A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing

This work argues that Thomas De Quincey’s literary output, which is both a symptom and an effect of his addictions to opium and writing, plays an important and unacknowledged role in the development of modern and modernist forms of subjectivity. It also shows that intoxication, whether in the strict medical sense or in its less technical meaning (‘strong excitement’, ‘trance’, ‘ecstasy’), is central to the ways in which modernity, literary modernity in particular, functions and defines itself. In its theoretical and practical implications, intoxication symbolizes and often comes to constitute the condition of the alienated artist in the age of the market. The author argues that through his confessional writings De Quincey is in many ways responsible for defining the modern self, that is, a post-Romantic form of subjectivity based on transgressive techniques, simulation, and bricolage.