Marcus Boon

Marcus Bernard Boon (born 1963) is an English scholar and university professor.

Quotes

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

I am writing from within a cultural space in which it is music, and not literature, that is the center of activity, in a way that very few people besides Antonin Artaud would have claimed sixty years ago. I am not saying this in order to use the new to terrorize the old, but because I feel in my heart that it's true, when I examine what has been most valuable, most powerful to me.
- Prologue, p. 3

Novalis wrote about the development of a new body that would overcome the "sicknesses" of this one. Although such talk is usually labeled "science fiction" in the absence of any serious proposals for how to construct a new body, the use of drugs can be seen precisely as achieving this transformation through chemical means. Narcotics, viewed this way, belong to what Michel Foucault calls the technologies of self.
- Ch. 1, pp. 28-29

I will use the word "Gnostic"...to describe a worldview that sees the material world and nature, as a fallen, corrupt, inauthentic place, and man as an alien, trapped within it. To escape, man seeks the flash of gnosis, or knowledge, in the form of a transmission from another cosmos or transcendental dimension in which the truth resides, and which is in fact man’s real home. This transmission can take various forms, but drugs, as Novalis uses them, are certainly one of them: opium may come from nature but its essence belongs to the transcendental night, and by taking the drug, the user is able to negate his or her own body and environment, temporarily.
When nature and the human body are abandoned, a new, Gnostic theory of heath becomes necessary, since "natural health" is precisely what is to be abandoned. This new notion of health would consist precisely in an organism’s ability to sustain an abandonment or overcoming of the body. But the body does not naturally sustain such a state of "health"; in fact, the word we use to describe this state is "sickness." Drugs appear in Romanticism as one of the more obvious ways of producing, or sustaining, this unnatural state of health—a revolt against the limits of the animal body.
- Ch. 1, pp. 30-31

Daumal's work raises the question as to whether anesthetics should even be considered psychoactive in the traditional sense, since they are literally transcendental in their effects, inducing at the most potent doses unconsciousness rather than hallucinations. Insight comes from exposure to the realm of unconsciousness itself rather than from chemical modulation of the structures of consciousness. Anesthetics produce a deterioration of the organism and its functions, which then results in unusual mental experiences, which can be linked to other experiences of the limits of consciousness, including concussion, exhaustion, and a variety of near-death experiences.
- Ch. 2, p. 116