The Banana Peel Project

How can we talk about a resilient, flexible, self-reflexive self without appealing to some natural, fundamental subject?  How can we understand the thinking, agentive, self-aware subject whose boundaries are themselves continuously negotiated with other agents?  The self that is articulated in and through engagement with drugs—whether by taking them or simply by talking about them—is continuously disassembled and reassembled, but at the same time it does not cease to be an active, thinking subject engaged in a conscious, reflexive, and purposeful relationship with those very drugs.

Our fear of drugs and of the participants in the drug economy—from users to pushers to developers—derives from our fear of dissolution and disassembly.  We acknowledge pleasure, and even encourage it.  Contemporary technoculture is, after all, both a culture of narcissism and a culture of Dionysian hedonism.  So it is not the pursuit of pleasure per se that has many of us so worried.  Instead, what we fear is what Derrida calls “the pursuit of pleasure without truth.”  We fear inauthentic experience, a kind of existential cheating.  We fear the power of drugs to erase the independent, fundamental, thinking, autonomous self that we value so highly and, indeed, require for the entire Western liberal philosophical and political apparatus to continue to function.

What many of us tend to miss is that drugs do no such thing.  The entire matrix of legal and medical discourse of addiction misses the fact that a drug user is not a zombie.  To be sure, we fear zombies and the scientific-supernatural reality on which their existence depends.  Thankfully, zombies are the stuff of fiction and fear, and they are not (contrary, it seems, to popular belief) to be found in psychiatric clinics, urban slums, college dorms, rehabilitation clinics, or anywhere else outside of the film industry.