From Thomas De Quincey to Will Self to Arthur Rimbaud, drugs have given rise to a wealth of literature. Antidotes to bourgeois moderation, whether they express excess or disorder, attest to a not-without-danger desire to engage in creative introspection. Rimbaud, “the man of the wind plants”, was one of the first to demand, in his famous collection of prose poems A season in hell (1873), the implementation of a “reasoned disturbance of all the senses” conducive, according to him, to poetic creation. Often associated with the image of the cursed poet, it nevertheless had an ambiguous relationship with substances that modify perception.
Many people did the same. Some have made narcotics a key focus of their work, others have seen them only as an uninteresting mirage or a refuge from depression or physical suffering. A minority found in psychotropic drugs a door to a greater dimension. Between self-knowledge and self-forgetfulness, the line is sometimes tenuous.
This article is taken from “Le Monde special issue – Drug traffickers: their networks, their crimes, the response”November-December 2024, on sale at newsstands or online by visiting our store website.
The German writer Ernst Jünger, fascinated by extreme experiences, perfectly summarizes this ambiguity in Approaches, drugs and drunkennessan important work published in 1970: “ Forgetting something, fleeing from something and on the other hand wanting to achieve, gain something, it is between these two poles where the whole problem of drunkenness moves. » We take drugs out of pain, sadness, curiosity, a taste for transgression as much as to open ourselves to a different form of consciousness and thought, neither cognitive nor discursive. For Jacques Rigaut, one of the most active agitators of the Parisian Dadaist group, known for its nihilistic spirit at the beginning of the 20th centurymy century, the use of narcotics simply lacks any justification.
Alice on top
Yes on the 16thmy century, Rabelais already mentioned mind-altering substances in his writings, Thomas De Quincey, self-proclaimed “Pope of the Church of Opium »He is the first writer in the world to have discovered without embellishment the recreational use of a drug, in this case laudanum, an alcoholic tincture of opium very popular in Victorian times. His Confessions of an English opium user, Published in 1822, it marks the beginning of a long series of imitations. Balzac was inspired, for example, by Alfred de Musset’s somewhat fanciful translation of the text to write a story (Opium) in 1830.
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