1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910162796203321

Autore

Bjelić Dušan I

Titolo

Intoxication, Modernity, and Colonialism [[electronic resource] ] : Freud’s Industrial Unconscious, Benjamin’s Hashish Mimesis / / by Dušan I. Bjelić

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Palgrave Macmillan US : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2016

ISBN

1-137-58856-X

Edizione

[1st ed. 2016.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (308 pages) : illustrations

Disciplina

325.309

Soggetti

Critical psychology

Culture

Civilization—History

Self

Identity (Psychology)

Psychoanalysis

Critical Psychology

Sociology of Culture

Cultural History

Self and Identity

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

This book depicts how Freud’s cocaine and Benjamin’s hashish illustrate two different critiques of modernity and two different 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 of its variant psychoanalysis in hashish’s mimesis. As part of the history of



colonialism, both drugs generated two different colonial discourses and, consequently, two different understandings of the emancipatory powers of pleasure, the unconscious and dreams. Processing cocaine as an undisclosed industrialized scheme of euphoric pleasure, Freud constructed psychoanalysis by infusing its concepts with the residue of cocaine’s euphoria while foreclosing cocaine’s double colonialism its external colonialism, i.e. of Peru, and its internal colonialism, i.e. of the coca plant by industrial chemistry. On the other hand, considering the mimetic powers of Benjamin’s hashish intoxication as an antidote to the intoxicating power of the industrial phantasmagoria while at the same time an industrial colonization of nerves, allows for an opening up of Freud’s cocaine language to the critique of his double unconscious, colonial and industrial.