"...I would say that what now takes on particular and macroscopic forms, without being absolutely new, is this paradox of a 'crisis,' as we superficially call it, of naturalness. This alleged 'crisis' also manifests itself, for example, throughout the problems of biotechnology and throughout the new and so-called artificial possibilities for dealing with life, from birth to death, as if there had once been some standard of naturalness and as if the boundary between nature and its other were susceptible to objectification...in certain always singular circumstances, the recourse to dangerous experimentation with what we call 'drugs' may be guided by a desire to think this alleged boundary from both sides at once, and thus to think this boundary as such, in any case to approach its formation, its simulation, or its simulacrum as it takes form...this experience may be sought with or without 'drugs,' at least without any 'narcotic' 'classified' as such by the law. We will always have unclassified or unclassifiable supplements of drugs or narcotics. Basically everybody has his own, and I don't just mean stuff that is patently comestible, smokable, or shootable. As you know, the introjection or incorporation of the other has so many other resources, strategems, and detours...It can always invent new orifices, in addition to and beyond those, for example the mouth, which we think we naturally possess. Besides, orality does not open up only to receive, but also, as they say, to emit, and we should ask ourselves whether drug addiction consists simply and essentially in receiving and taking in, rather than in 'expressing' and pushing outside, for example in a certain form of speaking or of singing, whether or not we drink what we 'spit out.'"
Derrida, Jacques. 'The Rhetoric of Drugs', in Points...Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others. (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 1995), p. 245.
