1. This introductory text, "Deposition: Testimony concerning a Sickness," was originally published in Evergreen Review 4.11 (Jan./Feb. 1960) and was included with the Grove Press edition (1962 and later) of the novel; the original Olympia Press edition of the novel did not contain an introduction.

2. See Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, chapter 3.

3. On the modernization of urban space, particularly New York City, see Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity , chapter 5.

4. On Burroughs's use of his mother's maiden name, see Lydenberg, Word Cultures 167-72.

5. As Burroughs notes in the glossary, "M.S." is morphine sulphate, a "croaker" is a doctor, and a "script" is a prescription for regulated drugs. "Script" in particular enters Burroughs's textual economy; we will trace some of its vicissitudes in the chapters that follow.

6. Even Foucault's Benthamesque panoptic disciplinary society is discontinuous in this sense: the "guards" cannot watch all of the "prisoners" all of the time, though the "prisoners" cannot know exactly when they are under direct observation. See Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , part 3, chapter 3. If one were to imagine a form of police control that was not rhythmic, not pulsed, but continuous, one would have to pattern it along the lines laid down by George Orwell in 1984.

7. Burroughs comments extensively on these laws in Burroughs and Odier, The Job 147-49, as well as in Burroughs and Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker , and returns to the subject in light of the "War on

Drugs" in "Afterthoughts on a Deposition," the new (1992) introduction to Naked Lunch , 15.

8. For examples of the characterization of drug addicts in the contemporary mass media, see Harry J. Anslinger and William F. Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics. The title of one of Anslinger's later books gives a good indication of his perspective on addiction: The Protectors: The Heroic Story of the Narcotics Agents, Citizens, and Officials in Their Unending, Unsung Battles against Organized Crime in America and Abroad. Most historians and police officials believe now that traditional organized crime (i.e., the Mafia) did not become involved in drug trafficking until the late sixties or early seventies. Anslinger, the U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics in the fifties and sixties, came to represent the inhuman face of control to Burroughs, who often quotes Anslinger's dictum that "the laws must reflect society's disapproval of the addict" (in The Ticket That Exploded 216 and elsewhere).

9. In this, Burroughs marks a temporary disagreement with Samuel Beckett, for whom the relation is exactly the opposite: the long-sought sequel to speech, for Beckett, is silence, though it is a silence that, in pure form, may be impossible to achieve. Later in his career, Burroughs will reverse himself on this issue and claim that the silence that comes after words is "The most desirable state" (Burroughs, "Interview" in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews 150). This is not to say that one of these perspectives on the relation of speech and silence is radical and the other conservative, but rather that this relation itself is crucial to the work of important contemporary writers other than Burroughs. Burroughs reflects on Beckett's work and declares himself closer to Proust than to Beckett in ''Beckett and Proust," in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays 182-86.

10. Deleuze, preface to Guy Hocquenghem, L'Après-mai des faunes: Volutions 10. My translation.

11. Recall that "connection" is another term for "pusher," although it is not included in Burroughs's glossary at the end of Junky.

12. "Confessions" of this kind are scattered throughout contemporary texts on psychopathology, civil rights, and religious tolerance. A number of them are collected in the volume edited by A. M. Krich, The Homosexuals As Seen by Themselves and Thirty Authorities; see Part 1, "As Seen by Themselves," particularly the first-person narratives "Autobiography of a Homosexual Writer" (70-74) and "Crisis in the Life of a Homosexual" (80-84). This volume also reprints texts on homosexuality (understood throughout as referring to both male and female homosexuality) by Freud, Jung, Sandor Ferenczi, and others. Burroughs does not cite Krich's volume to my knowledge, but he does refer, quite disparagingly, to Donald W. Cory's The Homosexual in America in a letter to Ginsberg: the book is "Enough to turn a man's gut. This citizen says a queer learns humility, learns to turn the other cheek, and returns love for hate. Let him learn that sort of thing if he wants to. I never swallowed the other cheek routine, and I hate the stupid bastards who won't mind their own business. They can die in agony for all I care. . . . I could never be a liberal except in a situation where the majority was made up of people I like" (Burroughs, Letters 1945-1959 105-6).

13. No less an authority than Norman Mailer has said, apropos of Burroughs's aggressively uneffeminate homosexuality, that "Burroughs is a real

man. . . . I remember when we read the first sections of Naked Lunch we felt so relieved. We knew a great man had spoken" (quoted in Burroughs and Bockris, With William Burroughs , xix).

14. When Burroughs recycles this routine in his later works, he attributes very different words of wisdom to Bobo: "as a wise old black faggot said to me years ago: 'Some people are shits, darling.'" See "My Own Business," among other texts, in The Adding Machine , 15-18.

15. See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet , especially her comparative analysis of Racine's Esther in chapter 1. George Chauncey claims that "Originally, the concept of gay coming out spoofed the debutante's; coming out didn't mean disclosing one's homosexuality to straights, but rather, it meant initiation into gay networks" (Wayne Koestenbaum's paraphrase from his review of Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 in the Los Angeles Time Book Review 7 Aug. 1994: 2). This would be closer to Burroughs's experience as it appears in Queer. Chauncey also examines the liminal spaces of the prewar gay world: the bathhouses, parks, and bars that paralleled the underdetermined spaces of the junky that I examined above.

16. Burroughs, "Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs," originally published in the British Journal of Addiction 53 (1957): 2 and reprinted as an appendix to the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch , 253.

17. Burroughs has often said of his writing, "Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction." See, for example, Burroughs and Bockris, With William Burroughs 28.

18. Burroughs, statement included in the catalogue of his painting exhibition at Cleto Polcina (Rome, 1989), quoted in Barry Miles, William Burroughs, El Hombre Invisible: A Portrait 241. "Nagual" is Carlos Castaneda's term for the unpredictable, magical universe that coexists with the "tonal," or causal and predictable, universe of science.