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 …
Patterns: writing
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, …
A profound boredom
The difficulties derived from the project itself, which was intended precisely to avoid them. By programming my work over several volumes according to a plan laid down in advance, I was telling myself that the time had now come when I could write them without difficulty, and simply unwind what was in my head, confirming …
