“Who’s watching your drink? Let your hair down, not your guard.” In bright pink with big black block lettering, of course. “Enjoy your night. Know your limits. Zero tolerance towards violence.” A textual exhibition of the physiology of alcohol (and its rapacious others). A drug defines its own textuality, its own social limits, its own …
Monthly Archives: September 2009
Controlled addiction
I just finished reading a really interesting article by Daniel Nunn (pdf) that details William Halsted’s thirty-year cocaine addiction. Halsted was the first professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University, and has been widely credited with being the first to describe the principle of local anesthesia by blocking nerves. In the 1880s, Halsted developed a …
Pharmacogenealogy
What forms of subjecthood and subjectivity are available to us? The question should not be, what is the “modern” subject or what is “modern” subjectivity, but rather what forms of subjecthood and subjectivity—what ways of being and of being with—are made possible in particular practices and sets of practices? We should be looking for multiple, …
