Intoxication, Modernity, and Colonialism

This book depicts how Freuds cocaine and Benjamins hashish illustrate two critiques of modernity and two 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 its variant psychoanalysis in hashishs mimesis. In addition, as part of the history of colonialism, both drugs generated two distinct colonial discourses and, consequently, two different understandings of the emancipatory powers of pleasure, the unconscious, and dreams. After all, great ideas don't liberate; they intoxicate.