Abstract

This book 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 effects. In each study of the ideas of key theorists, such as Freud, Benjamin, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, the reader is directed to the points at which drugs figure in the formulation of 'high theory', and it is revealed how such thinking is never itself a drug-free zone. Consequently there is no ground on which to distinguish 'culture' from 'drug culture' in the first place.