1. These trials took place in 1965 and 1966 respectively. See the prefatory material included in the Black Cat edition of Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1966). Earlier, in 1959, when sections of Naked Lunch were to be published in the University of Chicago's literary magazine, Chicago Review , the faculty advisors suppressed the forthcoming issue; the student editors resigned and founded the independent magazine Big Table , which was prosecuted on and cleared of obscenity charges for publishing excerpts from Naked Lunch. See Michael B. Goodman, Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs' Naked Lunch , and Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw 295-98.

2. See the prefatory material included in the 1961 edition of Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1961), in which Joyce's lawyer Morris L. Ernst claims that the Ulysses case "marks a turning point. It is a body blow for the censors. . . . Writers . . . may now describe basic human functions without fear of the law . . . [and] it should henceforth be impossible for the censors legally to sustain an attack

against any book of artistic integrity, no matter how frank and forthright it may be" (v-vi). The difficulty, of course, lies in the phrase "artistic integrity." Ernst also draws a parallel between the Ulysses decision and the repeal of Prohibition: "Perhaps the intolerance which closed our distilleries was the intolerance which decreed that basic human functions had to be treated in books in a furtive, leering, roundabout manner'' (vi). If he's right, then the legal opposition Burroughs faced in the late fifties and the sixties constituted the literary incarnation of the legislative anti-drug hysteria Burroughs chronicled in Junky .

3. See Elaine Dutka's article on Chernin, "The Lunches Won't Be Naked."

4. Cronenberg quoted in Ira Silverberg, ed., Everything is Permitted: The Making of Naked Lunch (London: Grafton, 1992), 61; see also 13 and 57.

5. The script has been published in France: David Cronenberg, Le Scénario du "Festin Nu ." It gives no writing credit to Burroughs, and therefore the Cronenberg film cannot be treated as a collaboration. Brion Gysin wrote a different screenplay for a Naked Lunch film, with Burroughs's help, in the early seventies; a small section of it is published in Burroughs and Gysin, The Third Mind 150-58, and another section in Gysin and Terry Wilson's Here to Go: Planet R-101 131-57.

6. See also Cronenberg, Scénario du "Festin Nu" 102-3.

7. The quotation is taken from the novel ( NL 216), but it is taken completely out of context.

8. Cronenberg, Scénario du "Festin Nu" 114, my translation.

9. Cronenberg, Scénario du "Festin Nu" 11, my translation.

10. Naked Lunch was not composed using the strict cut-up method, which functions at the level of syntax; instead, it was composed by juxtaposing separate, self-contained routines, according to a kind of narrative-level cut-up.

11. A similar formalist neutralization has allowed Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs to be defended within the very academy that they were, at least in part, meant to mock and disturb. A "formal" portrait of Burroughs in black tie and tails, taken by Mapplethorpe, faces the title page of Burroughs and Bockris's With William Burroughs, a collection of interviews.

12. See, for example, Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language 17: "The text is a practice that could be compared to political revolution: the one brings about in the subject what the other introduces into society."

13. Burroughs, Introduction to Silverberg, ed., Everything is Permitted: The Making of Naked Lunch 15.

14. The first quote is from Burroughs and Odier, 69; the second from Burroughs, "My Purpose is to Write for the Space Age" in Skerl and Lydenberg, eds., William S. Burroughs at the Front, 268.

15. This citation is actually a free rendering of proposition 3.328 of Wittgenstein's Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] 56-57: "Wird ein Zeichen nicht gebraucht, so ist es bedeutungslos. Das ist der Sinn der Devise Occams" ("If a sign is not necessary then it is meaningless. That is the meaning of Occam's razor").

16. Burroughs uses ellipses quite often in Naked Lunch and later works, as Pynchon does in Gravity's Rainbow . Burroughs's ellipses consist of three or four periods separated by spaces. To avoid confusion, I will keep ellipses added to

quotations to a minimum. When added ellipses are unavoidable, they will appear in brackets to distinguish them from Burroughs's own ellipses. Burroughs also imitates various dialects in print, often through conscious misspelling or distortion of syntax that anticipates his cut-up work of the sixties; all of the quotations in this book have been carefully checked against their sources in Burroughs's novel and the spelling and syntactic "errors" that remain are in the original text.

17. This point on Burroughs's trajectory can be fruitfully compared to Joyce's strategy of "silence, exile and cunning." Joyce went into continental exile in protest against the parochial philistinism of Irish culture that threatened to constrain his literary experiments (and, to a lesser extent, against the legal sanctions that threatened to constrain his unorthodox living arrangements with his "wife," Nora); see Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, revised edition 109-10. He was never explicitly threatened with violence or incarceration, as Burroughs often was.

18. Actually, there is a third alternative: to remain within the superficially fragmentary aesthetic of modernity, which is the course Adorno himself took.

19. On this organization of the subject and its vicissitudes through recorded history, see the three volumes of Foucault's History of Sexuality, as well as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences and Discipline and Punish . Louis Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy also discusses the interpellation of the subject as the image of the capitalist social structure.

20. Horkheimer and Adorno have a significantly different idea of addiction than Burroughs does, however, as their discussion of the "Lotus Eaters" episode of the Odyssey demonstrates: "This kind of idyll, which recalls the happiness of narcotic drug addicts reduced to the lowest level in obdurate social orders, who use their drugs to help them endure the unendurable, is impermissible for the adherents of the rationale of self-preservation. . . . [T]he tempting power ascribed to [the drug] is none other than that of regression to the phase of collecting the fruits of the earth and of the sea—a stage more ancient . . . than all production . . . a state in which the reproduction of life is independent of conscious self-preservation, and the bliss of the fully contented is detached from the advantages of rationally planned nutrition" ( DE 62-64). Burroughs would perhaps accept the idea of addiction as regression, even to a vegetative, precapitalist state, but hardly to a primitive state of ''bliss." On the contrary, in his experience the addict's life is much closer to the mechanization Horkheimer and Adorno discern in the reproduction of labor: the addict, particularly the heroin or morphine addict, has no affective existence whatsoever and is virtually indistinguishable from a corpse: "Morphine have depressed my hypothalamus, seat of libido and emotion, and since the front brain acts only at second hand with back-brain titillation, being a vicarious type citizen can only get his kicks from behind, I must report virtual absence of cerebral event. I am aware of your presence, but since it has for me no affective connotation, my affect having been disconnect by the junk man for nonpayment, I am not innarested in your doings. Go or come . . . but the Dead and the Junky don't care" ( NL 231).

21. See Lukács, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" in History and Class Consciousness, especially section 3, "The Standpoint of the Proletariat."

22. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, especially parts 2 and 3.

23. Burroughs dabbled in anthropology while a student at Harvard and knew enough about the field to make inside jokes about it. For example, in the midst of a passage on the fatalism of South American Brujos, a parenthesis demands a "straightjacket for Herr [Franz] Boas [one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology]—trade Joke—nothing so maddens an anthropologist as Primitive Man" ( NL 110). Naked Lunch also contains many parenthetical asides that purport to explain, objectively, obscure social practices; for example, "smother parties" are "a rural English custom designed to eliminate aged and bedfast dependents," and ''leading out" is "an African practice[ . . . ]of taking old characters out into the jungle and leaving them there" ( NL 10). These asides take the place of the futile glossary with which Junky concluded.

24. The resemblances between the critiques of Reason by Sade and Burroughs extend beyond their approaches to criminality; a common point of interest, which I cannot address here, is their shared belief that "We have just as good grounds for denying woman a title to be part of our race as we have for refusing to acknowledge the ape as our brother" (Sade, cited in DE 110). If Burroughs is less inclined to deny humanity's kinship with apes (see for example NL 86-87 and elsewhere), he is no less inclined to view women as a separate species.

25. Coleridge's Mariner is a figure recurring throughout Naked Lunch who seems to exemplify what Burroughs sees as the relation between writer and reader; consider this passage, from the "Campus of Interzone University" routine:

consider the Ancient Mariner without curare, lasso, bulbocapnine or straightjacket, albeit able to capture and hold a live audience. . . . What is his hurmp gimmick? [. . . ]He does not, like so-called artists at this time, stop just anybody thereby inflicting unsent for boredom and working random hardship. . . . He stops those who cannot choose but hear owing to already existing relation between the Mariner (however ancient) and the uh Wedding Guest. . . .

"What the Mariner actually says is not important. . . . He may be rambling, irrelevant, even crude and rampant senile. But something happens to the Wedding Guest like happens in psychoanalysis when it happens if it happens[. . . . ]an analyst of my acquaintance does all the talking—patients listen patiently or not[. . . ]He is illustrating at some length that nothing can ever be accomplished on the verbal level[. . . .] You can find out more about someone by talking than by listening ." (NL 87-88)

This passage implies that Naked Lunch, itself apparently rambling and crude, may be intended to reveal more about its readers in their various reactions to it than about its writer in his construction of it. See Anthony Channell Hilfer, "Mariner and Wedding Guest in William Burroughs' Naked Lunch ."

26. Horkheimer and Adorno's (implicit) attitude toward homosexuality diverges rather sharply from Burroughs's. Whereas for Burroughs, at this point in his career, homosexuality is capable of being both radical (in its challenge to the sexual division of labor on which capitalism is founded) and reactionary (in its continued resemblance to heterosexual norms of subjectivity and interpersonal control), in Horkheimer and Adorno's view homosexuality remains within a horizon of pure reactionary psychopathology, as a characteristic of Fascism. Consider this remark, from the "Notes and Drafts" section of Dialectic of Enlightenment:

This hostility—which was once carefully fostered by the worldly and spiritual rulers—felt by the lowly against the life which held out nothing for them and with which they

could establish a homosexual and paranoiac relationship by murdering, was always an essential instrument of the art of government. (234)

And this description:

Man surrenders to man, cold, bleak and unyielding, as woman did before him. Man turns into woman gazing up at her master. In the Fascist collective with its teams and labor camps, everyone spends his days from the tenderest years in solitary confinement. The seed of homosexuality is sown. (252)

Further study is necessary to determine to what extent this attitude problematizes Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of the sexual division of labor articulated elsewhere in Dialectic of Enlightenment .

27. U.S. Supreme Court, A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney Gen. of Mass., cited in the decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in its decision deeming Naked Lunch not obscene (NL viii).

28. See Lydenberg, chapter 2, "Notes from the Orifice: Language and the Body in Naked Lunch ."

29. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation 34-35. Translation by Daniel W. Smith forthcoming. These two passages also appear, in a very similar context, in A Thousand Plateaus 150, 153.

30. This "point of intersection" is narrated in Burroughs's short autobiographical text "Exterminator!" (1966), included in the 1973 collection of the same title.