fid1ilson, Rosalind Krauss, and Dougia.s C..rimp) Octobe.r:I11eFirst Der.."ade , 1976- 1986; mev isicm:A Challenge l'a the P.s ydr.oaMlyticEstablishment; and {wilh Si,gi Jottkandt) Permmbr(a). She "''aS formerly an editor of Octob-er,the el;e.Cu tivc editor of Umbr(a): A JotmmJ ()j the Unco1'?sciau~ and directo.r of the