Drugs as War, Trauma and Repetition

• In Event: Slaves Are Not Called: The Impact of Anthony Farley in Thinking Black Life and Law

Abstract

Anthony Paul Farley’s theory of "Law as Trauma and Repetition" in his pivotal essay of the same name theorizes the antagonistic relationship between Blackness and the Law as an outcome of Anti-Blackness. The trauma and repetition of the Law’s assumptive logics function to reproduce Black death as slavery’s repetitious perfection. In this paper, I follow a trajectory of Black sound and war starting from Jimi Hendrix’s famous “Star Spangled Banner” rendition to Juice WRLD’s “Legend” to reflect on Farley’s theory of Law as an entry into a conversation about the war on drugs as a war preconditioned by the elaboration of the Law as Trauma and Repetition. In addition, I consider how Law, rather than being simply Trauma and Repetition, is, as Michel Foucault states of politics: “War by other means.” In highlighting the War on Drugs, drawing on and placing side by side, the work of Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers and Anthony Paul Farley, I attempt to theorize both the meaning of War and the meaning of Drugs in relation to Black life and death. In the end, I argue that War and Drugs meet at common deconstructive location, namely, the refutation of the Maxim of Life. The suicidality at the heart of both iterations require us to re-examine this Maxim of Life and consider in which ways this Maxim functions as a Law, which not only facilitates the ongoing reproduction of War and Drug Addiction, but elides the crucible of Trauma built in its wake

Author

• John D Gillespie, University of California-Irvine