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Through an analysis of Dracula, this article will explore some of the hyperbolic rhetoric surrounding drug use and womens place in medical discourse that has, like the Count himself, risen again and again in our culture. It argues that Dracula attempts – through popular metaphors of addiction, shifting terminologies about drug use, and British anxieties about immigration – to make a clear but highly unstable distinction between licit and illicit drug use. In the process, Stoker‘s novel illuminates a complex relationship between middle-class women and the opiates that paradoxically serve as a site of patriarchal oppression and resistance to it.
Subject matter: writing as a racial pharmakon In this chapter, I explore ‘subject matter’ – often characterized as the polar opposite of form – and turn my attention to works of authors who deploy signifiers that connect broadly to South Asia.1 My central aim is to provincialize whiteness – the ground for all racialized art histories – or as British film and queer theorist Richard Dyer puts it in his important book White: Essays on Race and Culture (1997): make it ‘strange’.2 This will also demand that I explore how blackness fits into writing transnational
, expelled, sacrificed in order that the family may be seen to regenerate itself. The orphan functions as a pharmakon, a surplus, an excess to be excluded. Conceived of in this way, it is possible then to see how orphanhood became a vehicle for emigration in a scheme which would both rid Britain of its surplus population and settle the colonies with white stock. The emigration schemes highlight the orphan
their actions are represented as potentially dangerous. This can be understood in relation to what Jacques Derrida called ‘autoimmunity’, where a body’s own defence mechanism becomes the threat, or in another of his favoured concepts, the ‘pharmakon’, where something is both poison and cure. Although these moments of deconstruction are replete within superhero comics, the chapter will conclude with examples of how superhero comics also manage to re-establish the distinction, having previously problematised it. As was noted in Chapter 1, superhero comics are tied to
pharmakon . The multiple cautionary directions found in medical treatises to follow medical prescriptions and to prepare the patient's body before taking the waters testify to an overall confidence in the effectiveness of a water treatment, which was a risk in itself because of the strength of the remedy. Conversely, some critics of medicinal spas saw them as a mere cure-all. In medical and satirical literature alike, angry authors recurrently warned their readers against the ill consequences of quack remedies and charlatanism, and mineral waters were not left behind. In
According to the author, queer as an identification and subjectivity is important to his writing of transnational South Asian art histories. This book talks about new transnational South Asian art histories, to make visible histories of artworks that remain marginalised within the discipline of art history. This is done through a deliberate 'productive failure', by not upholding the strictly genealogical approach. The book discusses authorship by examining the writing about the work of Anish Kapoor to explore the shifting manner in which critics and art historians have identified him and his work. It focuses on the author's own identification as queer and South Asian American to put pressure on the coherency of an LGBTQI art history. It connects formal similarities of abstract work produced in the 1960s in New York City by Cy Twombly and Natvar Bhavsar. The book deals with an art history that concerns facile categories such as South Asian/non-South Asian and black/white, and discusses the works of Stephen Dean, Mario Pfeifer, Adrian Margaret Smith Piper, and Kehinde Wiley. It focuses on practice-led research by discussing 'Sphere:dreamz,; which was produced by queer-identified South Asian women. Continuing the focus, the book looks at the multi-site exhibition 'Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street', organised by the author in 2007. It addresses the question of how certain subjects are considered as 'belonging' and others as not; and the role of art in the reconstitution of notions of 'home' and transnational South Asian art histories.
knowledge of drugs. One principal well-spring of western philosophy’s attempt to see things in terms of the distinction between ignorance and knowledge (of drugs as much as of anything) is, of course, Plato. In Plato’s pharmacy In ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1981b), Derrida re-reads a bit of Plato in a way which is intended to sidestep that metaphysical couple. It centres on the role of the pharmakon in Plato’s text Phaedrus. Pharmakon, he tells us, can be translated by ‘remedy’, ‘recipe’, ‘poison’, ‘philtre’ and ‘drug’. And, rather than appealing to any theory of this ‘drug’, he
Deconstruction and drugs 51 showed, in relation to his discussions of the pharmakon in the essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (Derrida, 1981b); in relation to supplementarity, undecidability, play, repetition, in other words, right at the heart of deconstruction’s thinking of writing (écriture) and textuality. As with the term ‘drug’, pharmakon bears the sense of both ‘antidote’ and ‘poison’, but it is (in Plato) as discussed in the previous chapter, a metaphor for writing, too. Derrida’s account of the pharmakon (in this instance in the form the text of Lysias’ speech) as it is in
the uncanny as being both foreign and of the known combined with Derrida’s notions of the supplementary double in which sameness always contains its difference combine in the concept pharmakon (a concept akin to Girard’s notion of the scapegoat 2 ) in which is contained simultaneously both the poison and the cure; the pharmakon also acts as the structure in which this difference is at one and the same time produced
, the body as a receptacle for remembering. However, neither offers an uncomplicated form of remembrance, and he is unable to offer a third, and perhaps less troubling, way of remembering the past of slavery. The long poem Bloodlines (2000), in some ways, is D’Aguiar’s most challenging text, especially in relation to the portrayal of available roles for women. Like The Longest Memory , Bloodlines demonstrates his concern with the problem of the pharmakon – for Derrida, both remedy and poison – and is a deliberate attempt to avoid