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Judith Butler's task of rethinking gender leads her to question the concept of the "body" itself as a construct, an interrogation that perhaps shares concerns with the "crucial project" of electronic and drug culture to which Ronell refers:
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The "body" often appears to be a passive medium that is signified by an inscription from a cultural source figured as "external"
to that body. Any theory of the culturally constructed body, however, ought to question the "body" as a construct of suspect
generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse.
(Butler, 129)
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In Butler's theory, the "body" is inscribed by technologies of representation, external cultural forces which not merely encrypt, but by that act of encryption create the very text, the "body", which is to be read. And yet the phrase in theory contains the promise of that which is external, outside of theory. Beyond the sanctity of academicizing the body, of learning the "body" in cyberspace, through discourse as well as social intercourse, is it possible to evade the seemingly inevitable recuperation and maintenance of inside/out on an a priori body?
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In contrast to the narcissistic concern "How can I `know' myself," Ronell suggests that the project of drugs, chemical prostheses for the cyborgs, is excessive: "drugs open up the gulf of extra-erotic, extra-epistemic desire" (33). The "algebra of need" that is addiction is out of control. For this reason, "we" hold something against the addict:
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We do not object to the drug user's pleasure, per se, but we cannot abide the fact that his [sic?] is a pleasure taken in an experience without truth. Pleasure and play are not in themselves condemned unless they are inauthentic and void of truth. (Jacques Derrida, "The Rhetoric of Drugs: An Interview with Jacques Derrida", interview by Jean Michel Herpieu, et al., in 1-800, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1991):66)
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