Overview
- Examines cocaine as the link between colonialism of Peru and the pharmaceutical colonialism in relation to the origins of psychoanalysis
- Offers a radical contrast between Benjamin’s ‘hallucinatory collective’ and psychoanalytic normalization
- A groundbreaking analysis of Freud’s cocaine dreams and “screen memories” as his industrial unconscious
- Explores Freud and Benjamin’s messianic dialectics in relation to unconscious colonialism
- Political re-contextualization of coca leaf as mimetic antidote to biopower
- An original rethinking of Freudian and Benjaminian concepts through the discourses of colonialism and drug addiction
- Analyzes the relation between discourse and intoxication in the time of high modernity
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About this book
This book depicts how Freud’s cocaine and Benjamin’s hashish illustrate two critiques of modernity and two messianic emancipations through the pleasures of intoxicating discourse. Freud discovered the “libido” and “unconscious” in the industrial mimetic scheme of cocaine, whereas Benjamin found an inspiration for his critique of phantasmagoria and its variant psychoanalysis in hashish’s mimesis. In addition, as part of the history of colonialism, both drugs generated two distinct colonial discourses and, consequently, two different understandings of the emancipatory powers of pleasure, the unconscious, and dreams. After all, great ideas don't liberate; they intoxicate.
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Keywords
Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dušan I. Bjelić is Professor at University of Southern Maine USA. He obtained his PhD in Sociology from Boston University, USA. He is the author of Galileo's Pendulum (2003) and Normalizing the Balkans (2011) and the co-editor (with Obrad Savić) of Balkan as Metaphor (2002).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Intoxication, Modernity, and Colonialism
Book Subtitle: Freud’s Industrial Unconscious, Benjamin’s Hashish Mimesis
Authors: Dušan I. Bjelić
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58856-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and Psychology, Behavioral Science and Psychology (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-349-95072-0Published: 29 January 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-95721-7Published: 15 July 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-58856-2Published: 25 January 2017
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 307
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Critical Psychology, Sociology of Culture, Cultural History, Self and Identity, Psychoanalysis