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.
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Marcus Boon, The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (2002), pp. 28-29Novalis
Novalis can thus be seen as one of the originators of a modern gnostic approach to drugs, in which nature is abandoned for negative, transcendental space. Gnosticism is a vast and diffuse subject, but I will use the work “Gnostic” in this chapter 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.Novalis
We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them.
Erwin Schrodinger
And now his own history has been written. What does one learn from these books? Chiefly that Foucault's relativistic outlook can be applied to Foucault himself. He used to say that the 19th century was to Marxism what water is to a fish. Increasingly his own work makes sense only when seen as a product of the Sixties. Not that Foucault would have denied this. He never suggested that he wasn't an interested being too. But one should ask of a body of philosophical work that it has a longer shelf life than a couple of decades. Nine years after his death his achievements, such as they are, are so much historical jetsam, their final worth little more than sweet Foucault.
Michel Foucault
Tattoos are cool because they don’t belong on your body, but you put it there to say something about yourself. Much like my rolls of fat. That shit does not belong on a human body. And I put it there to say something about me. I don’t like fruit. I don’t like it! Long bike ride? I’m out. Hot dog eating contest? I’m listening.
Dave Attell
Self-painting is a further development of the art of painting. The surface of an image has lost its function as the sole means of conveying expression. It was taken back to its roots,to the wall,to the object,to the living being,to the human body. By using my body as a means of conveying expression,the result created is a happening captured by a camera as it progresses,and an experience which viewers can share.
Brus,Gunter
Novalis
Novin, Guity
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