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Review
"Avital Ronell is perhaps the most interesting scholar in America." -- Gregory Ulmer, author of Teletheory "This is another wake-up call from the most exciting critic working today. ... her switchboard lights up a conference call on the challenge to critical invention and intervention posed by the drug crisis. It is her dazzling accomplishment to have fused the crackling urgency of current events with the premonitions of philosophy and the prescience of literature." -- Sanford S. Ames, Substance "Ronell produces a text of cultural criticism in the best sense, not just as a critique of a cultural text, but a stunning indictment of the text that is our culture." -- American Book Review "Ronell reminds us that the 'war on drugs' is also and always a struggle for the minds as well as the veins of people. (Ronell) deserves the avid following that is building for her work. Crack Wars will reward your patience." -- San Francisco Chronicle "At the center of Crack Wars is Ronell's constitutive reading of Madame Bovary, that 'clinic of phantasms,' the urtext of toxic modernity." -- David Levi Strauss, Artforum
Product Description
Avital Ronell asks why "there is no culture without drug culture". She deals with the usual drugs and alcohol (and their celebrities: Freud's cocaine, Baudelaire's hashish, the Victorians' laudanum), and moves beyond them to addictions that are culturally accepted - an insatiable appetite for romance novels, for instance, and romance itself. It is a commonplace of modern culture to presume that there is a subculture or counterculture deeply saturated with drugs, but such modern cultures need subcultures, and need drugs on every level. Culture defines itself, its classes, its power structures, and its economy in terms of how it allows and encourages drugs to circulate. If drugs are dangerous, that danger seems to increase their appeal for millions. If drugs are unnatural and addictive, gasoline is a drug. What is art but a kind of drug, and what is art criticism but a kind of criticism of drugs and drug-induced states? Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" takes up the problems of drugs and addiction in numerous ways, which Ronell unpacks and presents as examples of the safe and unsafe. From Emma Bovary's romantic hallucinations to her suicide by arsenic, she moves through this realistic novel constantly reaching for the unreal. For Ronell, Emma Bovary represents the first addict, embodying a yearning that calls from the bottom of her humanity, and which it seems can only be satisfied by some sort of drug.
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First Sentence
When he wanted to formulate the task of a philosophy yet to come, Friedrich Nietzsche committed this thought to writing: "Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
When he wanted to formulate the task of a philosophy yet to come, Friedrich Nietzsche committed this thought to writing: "Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
Avital Ronell examines drugs addiction & mania in this amazingly well written and concisely beautiful book. A book-as-object, containing installations, special sections and poetic-philosophic passages, Crack Wars is sure to please the patient reader. Draws from Flaubert, Heidegger and Derrida...contends that this "culture inspires and supports destructive play only to punish it." A must read!
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5 reviews
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Not only a stunning analysis of -Madame Bovary-, but also---
23 Jun 2001
Format:Paperback
Ronell's book is a tour-de-force on many levels: for its lucid and startling close-reading of -Madame Bovary-, for the densely glittering energy (and humor) of her prose, and above all for its insight -- never before so comprehensively and convincingly argued -- into addiction as a symptomatic structure of the modern condition. (The addict, she points out, embodies a peculiar challenge for thinking about the inside/outside, mind/body relation. Emma Bovary takes us farther into questions of expenditure and circulation.) This is a must-read not only for those interested in Flaubert's novel, but in the history of subjectivity more generally. Even in its craziest moments, the book is provocative and perceptive.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Critifiction at Its Best
14 Feb 2009
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
One of the finest works of "critifiction" written, Ronell mixes atobiography, fictional biography (set in the future), literary crit, philosophy, cultural studies, and political commentary rolled into one. Her most accessible book, if you found The Telephone Book or Stupidity too involved in jargon and theory.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
masterpiece
24 July 2004
Format:Paperback
Just when you thought literary crit. was doomed to its staid exsistence, Ronell arrives on the scene. A critic (whose name escapes me) once said that while we can pick up a book, books can throw us across the room. I'm still recovering from the flight and trip this little book sent me on...
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