Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania

Avital Ronell asks why "there is no culture without drug culture." Tracing and tracking the zones of modern dependencies, 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 addictive mappings that are culturally accepted - an insatiable appetite for romance novels, for instance, and romance itself as well as the satellite technologies of our everyday existence.