Abstract
The author attempts a micro-bio-politics of drugs, starting from an excerpt of an interview with a couple of young drug users in a Copenhagen social youth work facility that pushes harm reduction in 1996. The article is guided by Derrida's idea of ‘drugs as the religion of atheist poets’ – that the contemporary discursive pragmatics of more or less pharmaceutical life practices still include forms of transcendence – and by the wish to fertilize the field of bio-politics with the indexical inter-subjectivity of the concept of ideology, as derived from an anti-essentialist reading of Hegelian–Marxist traditions. The analysis unfolds as an ideology critique that reconstructs, and seeks ways to overcome, particular forms of recognition that are identifiable in the data and in the field of drug practices, and how these form part of the constitution of singular collectives and participants – in these life practices, but also in the research practice that engaged with them through the interview.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Incidentally, is not this opposition quite reminiscent of the one Derrida identified in the rhetoric of drugs between naturalism and artificialism? Why, then, did he seem to opt for the meta-naturalism of deconstruction, of further clearing the sky of transcendence? Had he in fact even, as the Check police claimed in 1981, himself been a poet of drugs? Forgive me this ad hominem, but, in life, there is no end to complicity.
References
Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bateson, G. (1972) The cybernetics of self: A theory of alcoholism. In: G. Bateson (ed.) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, pp. 309–337.
Billig, M. (1997) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.
Bloch, E. (1995) The Principle of Hope. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Bowker, G. and Star, S.L. (1999) Sorting Things Out. Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.
Brown, S. and Stenner, P. (2009) Psychology Without Foundations. History, Philosophy, and Psychosocial Theory. London: Sage.
Canguilheim, C. (1991) The Normal and the Pathological. New York: Zone Books.
Carr, E.S. (2011) Scripting Addiction. The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (2003) The rhetoric of drugs. In: A. Alexander and M.S. Roberts (eds.) High Culture Reflections on Addiction and Modernity. Albany, NY, USA: State University of New York Press, pp. 19–43.
Donzelot, J. (1979) The Policing of Families. Baltimore/London: Random House.
Dreier, O. (1992) Re-searching psychotherapeutic activity. In: J. Lave and S. Chaiklin (eds.) Understanding Practice. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, pp. 104–124.
Dreier, O. (2008) Psychotherapy in Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Forchhammer, H.B. (1999) The emergence and role of client perspectives in and on cancer treatment. Outlines. Critical Social Studies 1 (1): 51–58.
Foucault, M. (1985) The History of Sexuality I. New York: Vintage Books.
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Goffman, E. (1986) Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: North Eastern University Press.
Gomart, E. (2004) Surprised by methadone: In praise of drug substitution treatment in a French clinic. Body and Society 10 (2–3): 85–110.
Hänninen, S. and Paldán, L. (1983) Rethinking Ideology: A Marxist Debate. Berlin: Argument-Verlag.
Haug, F. (1999) Female Sexualisation. A Collective Work of Memory. London: Verso.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1968) Philosophy of Right. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hilden, P.K. (2003) Risk and Late Modern Health. Socialities of a Crossed-Out Pancreas. Oslo: Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo.
Holzkamp, K. (1983) Grundlegung der Psychologie. Frankfurt/M: Campus Verlag.
Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition. The Grammar of Social Conflicts. London: Polity Press.
Højrup, T. (2003) State, Culture and Life-Modes. The Foundations of Life-Mode Analysis. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Houborg, E. (2003) Producing the voice of socially excluded people. In: E. Houborg Pedersen and C. Tigerstedt (eds.) Regulating Drugs – Between Users, the Police, and Social Workers. Helsinki: Nordic Counsil for Alcohol- and Drugs Research, pp. 33–52.
Houborg, E. (2006) Stofmisbrug, metadon, subjektivering. Historiske og aktuelle fremstillinger af stofmisbrug. [Addiction, Methadone, Subjectification. Historical and Current Performances of Addiction]. Copenhagen: Copenhagen University: Department of Sociology.
Keane, H. (2002) What's Wrong with Addiction? Victoria: Melbourne University Press.
Mäkela, K., Arminen, I. and Bloomfield, K. et al (1996) Alcoholics Anonymous as a Mutual-Help Movement. Madison, Wisconsin/London: University of Wisconsin Press.
Mattingly, C. (2010) The Paradox of Hope: Journeys Through a Clinical Borderland. London: University of California Press.
Mead, G.H. (1967) Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Musaeus, P. (2005) Crafting Persons. A Socio-cultural Approach to Recognition and Apprenticeship Learning. Århus: Aarhus Universitet.
Nissen, M. (2000) Projekt Gadebørn. Et forsøg med dialogisk, bevægelig og lokalkulturel socialpædagogik med de mest udsatte unge. [Project Street Kids. An Attempt at Dialogical, Mobile, and Local-cultural Social Pedagogy with the Most Vulnerable Youth]. Frederikshavn: Dafolo.
Nissen, M. (2002) To be and not to be. The subjectivity of drug taking. Outlines 4 (2): 39–60, Available at: http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/outlines/article/view/5149/4554.
Nissen, M. (2003) Tjek-Punkt: Hverken fix eller færdigt. [Check-point. Neither fixed nor finished]. In: Tjek-Punkt (ed.) Jubilæumsskrift. Copenhagen. Københavns Kommune: Tjek-Punkt.
Nissen, M. (2004) How can ‘young drug misusers’ become ‘persons’? Presentation to the First International Symposium: Health, Humanity, and Culture – Comparative Social Practices, Malibu, Cal., October 2003. Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen [On-line]. Available at: http://mnissen.psy.ku.dk/Text/SMK03.htm.
Nissen, M. (2011) Activity theory: Legacies, standpoints, and hopes. A discussion of Andy Blunden's an interdisciplinary theory of activity. Mind, Culture & Activity 18 (4): 374–384.
Nissen, M. (2012) The Subjectivity of Participation. Articulating Social Work Practice with Youth in Copenhagen. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
O'Malley, P. and Mugford, S. (1991) The demand for intoxication commodities: Implications for the ‘war on drugs’. Social Justice 18 (4): 49–75.
Osterkamp, U. (1976) Motivationsforschung 2. Die besonderheit menschlicher Bedürfnisse – Problematik und Erkenntnisgehalt der Psychoanalyse [The Study of Motivation 2. The Specific Nature of Human Needs – Problems and Lessons from Psychoanalysis]. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag.
Philp, M. (1979) Notes on the form of knowledge in social work. The Sociological Review 27 (1): 83–112.
Rice, J.S. (1998) A Disease of One's Own. Psychotherapy, Addiction, and the Emergence of Co-Dependency. New Brunswick/London: Transaction Publishers.
Rose, N. (2007) The Politics of Life Itself. Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
Stengers, I. (1997) Power and Invention. Situating Science. Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press.
Taylor, C. (1995) The politics of recognition. In: C. Taylor (ed.) Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 225–156.
Valverde, M. (2002) Experience and truth-telling: Intoxicated autobiographies and ethical subjectivity. Outlines 4 (1): 3–18.
Williams, R.R. (1997) Hegel's Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press.
Zizek, S. (ed.) (1994) Mapping Ideology. London/New York: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
The first version of this article was drafted as a contribution to the symposium Life: Practice: Multiplicity. Socio-material Orderings and Body Politics across the 20th and 21st Century, arranged by the Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie der Lebenswissenschaften of Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, in Potsdam, Germany, July 2009.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Nissen, M. Recognising life – A study in the atheist micro-bio-politics of drugs. Subjectivity 6, 193–211 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2012.25
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2012.25