Abstract
The author attempts a micro-bio-politics of drugs, starting from an excerpt of an interview with a couple of young drug users in a Copenhagen social youth work facility that pushes harm reduction in 1996. The article is guided by Derrida's idea of ‘drugs as the religion of atheist poets’ – that the contemporary discursive pragmatics of more or less pharmaceutical life practices still include forms of transcendence – and by the wish to fertilize the field of bio-politics with the indexical inter-subjectivity of the concept of ideology, as derived from an anti-essentialist reading of Hegelian–Marxist traditions. The analysis unfolds as an ideology critique that reconstructs, and seeks ways to overcome, particular forms of recognition that are identifiable in the data and in the field of drug practices, and how these form part of the constitution of singular collectives and participants – in these life practices, but also in the research practice that engaged with them through the interview.
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Notes
Incidentally, is not this opposition quite reminiscent of the one Derrida identified in the rhetoric of drugs between naturalism and artificialism? Why, then, did he seem to opt for the meta-naturalism of deconstruction, of further clearing the sky of transcendence? Had he in fact even, as the Check police claimed in 1981, himself been a poet of drugs? Forgive me this ad hominem, but, in life, there is no end to complicity.
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The first version of this article was drafted as a contribution to the symposium Life: Practice: Multiplicity. Socio-material Orderings and Body Politics across the 20th and 21st Century, arranged by the Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie der Lebenswissenschaften of Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, in Potsdam, Germany, July 2009.
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Nissen, M. Recognising life – A study in the atheist micro-bio-politics of drugs. Subjectivity 6, 193–211 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2012.25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2012.25