Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

Drug literature does not merely represent the subjugated individual. It is also subversive by its nature—that is, as a genre that is written through and about drug addiction. Drug literature can be seen to question societal expectations and normative experience and values. As a literary genre, it can be seen to explore or explicate the Derridian notion that the world lacks natural order or a stable identity of truth.¹⁴ The drugs themselves, as well as the literature about them, destabilize the binaries that are set in place to stabilize. Helen Keane suggested that it is the binary opposition of “health and disease, pathology and normality” instilled in addiction discourse and more broadly in “regions of discourse and power,” generally, that create “human subjects and modes of existence as more or less worthy of respect and more or less needful of management and control.”¹⁵ I would suggest that drug literature also problematizes the stabilizing dichotomy of another set of binaries: “virtue” (as “true” and “real”) and “vice” (as “false” and “unreal”).¹⁶ As Jacques Derrida noted, “In our common conception, the drug addict as such produces nothing, nothing true or real.”¹⁷ Derrida further suggested that the discourse of drug addiction is “condemned or deplored” and viewed as inauthentic.¹⁸ Though I would argue that (male) drug literature (and its movie spin-offs) are now socially accepted and well received into the mainstream of popular culture, hence viewed as somewhat authentic productions, it is how drug writing deals with the common conception of true and real that creates a fluid shift in authenticity. It is by bringing the so-called characters of vice from the periphery into the center that the drug writer can be seen to fracture the boundary between vice and virtue, inside and outside, authentic and artifact.¹⁹ Likeable or not, whether one relates to them or not, sympathetic or not, the characters of vice are center stage in drug literature, illuminated, and the world is perceived via them. This subversive shift in perception, and with it a kind of reorganization or disorganization of value(s), reexamines and perhaps disables the primary opposition (i.e., vice/virtue) that upholds order—whether it be an orderly society or an ordered individual. Drug literature, in particular, is a kind of reevaluation of what that order does to individual agency.