Droga, cultura y farmacolonialidad: la alteración narcográfica ed. by Lizardo Herrera and Julio Ramos (review)

Considering modernity's deep imbrication with global patterns of psychotropy, it should not be surprising that Julio Ramos—who, among other things, is known for his penetrating look at Latin America's troubled relationship with modernity—would turn his attention to the problem of drugs and intoxication. The transatlantic trade in psychoactive substances is as old as European colonization of the Americas itself, and "exotic" stimulants like tobacco played an immense role in fashioning a modern European subjectivity, as memorably expounded in Fernando Ortiz's classic Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, excerpted in this collection. These extractive patterns persist in postcolonial times, but intoxication itself is not the exclusive domain of the (neo)colonial powers, nor is it a phenomenon that is limited to the physical introduction of "foreign" objects into the body. By bringing together a diverse and fecund group of texts—some of which appear here in Spanish for the first time—that approach a set of problems from very different angles, Lizardo Herrera and Ramos take an important step toward framing interdisciplinary dialogue on the far-reaching and multivalent implications of psychotropy. This vital juxtaposition places in contact parallel discussions that have yet to fully engage with each other, such that the contribution of this volume can be summarized into three interrelated focal points, each one establishing an important nexus within the study of intoxication, culture, and violence. These are, first, the centrality of the colonial legacy in global problems of psychotropy today; second, the role of psychotropy in the formation of subjectivities; and third, cultural formations around the violence of the narcotics industry.

As indicated in its title, the collection brings to bear important Latin American perspectives on the interpenetration of colonialism and psychotropy, as the origin not only of subsequent psychotropic exploration of consciousness in the Western literary and cultural tradition, but also of modern Western subjectivities in general. In addition to Ortiz's foundational work, here we have Curtis Marez's stunning thesis that Freud's experience with cocaine—and his disavowal of Indigenous exploitation—influenced the dichotomies he theorized between mind and body, rational and irrational, Western and non-Western, facilitating the othering of faroff, racialized groups that produce consumer goods. Also included are Michael Taussig's illuminating meditation on the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, and a piece by Miriam Muñiz Varela that examines contemporary colonial exploitation in Puerto Rico under the sign of what she terms "bioeconomía."

Ortiz and Marez show us the colonial roots of patterns of subjectivity explored here by other influential thinkers, forming an important complement, for example, to Susan Buck-Morss's magisterial account of the development of an "anaesthetic" Western consciousness. Avital Ronell's "Hacia un narcoanálisis," on the other hand, highlights the destabilizing potential of the intoxication of literature, which for her, "consume drogas y trata sobre las drogas," forming a menace to public decency through its hallucinatory "señalamiento de lo que no está allí" (130, 135). Ronell, then, is well aware of the political and social multivalence of intoxication, but this aspect is foregrounded and systematized in Paul Preciado's "La era farmacopornográfica," which describes a psychotropic regime of control through psycho-sexual technologies, while pointing to the appropriation of the same as a means of salvaging a degree of autonomy. One of the merits of Droga, cultura y farmacolonialidad is indeed its inclusion of key texts by authors associated with queer theory, a critical field intensely engaged with theorizing the formation of subjectivities. Thinkers like Preciado and Mel Chen have been foremost in thinking toxicity as otherness, and Herrera and Ramos note in their introduction that "la droga … es capaz de trastornar algunos de los … aspectos de la identidad que se piensan fundamentales o esenciales del sujeto que la consume" (11). In a queered paradigm like Preciado's, in which a subject is always...