John Hutnyk
SHOPPINGHOUR /ESSAYS WORDS BY
John Hutnyk Narco-Analysis “Dirty needles, guilt and melancholia - time perhaps to lift the lid off this (La)Can of worms, and get back to work…”
Narco-analysis, by John Hutnyk Dave Boothroyd’s book “Culture On Drugs” (2007) is a sound and entertaining read, and is just as much a carefully argued account of the influence of various substances on theory and theorists across a wide field - Freud and Cocaine, Benjamin and Hashish, Sartre and hallucinogens - as it is a commentary on, and plea for, a narco-analytic turn in culture theory. Good. All the way through the book there were important 12
SHOPPINGHOUR N°05 — 09/09
questions raised and important answers offered - and experimental writing is approved here and there (but perhaps not adopted in the text as much as might be anticipated). All that said however, I think there was something held back…for example, I expected something on Marx and the opium wars: old beardo advocated that the Chinese not prohibit homegrown manufacture of the stuff so as to thereby undermine the East