(No) Smoking

Abstract

Whereas smoking was once linked both to sexuality and transcendence, smoking is now correlated with medicalized death. Smoking is unhealthy because health and sex are redefined as secular rather than transcendental conduct. Freud worried about the health of civilization but did not analyse his own addiction to cigars whose smoke enveloped the practice of psychoanalysis. In the character of Zeno the paradox of the pleasure principle is reconnected to its `beyond' through the mother's complicity in the child's original theft of fire. This stolen memory in turn underwrites Zeno's adult discovery of the inexhaustible pleasure of smoking each cigarette as the last cigarette, borrowing life from death.