Cinematic Heroin and Narcotic Modernity

Abstract

This article draws on Deleuze's thinking of the image to develop a materialist aesthetic of the heroin film and explores the continuuum between the phenomenon of heroin and the images ordinarily held to variously represent it. As an alternative to understanding cinema on the basis of 'representation', it appeals to the deleuzian idea of the whole (Le Tout)as 'metacinema' to expose how the modernity of narcotics (in aprticulat heroin) is charcaterized by extensive 'narcotic effects' which are discernible and felt throughout modern culture and society across a range of cultural forms