Herman+Herlinghaus+-+Narco-epics

Herlinghaus describes a matrix of possibilities stemming from possible combinations of psychoactivity and cultures, a field at one "biopoetic" and "biopolitical ."

"Both speech and writing are susceptible to being "overturned" by the pharmakon, or to becoming "pharmakological media" themselves." 159

Said's reading of Vico: to begin is to think in terms of history and scale when the present encroaches ("overintoxication due to consumption and all kinds of pressing anxieties in our 'age of insanity'" 161) and restricts perception and imagination

Of the critics and Amalfitano: "The need for an inferior Other complements their search for a superior object of desire, much like the tidal movement reveals, and turns invisible, the face of the dark earth beneath the water." 162

"Those substances and artifacts that can simultaneously unleash forces of poisoning and curing are of the highest value among a contemporary intellectual elite (e.g. Bolaño's European "Critics") as well as for those agents who can compensate - in the best of cases - for their lower status with knowing about pharmaka." 163

Amalfitano "judges 'great works' by dint of their imperfection, their zest to become involved with poisonous, intoxicating experiences, to the extent that these can shatter (the imagination of) life itself." 165

There is... an awareness of violence as deeply ingrained in the history of the globalized earth, as well as in its present-time pulsations that are, insanely, saturated with boredom and the most pointless of routines. Thus Bolaño is skeptical of the aesthetic "pharmaka" of sublime horror, or pathetic drama, or other cathartic dispositifs in relationship to violence." 168

classrooms as spaces for transgression

"There is a 'profane mysticism' at work in Amalfitano's situation, one in which his alien, northern Mexican environment acquires a 'plasticity' that his learned philosophical ideas and ordinary knowledge would have prevented him from perceiving." 171

"the trope of the 'nihil volo' - that special disposition in the mystics' experience in which unflinching will unites with an 'emptiness' of purpose, thus opening an enhanced subjective perception of the things or forces to come..." 174 References Michel de Certeau's "Mystic Speech"

"Paraphrasing Michail Romm's film title, //The Ordinary Fascism,// one might say that Amalfitano feels the //ordinary presence//, the atrocious immanence, of the Santa Teresa femicides (in Spanish "feminicidios"), even in his private and academic environments." 175

Bolaño apparently collaborated closely with Sergio González Rodríguez, author of //Huesos en el desierto//. He is a character in 2666 and is asked by Azucena Esquivel Plata to "write about this, keep writing about this" (631) followed by mention of another killing "closed after three days of generally halfhearted investigations." (633)

On the beating of the Pakistani driver: "goes beyond recasting those academics as violent perpetrators, which means that he does more than expose how the respectable and educated can step into the abyss of punishing an 'uncivilized' intruder, thus arriving at the verge of their humanistic habitus, and meeting their colonial unconscious. The occurence is linked to the novel's deeper core of violence . . . the matter of intoxication through violence . . . What can we make of Bolaño's exposure of the 'group orgasm' of the critics?" 189

man/fruit = amphibian = indeterminate = pharmakon

The violent 'real' has an 'unreality effect.' Beneath this paradox lurks the most difficult aspect of violence - it's disguised core. The visible part, increasingly taken care of by corporativized media is not necessarily what helps to gain experience and insight. How can we manage to step back without losing sight of what is most striking." 209

Teresa Margolles

"Brute violence, when it silences resistance, has a tendency to enter a delirium of being 'god-like,' spreading the poison of its own myth." 213

Bolaño's "occasional obsession for configurations that help articulate violence poetically, which is a matter of countering the powers of the oppressive "real." 214

Melissa W. Wright. "Disposable Women and other Myths of Global Capitalism."

Epifanio, ordained to uphold on be half of 'law,' actually champions an authority through which the ' separation of law and law-preserving violence is suspended.'" 224 Quoting Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence."

Haas perceives in Epifanio, "evil from somone who knows how to move - and to use violence - without showing any hint of emotion. It seems as if this is, on Haas's part, also an intuition about the existence of a totalitarian underground - a "system" underneath the system - against which declaration of innocence are useless." 225

"Bolaño seems to imply that it is not about impunity . . . How could the murders be explained through the failures in a system of order and punishment, if the mightiest players belonging to that system capitalize on them? In this light, 'impunity' itself might seem to be a euphemism, suggesting that there would indeed be a concerted, profoundly ethical as well as integrally structural interest in punishing the perpetrators of the crimes. Perhaps the novel is about infamy on a yet-to-be imagined scale in late modern existence." 231

"2666 avoids the common responses of pity and compassion. It does not give in to a longing for relief; it gives the tortured spirit not rest. Nor has Bolaño created another metaphysics of evil, an ontology of absolute darkness. In his book, the answers are all there; they do not have to be given, since the actual problem is not finding 'truth,' but rather the burial of truth. We are dealing with the imagination of a state in which the main driving forces are fear, ethical exhaustion, and an avalanche of 'common responses' located between dissociation and repression, forces that in one way or another have adapted to the seemingly hermetic grid of 'pure' and hidden violence of different kinds." 231

Jorge Herlade. "Para Roberto Bolaño."