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Issue 71 now available

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Dedicated to the memory of Charles Melman, issue 71 collects together in one volume the rich contribution made to The Letter by Charles Melman over the last 30 years. This issue also contains several articles by Charles Melman appearing in English translation for the first time.

Rik Loose

Libido and Toxic Substance

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages 32 - 43

LIBIDO AND TOXIC SUBSTANCE

Rik Loose

If writing, according to the king and under the sun produces the opposite effect from what is expected, if the pharmacon is pernicious, it is so because it doesn't come from around here. It comes from afar, it is external or alien to the living, which, is the right-here of the inside, to logos as the zoon it claims to assist or relieve.

J.Derrida in Plato's Pharmacy

Introduction

Despite Freud's tendency to deny this, there can be little doubt that the Cocaine Episode was an important part of his scientific and therapeutic work. Elsewhere we have proposed a reading of Freud's Cocaine Papers which considers them as a beginning of the Freudian adventure.[1]