Affect and subjectivation in Hanif Kureishi’s novel The black album

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the dynamics between affects and subjectivation in Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Black Album, focusing on the narrative perspectives associated with the use of illicit drugs. The theoretical discussion draws on the contributions of thinkers such as Canguilhem (2009), Cohen (2003), Deleuze (2019), Latour (2008), Rolnik (2007, 2021) and Rose (2001). Critical studies of the novel highlight that in the figuration of migrants, especially as far as the protagonist Shahid is concerned, two alternative cultural frames of reference are connected, liberalism and Islamic religious fundamentalism. The use of illicit drugs, understood as part of British liberal culture, appears as one of the equalizing points of these social codes, considering violence, destruction and monoculturalism as their common characteristics. This statement is problematized, suspending moral judgment on the consumption of illicit drugs. Possibilities of dissent are traced in the text, searching for other ways of reading it and the world it represents. It is understood that in order to know how bodies are affected, how differences are (counter)posed, it is necessary to analyze their constitutive, circumstantial relationships, without dwelling on the intersections of social and individual narratives. For this, it is necessary to map the inhuman circuits in which they are set in motion, to understand the body as a network of relationships, which apprehends the world through two simultaneous and complementary ways: perception (coded by culture and communicable) and affection (unformed and unspeakable). Any element that composes the body-agency, the rave party, religion, ecstasy, pop music, wine or literature, emerges as a type of pharmacon, poison-medicine, depending on the disposition of the bodies, its uses and its contexts.