L ea d art US 24 /25 F A L L · W I N T E R 2 0 0 8

b e n j a m i n b e n n e t t ’s

INTRANSITIVE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY

and the
problem of personal identity

artUS#24Columns.indd 31 11/27/08 11:49:30 AM

Intransitive Autobiography: Naked Lunch
and the Problem of Personal Identity
IF ONE OF us, one of the guild of literary scholars, were
asked to situate William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959)
in literary tradition, he or she would almost certainly think
first of the idea of carnival, of Kristeva and Bakhtin, of
Rabelais obviously, and given the motif of shape-changing,
eventually of Dante and Ovid. But these contextualizations
do not say much about the specific nature of Burroughs’s
project, which, it seems to me, combines serious philo-
sophical ambitions with an unwavering focus upon the
concrete, and carries out this combination in a manner
that practically defines what we think of as the “literary,”
defines it so completely as to present it, in the end, as a
target for revolutionizing.
The traditions that matter in this regard are traditions
of autobiography. The first involves the type of confession.
Rousseau, in his version, claims at the very beginning that
when the last trumpet sounds, he will present himself to
God with his book in his hand and expect reward simply
for having been mercilessly accurate in portraying him-
self. Thus he distinguishes his confession from that of
Augustine, who confesses precisely that his self-knowl-
edge had not been sufficient, that without God’s merciful
intervention he could not have hoped
for redemption. And Burroughs manages
Art actually to combine the two positions.
The text of Naked Lunch “itself,” apart
Project from the various authorial appendages
by printed with it, is a confession in the man-
ner of Rousseau in that it goes out of its
Jesse way not to conceal what might be consid-
ered shameful or degrading in its subject.
Finley Burroughs even out-Rousseaus Rousseau
Reed by insisting, “There is only one thing a
writer can write about: what is in front of
his senses at the moment of writing” (184).
Rousseau writes what he remembers;
Burroughs claims to “have no precise
memory of writing” (199) what became Naked Lunch; he
simply publishes “notes” that reproduce their experiential
content without even the mediation of memory. And yet, at
the same time, if we broaden our view to include the para-
textual appendages, Naked Lunch instantly becomes an
J"F"R﹐"I ’!﹒﹒﹒﹐ €€-€‚﹐   -" ﹒Ž"﹒ "
& -""-﹐ UV- P﹐ ”€  €"﹒ C" ﹒
B&B
exemplary tale of redemption—in the Augustinian manner,
except that the redemptive agency is not God but rather a
chemical, the apomorphine by which Burroughs claims to
have been cured definitively (202-04).
The second autobiographical tradition I have in mind,
however, is one without which it would never even occur to
us to think of Augustine and Rousseau in connection with
Burroughs: the tradition by which the literary or poetic
work in general comes to be understood as both a manifes-
tation and a confirmation of its author’s personal identity.
Paul Barolsky argues that Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the
Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects of 1550 and
1568, invented the figure of the “artist as hero”—a mold
that is later re-occupied by one of its formative influences
when Dante regains popularity. Sir Philip Sidney, in the
Apologie for Poetrie of 1580, stresses the special qualities of
mind and character that are needed to make a poet. Samuel
Johnson, in the Lives of the Poets from around 1780, goes
an important step further when he raises the question of
how different historical conditions, operating upon differ-
ent character types in their own personal circumstances,
might produce highly divergent types of poetry. And this
question, perhaps also in the more systematically anthro-
pological version suggested by Herder, forms the backdrop
against which Goethe declares that his published works are
all “fragments of one great confession”—alluding thus to
the specific term used by both Augustine and Rousseau.
The rest of the story is well enough known. With the
growth of mass industrial society, our loss of “personal
identity” (whatever this is imagined to have been) becomes
increasingly an issue; and the arts in their turn—but most
especially the art of literature, which is already loosely
associated with the practice of autobiography—now come
to be regarded as a repository or refuge of that lost per-
sonal identity: for authors in that they assert identity, for
readers in that they imagine themselves to be affected on
a level whose personal depth is measured by its lack of
rational structure. Theories of art and of literature now
arise, culminating perhaps in Adorno’s aesthetics, in which
artistic activity is understood as bearing a fundamentally
adversarial or critical relation to the social; and even in
cases where the actual details of a theoretician’s argument
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Le ad art US 24 /25 F A L L · W I N T E R 2 0 0 8
Le ad
do not justify it, readers are inclined to conclude (in their
hearts if not in their exam papers) that art is the domain of
embattled individual identity, the place for me to be some-
body, essere qualcuno.
Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, we have
got to the point where literature as a whole is practically a
species of autobiography. Or to put it more circumspectly,
we are reluctant to call a piece of writing “literature” if we
cannot at least claim to detect in it the kind of energy or
presence that we associate with a strong personal identity.
As literary scholars, of course, we strenuously deny that
any such veneration of personal identity informs our view
of our discipline. One of the critical techniques that we are
practically unanimous in dismissing as obsolete is what we
call “biographical criticism,” criticism that argues from the
facts of an author’s life toward the meaning of his or her
works. But the peremptoriness of our denial here only mea-
sures the depth of the danger against which it is erected.
Our professional life is full of contradictions of this sort.
Just as we all clearly recognize the corruptness of the idea
of national literature, yet continue to work in national lit-
erature departments, so also, in order not to lose the public
podium from which to launch our critiques of the very
concept of personal identity, we continue to collaborate in
propping up the even shakier concept of “literature,” which
in turn has come to require precisely personal identity for
its definition.
Am I digressing? Not in the least. For there is one par-
ticular kind of book in which the proximity of literature as
a whole to autobiography becomes especially apparent: I
mean books that while narrating or describing constantly
find the opportunity to introduce geographical references
(to relatively exotic places, say Mexico or North Africa)
and technical references (to things like exotic diseases)
and cultural references (like explanations of exotic slang)
that all suggest intimate knowledge of the places or things
referred to, and so sketch an image of their author’s
broad experience. I mean, in other words, books like
Naked Lunch. Burroughs also takes up directly the problem
of personal identity (especially in relation to literature)
when he discusses the most dangerous political party of
Interzone, the Senders. The Senders are practitioners of
that “one-way telepathic broadcast” which, according to
the Factualists, “must be regarded as an unqualified evil”
(140); and as far as I can see, Sending in this sense—which
“Artists will confuse … with creation” (141)—is nothing
but literature regarded as the assertion and expression of
an author’s personal identity. What is it, if not a wishful
belief in telepathy, when we imagine ourselves able, by
staring at a ritual object (in this case, a book), to experience
not only the force of someone else’s personal identity, but
even its specific contents?
In the process of producing the type of literary work
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that is most easily recognized as veiled autobiography,
therefore, Burroughs also suggests a radical critique of the
literary in this sense. The autobiographical view, the idea
of literature as the assertion and expression of an author’s
personal identity, is reduced to an absurdity in the meta-
phor of Sending. For the aim of Sending, as one-way telepa-
thy, can never be anything like communication or com-
munity, can never in truth be anything but control, and as
the Speaker points out, “control can never be a means to any
practical end…. It can never be a means to anything but more
control…. Like junk” (137). The Sender is thus constrained
by the nature of his own activity to continue sending, to do
nothing but send, because “sending can never be a means to
anything but more sending, like junk” (141). Which produces
the absurdity:
A telepathic sender has to send all the time. He can never
receive, because if he receives that means someone else has
feelings of his own could louse up his continuity. The Sender
has to send all the time, but he can’t ever recharge himself by
contact. Sooner or later he’s got no feelings to send. You can’t
have feelings alone. Not alone like the Sender is alone—and you
dig there can only be one Sender at one place-time…. Finally
the screen goes dead…. The Sender has turned into a huge
centipede. (137)
And from the point of view of this book’s reader the absur-
dity is even more obvious. On the first page, the narrating
“I,” having just eluded a narcotics detective at Washington
Square Station, runs and barely catches an uptown “A”
train, whereupon we read:
Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec
type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of
a character. You know the type: comes on with bartenders and
cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, calls the
counterman in Nedick’s by his first name. A real asshole. (3)
This “asshole” is of course none other than the reader, at
least that reader who reads in order to imbibe the personal
identity (“his idea of a character”) that supposedly express-
es itself in the writing. In other words, if you are the kind
of person who wishes to receive from a particular type of
Sender, you are ipso facto an asshole, incapable of receiving
anything authentic.
This twofold reduction to absurdity operates only if
we subscribe to the autobiographical model of literature,
the idea of literature as the assertion and expression of an
author’s personal identity. But is this really a limitation? Is
it possible not to subscribe to that idea of literature? Would
such a claim, of non-subscription, make sense on the part
of an individual still entangled in the delusion (if such it
is) of his or her own personal identity? At least since Kant,
we philosophers and philosophasters have all professed
ourselves dissatisfied with the Cartesian cogito ergo sum.
But when we take a book out of the library, we still look it
up under the author’s name. We still speak, for example,
35
of “Pirandello’s theater,” even when talking about how
“personal identity is dismantled” in it. And when we are
challenged by the idea of a “Mann ohne Eigenschaften”
(man without qualities)—which tells the simple truth about
every so-called “character” that we distill from narrative
semiosis—we inevitably find ourselves denying that truth,
supplying that “man” with an identity after all, in every
critical sentence we form. We are obviously in a bind.
In order to be innocent of the great centipede, the auto-
biographical model of literature, I must somehow have
transcended personal identity in my own experience. But
even if I have managed—as a Marxist or a Freudian or a
poststructuralist or a Factualist bitch—to keep the delusion
of personal identity at a certain distance, still, exactly that
delusion floods in on me from another direction as soon as
I make any move to operate in the historically conditioned
medium of literary discourse.
Am I digressing? Not in the least. Exactly this prob-
lematics of personal identity is implied in the politics of
Interzone, where the other parties, besides the Senders, are
the Liquefactionists, the Divisionists, and the Factualists.
The Liquefactionists are in a sense the direct opposite
of the Senders, for they advocate the obliteration of all
identity, all individuality, in a single liquid mass. Of course
there is a problem here: “It will be immediately clear that
the Liquefaction Party is, except for one man, entirely
composed of dupes, it not being clear until the final absorp-
tion who is whose dupe” (136). Is there still any difference
here from the Sender’s inexorable tendency toward total
control? Perhaps at least enough difference, Burroughs
suggests, for us to posit an intermediate condition:
The Divisionists occupy a midway position, could in fact be
termed moderates…. They are called Divisionists because they
literally divide. They cut off tiny bits of their flesh and grow
exact replicas of themselves in embryo jelly. It seems probable,
unless the process of division is halted, that eventually there
will be only one replica of one sex on the planet: that is, one
person in the world with millions of separate bodies…. To
avoid extermination of their replicas, citizens dye, distort, and
alter them with face and body molds. (137-38)
The Divisionists are a clear allegory of what one might
call the reasonable (or “moderate”) acceptance of personal
identity, which implies the acceptance of everybody else’s
identity, hence of a world full of identities with as much
right to exist as one’s own. What the allegory suggests,
however, is that the supposed acceptance of other identi-
ties is never really anything but a projection of one’s own
identity into other people’s bodies, hence the implied
demand that other people be replicas of oneself. The
Divisionist utopia—“As far as the eye can see, nothing but
replicas” (138)—therefore has exactly the same structure of
perfect dictatorship that is arrived at by the other parties’
programs.
Literature, understood as telepathy, is thoroughly cor-
rupt. Still, even in its corruption it operates as a kind of
conscience for us, a refusal to let us forget our entangle-
ment in the problem of personal identity, our involvement
in a logicopsychosomatic life process that ends inevitably
in the condition of a huge centipede—or its equivalent, per-
haps a “creature without species” (17) or a “cretinous albino
Caid” with the “body of a huge crab” (138). But what of the
Factualists, who are “Anti-Liquefactionist, Anti-Divisionist,
and above all Anti-Sender” (140)? Unquestionably, to
judge from their “bulletins” (140-41), the Factualists have
a clear understanding of the program of each of the other
parties, and especially of the limits that must be imposed
on each program. There are only two things wrong with
their position: first, the other three party programs are
inherently progressive and illimitable, tending inexorably
toward their absolute states; and second, understanding is
of no avail in dealing with them—in dealing, that is, with
the problem of personal identity—because understanding,
in the form of self-awareness, is precisely the medium in
which that problem is born and flourishes. The conclusion
drawn by the book from all the Factualist bulletins is: “The
Sender is not a human individual…. It is The Human Virus”
(141). A virus, a not-quite-organism whose only business is
to replicate itself; and precisely human understanding, as
practiced by the Factualists, is its favored host and medium
and victim.
Nor is this problem, in Burroughs’s view, merely our
personal problem. “So every species has a Master Virus,”
he says, which is the “Deteriorated Image of that species”
(141). And then he continues:
The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell
by cell…. Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy,
insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.
Strange as it may seem to insist on fine conceptual distinc-
tions in the exegesis of this particular text, we must be
very careful to understand that it is not a question here of
personal identity as such—whatever that might be. The
source of the “symptoms” Burroughs lists is the problem
of personal identity, or the establishment of personal
identity as a problem, which happens in the development
of literature as a type of autobiography or telepathic
Sending—the latter being, again, “The Human Virus” itself.
But the sentence immediately following the passage I have
just quoted reads, in italics: “The Human Virus can now be
isolated and treated.” What can this possibly mean? How
can this sentence possibly maintain itself in a book which,
especially with its appendages on the author’s sickness and
cure, could not be more obviously an instance of literature
as autobiography?
The answer to this question is extremely simple. Personal
identity could not become the problem that literature
makes of it if it were a material fact. What makes it a prob-
Le ad
lem, what opens it to the process by which it becomes a
problem in the history of literature, is that it is constituted
as a structure of entirely non-material relations that we
imagine (and in this non-material realm our imagining
is authoritative) as unfolding “inside” us, “au dedans de
nous,” where it is subject to the dialectical reversals of self-
consciousness. The very idea of personal identity seems to
exclude the possibility of its being regarded as a material
fact. And yet, somehow, its apparent antithesis, the strict
negation or absence or refutation of personal identity—as
Naked Lunch, in its Ovidian or shape-changing aspect,
insists over and over again—is a material fact, in the form
of junk, meaning especially heroin. It is not enough to say:
junk is the point at which personal identity, the evidence
and continuity of form, ceases to operate. The cessation of
personal identity would after all itself be a developmental
stage, hence a confirmation of personal identity. Junk is
a point at which personal identity is refuted, at which it
simply had never been. It is not enough to say: people who
use opiates experience a loss of all the qualities of life we
associate with identity; or heroin robs its user of his or
her identity. Statements of this type assume that there had
been such a thing as personal identity to be lost; and espe-
cially they assume that one can speak of events with respect
to heroin addiction, of what “happens” to a user, whereas
in truth, as Burroughs insists, “NOTHING Ever Happens in
the junk world” (207). There is, in that world, no articula-
tion into event or experience—into reality as it supposedly
unfolds for a “person.” There is nothing but “the ultimate
merchandise” itself (201), the physical thing, as powder or
liquid or pill, which is the object of “total need,” the simple
material fact which by its nature, in its unqualified materi-
ality, cannot possibly be understood to “cause” anything,
but simply is the strict antithesis of personal identity, the
strict absence of everything we might ever have associated
with such identity.
Personal identity, vis-à-vis junk, thus ceases to be a prob-
lem, because it can no longer be relegated to the non-mate-
rial. What I am—what I used to represent by the supposed-
ly positive notion of a “personal identity”—now turns out
to be located by a simple negative relation with respect to
junk. Which means—since my positive “personal identity”
had claimed existence only as a structure in consciousness,
and since the category distinction between such a structure
and the material fact of junk cannot possibly operate as
a simple negation—that that personal identity had never
truly represented what I am after all. Does this mean that
in order to be what I truly am in the new non-problematic
material sense thus suggested, I must at some point myself
have been a junky? Not at all. Again, it is not a question
here of anything we might once have understood as an
“internal” or subjective quality, like experience or memory.
It is now possible for human existence to unfold entirely
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in relation to the simple material fact of junk, as a separa-
tion or difference, which must mean a material separation
or difference, from that fact. At least it appears that the
supposed subject of the apparently autobiographical text
we are reading achieves or plays out his existence (let us
not say he “experiences” it) in these terms—which means,
strictly speaking, that he is not really a subject at all, not
a bearer of the sort of problematic identity that literature
feeds on. His book has therefore become an intransitive
autobiography.
This is a difficult idea, not because it is complicated but
because it introduces radical simplicity into the way we
imagine an entity (our self, our identity) whose very exis-
tence we (we Hegelians, we Kantians, even we Cartesians)
had always thought to be constituted by complication. I
do not mean to plead for this idea, which would be point-
less anyway. I am simply trying to work out logically what
Burroughs means—what he has to mean, what he cannot
help but mean—by saying, “The Human Virus can now be
isolated and treated.” First, despite his claim to have been
cured personally of heroin addiction, he does not mean
that addiction in any form (chemical, psychological, social,
political) is the now treatable virus in question. He is
entirely explicit on this point: “The Human Virus” is the
Sender, who, by carrying out the most absolute and there-
fore autocratic assertion of personal identity that can be
imagined, reveals in himself the “Deteriorated Image” of
the human species, the “broken image of Man.” It follows
that the whole extent of the viral infection that produces
“Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insan-
ity” is personal identity as such (in the sense of the subjec-
tive problem of personal identity), not merely the extreme
form of Sending. For if Sending is the assertion of personal
identity, the rest of Interzone (or the world) is made up of
Liquefactionists, Divisionists, and Factualists, who repre-
sent, respectively, the denial, the acceptance, and the critique
of personal identity. Thus every possible position relative
to personal identity is occupied; and all those positions,
we have seen, turn out to be nothing but ways of contend-
ing with the supposed problem of personal identity, hence
devious or attenuated versions of Sending itself, tending
inexorably toward the condition of the centipede. Again,
therefore, the whole “subjective” problem of personal
identity is the seat of the infection.
But Sending, or one-way telepathy, is also openly mani-
fest as literature in the modern autobiographical mode.
And this is part of what Burroughs means by asserting, “The
Human Virus can now be isolated and treated.” In literature,
namely, Sending shows itself in something very close to its
pure form; it is, so to speak, isolated, as the virus behind the
infection. All that is required now is an avenue for treat-
ment; and this is where junk comes in. Not in the sense that
using junk simply cures an individual of the delusion of per-
37
sonal identity; the non-fictional framing material of Naked
Lunch clearly prevents this interpretation of the text. But
in exactly what sense then? How can junk be understood to
operate in the treatment of the Human Virus?
The very word, “junk,” aims with a practically unique
directness at the materiality of its referent. (Even “stuff ”
is not as exclusively material in its implications; and other
terms for what is discarded, like “garbage” or “trash,” carry
much more emotional, hence non-material force than
“junk,” as does also, of course, “shit,” which is how addicts
nowadays refer to the object of need.) “Junk” means stuff
that is thrown away—therefore not useful, not involved in
any fabric of human purposes—but not thrown away with
a gesture of contempt or disgust. It is simply away, out
there, divorced (as mere material) from the intellectual and
emotional experience of our supposed humanity.
And yet junk, as heroin, appears somehow to operate,
in an individual, as the very antithesis of personal iden-
tity. Strictly speaking, this is impossible. A material fact or
object cannot operate, as such, in the non-material realm
of conscious tensions where our supposed identity and its
undeniable problematics unfold. The thing, whatever it is,
in relation to which junk operates as the simple strict nega-
tion—let us call it X—must be material in character, and
must also be the actual object that the chimera of personal
identity attempts (and fails) to represent. (It must be, in
other words, what I am in truth.) X evidently cannot be
represented; otherwise personal identity would not be as
morbid and fragmented as it shows itself in Interzone. But
the existence of X is still demonstrated indirectly by the
negative operation of junk; the existence and indeed (since
personal identity was the gesture of attempting to repre-
sent it) the inhabitability of X is demonstrated, its avail-
ability as a mode of human being. This, the availability of X
as a truer version of “personal identity,” is what Burroughs
means, what he has to mean, by the possibility of treating
the Human Virus.
(There are of course plenty of open questions here.
Instead of saying X, for instance, should we not simply
have said “the body,” meaning the material vehicle of indi-
vidual identity? The trouble is that “the body,” as this term
is used in a discourse shaped precisely by the assumption of
personal identity, cannot refer to the entirety of a possible
mode of being; and second, that restricting junk’s nega-
tive operation to the individual body, as its theater, would
imply, after all, that I can arrive at X only by having been a
junky, hence that X is constituted as an experience, not as a
material fact. Thus, curiously enough, precisely the materi-
ality of X separates it from the body. Or one might ask: how
exactly am I supposed to imagine the strict negative rela-
tion between X and junk, or between junk and myself? The
trouble is that insofar as imagining is a representational
procedure, it has no place here. To suggest that the self can
be material is to use “be” not as a copulative, between “self ”
and the idea of materiality, but rather as a kind of spring-
board, propelling the sentence beyond any recognizable or
indeed conceivable idea of the self. We are talking, after all,
about intransitive autobiography.)
As I have said, I do not mean to plead for this theory of
personal identity. I mean only to show, in all its perhaps
hopeless obscurity, the direction in which Burroughs’s
text takes us. But this showing also brings us back to a
question that we can, after all, discuss rationally. Does
Naked Lunch, understood in the manner I have suggested,
exhibit the ambition to bring literature (as a symptom
of corrupt personal identity) to an end? The compari-
son that Burroughs makes between telepathic Sending
and junk might easily lead us to this conclusion. But if
we think the matter through, it must occur to us that by
maintaining in its very structure an awareness, a kind of
model, of junk, literature can perhaps be made to carry
out, or to enact, exactly the separation or difference from
junk that supersedes its own evolved focus upon personal
identity. Literature in this sense will have been revolution-
ized, but will it have changed its basic nature? Literature,
or “poetry,” as our ancestors called it, has always been
understood as a union of philosophical meaning with the
kind of concrete immediacy that actual school philosophy,
in its abstraction, tends to lose its grasp of. It is precisely
the idea of this sort of union, plus the interpretation of
concrete immediacy as “experience,” that makes possible
the development of literature as telepathy, as a species
of autobiography. And all that happens in Naked Lunch
is that the union of the philosophical and the concrete is
understood in a radically new sense, as a bringing of the
problem of personal identity into contact with the simple
material fact of junk—as this fact is modeled in the struc-
ture of literary practice or Sending. In fact, Naked Lunch
is in this sense more literary, or poetic, than the telepathic
literature with which it takes issue. For what had made
that literature corrupt is precisely its loss of concreteness,
the progressive deterioration of its cargo of actual mate-
rial immediacy into mere brooding, into the problem of
personal identity.
BENJAMIN BENNETT is Professor of German at the University of Virginia. His most
recent books include Goethe as Woman: The Undoing of Literature (2001), All Theater
Is Revolutionary Theater (2005), and The Dark Side of Literacy: Literature and
Learning Not to Read (forthcoming). Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in William
S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, The Restored Text, eds. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles
(New York: Grove Press, 2001). The other direct reference is to Paul Barolsky, “Dante and
the Modern Cult of the Artist,” Arion 12/2 (Fall 2004), 1-15. Further allusions are to Luigi
Pirandello, Quando si è qualcuno (1933); Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
(1930-42), and (“au dedans de nous”) Denis Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773-
77). JESSE FINLEY REED is a New York-based artist. His If You’re Lonely… (2006-08)
series of lightjet prints, a selection of which is kindly reproduced here, are backlit portraits
of men the artist met through online communities in Berlin and New York. Participants
came to his studio, removed their shirts, and posed. No information was exchanged, and
their identity remained a mystery.
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