|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
like money, whereas hallucinogenic drugs are considered sacred by many who use them. The “evil virus” is the face of total need without boundaries, and like a rabid dog, it cannot help but bite. For Burroughs, the addict is a sick person who is unable to act in any other way; it is beyond his or her choice. Yet Burroughs was not despairing because addicts “can be cured or quarantined.” Burroughs claimed the addict is an out-of-control new species, like a mad zombie. “Come to Manchester; we have the cure for infection,” barks the radio in Danny Boyles’s 28 Days Later (2002), where zombies are addicted to savaging and infecting others. The sequel, 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carols Fresnadillo, 2007), reveals what happens when the quarantine breaks down. The addict is supposedly inhuman and zombielike, feeding parasitically. As is pointed out in chapter 10, the most popular contemporary myth is that of the vampire, addicted to the blood of others—the key myth in European culture for the last four hundred years.
In his analysis of rock lyrics, Atte Oksanen utilizes the work of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly their work in A Thousand Plateaus where they noted that drug addicts fall back into what they wanted to escape. As Oksanen states, people know that the allure of drugs is that they alter reality, change the speed of perception, and even can possibly enable the creative processes, but they ironically involve the most rigid modes of acting. Sherlock Holmes, for example, might be way beyond his peers in terms of his powers of creative deduction, but his use of addictive drugs such as cocaine and opium means he is stuck, cut off from society, in many ways rigidly acting out a ritual. I examine the relationship between violence and pleasure, but Oksanen highlights Deleuze’s point in The Logic of Sense that alcoholism is not about the search for pleasure. Significantly, in a world that is seemingly out of one’s control, one’s addictions paradoxically are the place where one can, to some degree, feel in control. This may lead to a literal incarceration, having a stint in rehab, relinquishing control to gain control.
People are, in the main, often dominated by desires to consume, and addiction is the quintessence and zenith of this desire, with many