Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Texts and Contexts) [signed]

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.