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.
Bjelic / Bjelic
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Introduction.- 1. On Cocaine's radical ambiguity.- 2. Freud's 'Cocaine Episode'.- 3. From Colonial to Sexual Conversion: Freud as 'Woman'.- 4. Freud as 'Conquistador' of the Underworld and as 'Bosnian Turk'.- 5. Freud on the Acropolis: Between Oedipus and 'Little Moor' Conclusion.
Dušan I. Bjelic 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 Savic) of
Balkan as Metaphor
(2002).