Crack Wars
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992) is a book by Avital Ronell.
Ronell takes as her point of departure Nietzsche's position that, as long as culture has existed, it has supported and inspired addiction.
She develops an argument investigating destructive desires that coincide with the war on drugs and with the very addiction to drugs which the war claims to want to vanquish. The text intends to disturb simple comprehension of drugs on one side or another of a binary opposition.
Crack Wars focuses on Madame Bovary, looking at addiction to literature and comparing it to addiction to drugs.
She describes the work as being a political gesture against the hysteria of the "racist" war on drugs.
It begins with a wide survey of literary discussions of intoxication, including Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Benjamin and more.
The book proceeds by looking closely at Heidegger's descriptions of want, wishing and "being towards".
