Culture on Drugs: Narco-cultural studies of high modernity

This work addresses themes such as the nature of consciousness, language and the body, alienation, selfhood, the image and virtuality, the nature/culture dyad and everyday life - as these are expressed in key figures such as freud, Benjamin, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari. It argues that the ideas and concepts by which modernity has attained its measure of self-understanding are themselves the products of encounters with drugs and their effcets. In each case the reader is directed to the points at which drugs figure in the formulations of 'high theory', and it is revealed how such thinking is never itself a drug-free zone.