Hunter S. Thompson was writing his weekly online column, “Hey Rube,” for ESPN when the World Trade Center was attacked on 11 September 2001, and his reaction to the news appeared on ESPN's “Page 2” the following day in a column titled “Fear & Loathing in America.” Thompson writes,
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now – with somebody – and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
This state of conflict, Thompson predicted, would be not only permanent, but global: “This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed … [Bush] will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why.”Footnote 1 After ten years of War-on-Terror tactics deployed against both American citizens (USA Patriot Act, NSA electronic surveillance, full-body scanners) and noncitizens (Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, enhanced interrogation),Footnote 2 Thompson's words are clearly prescient. That reality, in turn, reveals significance in Thompson's earlier work that has previously been overlooked. Specifically, Thompson's best-known work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), anticipates the more recent work of political theorists Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri.
In spite of its continued popularity, Fear and Loathing has received relatively little attention from academic critics over the years.Footnote 3 In a 2000 article comparing Fear and Loathing to The Great Gatsby, in fact, Robert Sickels notes that “Thompson has been largely critically ignored since his heyday in the mid-1970s.”Footnote 4 Even so, a handful of critics in the years since have offered new frameworks for reading Fear and Loathing. Lindsey Michael Banco, for example, examines the novel as a travel narrative, while Greg Wright explores the rhetorical strategies in Thompson's use of a fictionalized alter ego, and Marianne DeKoven uses the novel to trace the emergence of postmodernism.Footnote 5 Whatever the framework, most critics situate the novel's political engagements rather tightly in its historical moment, whether as a requiem for the counterculture or as a harbinger of what lay ahead in the 1970s. The novel is, as DeKoven says, “self-consciously, and by critical consensus, an epitaph for the 1960s,”Footnote 6 but is also “an extended hallucination upon the ascension of Richard Nixon's America, and Las Vegas is the horrific incarnation of what the establishment would look like if only matter were malleable enough.”Footnote 7
Because the narrative is so thoroughly rooted in what Thompson called “this foul year of Our Lord, 1971,”Footnote 8 the novel is generally approached as a historical artifact – a gonzo first draft of history – and its fortunes rise and fall with the reputation and relevance of the 1960s. In moments (or for audiences) with little room for 1960s nostalgia, Thompson is easily dismissed, as Louis Menand demonstrates in his review of Thompson's Songs of the Doomed. “Few things sound less glamorous in 1991 than ‘the counterculture,’ ” Menand writes, while Thompson is “practically the only person in America still living in 1972.”Footnote 9 On the other hand, in moments of nostalgia and in moments when similar themes emerge in the political discourse (as in, for example, comparisons of the most recent Bush administration to that of Nixon), the novel may once again find relevance. While the context of the War on Terror provides a particular currency to their analyses of sovereignty and empire, Agamben and Negri, like Thompson, have intellectual roots in the international protest movements of the 1960s. “Some like to say,” Michael Hardt wrote in the introduction to Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, a 1996 collection of Italian thinkers that included essays by both Agamben and Negri, “that whereas 1968 lasted only a few months in France, in Italy it extended over ten years, right up until the end of the 1970s.”Footnote 10 This legacy and the passage of time afford Agamben and Negri (with Hardt) a different perspective from Thompson, whose 1971 text signifies, for him and for his readers, the end of that era. Still, the projects are similar in that these later authors, too, are seeking to identify where these movements fell short as well as to devise new strategies for the political realities that emerged in their wake. As an early attempt to analyze and articulate the same concerns that Agamben, Hardt, and Negri would theorize years later, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas attends not to shifting political winds, but rather to more substantial changes in the political terrain.
Agamben traces, on the one hand, the legal and political developments by which late modern sovereign power ultimately reduces its subjects to “bare life,” a life that can be killed without penalty but was unfit for the ritual killing of sacrifice (the homo sacer); and on the other, the expansion of sovereign power through increasingly frequent and prolonged states of exception, whereby the law is paradoxically suspended for its own preservation. In their influential study Empire (2000), Hardt and Negri analyze what they term a postmodern sovereignty of empire, which has transformed modernity and supplanted the nation-state. These increasingly familiar concepts – bare life, the state of exception, and the emergence of empire – provide an important framework for understanding the role of law, citizenship, and sovereignty in today's world, just as the protagonists, setting, and production history of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas speak to similar concerns about citizenship and state power. Specifically, I examine the context of production and offer a close reading of the text itself to show that the creation of the novel is rooted in the state of exception and reveals the anxieties of the homo sacer. I then explain, with Hardt's and Negri's help, how the novel reveals insight into the passage from modernity into empire. This reading of the novel both clarifies the history of these more recently theorized concepts and reveals new significance in Thompson's most famous work as a first draft of that history.
Agamben's work is particularly useful for this analysis because the events surrounding the novel's production offer a concrete connection to the concepts of the state of exception and the homo sacer, thus anchoring Fear and Loathing in a broader historical discourse than it is usually given credit for. In State of Exception (2003), Agamben builds on the work of German political theorist Carl Schmitt to argue that civil governments increasingly rely on the structure of the state of exception, in which protections of the law are suspended so that the society of laws can be preserved, to the extent that the state of exception has now become the rule. Written during the Weimar Republic, Schmitt's The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1925) argues that there is an inherent conflict between representative government, which relies on conflict and difference, and the guiding principle of democracy, the “general will,” which requires open discussion among a homogeneous population. The general and particular instance of constitutional authority is one site where this conflict erupts; while a legal constitution asserts the general authority of the law (that is to say, a constitution provides a government of law rather than a government of men, and even the king must obey the law), the process of governance is often concerned with the particular. But while constitutional authority has come to rest on a notion of its universality, Schmitt says, this rhetoric only obscures the particular; it does not eliminate it: “The usual definition of sovereignty today rests on Bodin's recognition that it will always be necessary to make exceptions to the general rule in concrete circumstances, and that the sovereign is whoever decides what constitutes an exception.”Footnote 11
In response, Agamben articulates a theory and history of the state of exception itself. He traces first the modern incarnations of states of exception in Western liberal democracies, exploring the constitutional provisions that empower the executive to suspend the law in order to preserve it. In the state of exception, “the norm is suspended or even annulled; but what is at issue in this suspension is, once again, the creation of a situation that makes the application of the norm possible.”Footnote 12 In a given particular, the general security of the law itself may be so threatened that a suspension of the law is required in order to preserve it. This typically involves (both in constitutional theory and in early practice) a state of siege. Threatened with a force (external or internal) capable of toppling the constitution itself, the inefficiencies of representative government or democratic discussion must be suspended, allowing the sovereign to suspend and subsume the law in the interest of preserving it.
Directly related to the state of exception, which removes limits on the exercise of state power, is the concept of the homo sacer, which revokes the protections of citizenship. Agamben analyzes this concept in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), which traces the development of biopolitics within the structure of modern sovereignty, ultimately arguing that the concentration camp represents the true paradigm of modernity. In doing so, Agamben develops the figure of the homo sacer, a character in Roman law who had been banned from the law and therefore could be killed by anyone without punishment but could not be sacrificed. He is abandoned to a state of nature, no longer protected by the state of law from violence by the state or by anyone else. The victims of the Nazi concentration camps are Agamben's primary example – before their transfer to the camps, they were formally stripped of their citizenship and thereby placed outside the protection of the law. The homo sacer, then, opens up a state of exception: he is at once outside the law (because the law has withdrawn its protection) and contained by the law (because it is a legal mechanism that defines his status). The mythological figure of the werewolf, Agamben argues, is akin to the homo sacer: he is both man and animal, simultaneously inside the law and outside, with nature. He exists at the “threshold of indistinction” between society and nature. In this sense, the homo sacer is the flip side of the sovereign – for the sovereign, too, exists at the margin of society and nature, being at once bound by the law and able to operate outside the law through its suspension in the state of exception.
Before examining the state of exception that helped to inspire Fear and Loathing, it is worthwhile to briefly review the novel's production history. Originally published in two parts in Rolling Stone magazine in November 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas builds on a tradition identified by such terms as New Journalism, the nonfiction novel, or (Thompson's own term) gonzo journalism.Footnote 13 The genre has long been associated with postmodernism, as its practitioners self-consciously collapse distinctions between participant and observer, between historical and personal narratives, and between modern journalism's supposition of objectivity and the subject/reporter that such journalism seeks to conceal or deny. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas expands this approach, aggressively attacking the distinction between truth and fiction: the names of the main characters are fictional, but the real-life participants in the novel's events (Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta, a Chicano lawyer, activist, and friend) appeared together in a photograph on the original jacket cover. The book's cover identifies it as nonfiction, although Thompson admitted exaggerating for dramatic effect and was willing to sacrifice accuracy of specifics for a reporting style “based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.”Footnote 14 The artwork, too, is “gonzo,” refusing to respect the invisible border that traditionally protects the text: ink from illustrator Ralph Steadman's pen spills across the page, interrupting paragraphs and even, on occasion, obscuring the words themselves.
The book was inspired by a frenzied, drug-fueled trip the pair took to Las Vegas in 1971, initially to cover the Mint 400 (an off-road automobile race) for Sports Illustrated and then to cover a national district attorneys' conference for Rolling Stone. Thompson stitched together his experiences covering these two disparate events with an earlier project involving the search for the American Dream to create a patchwork portrait of 1971 America, in which the counterculture movement (“a high and beautiful wave”) of the 1960s has collapsed and Las Vegas stands as a model for the American mainstream culture persisting in its wake. The “proper end to the sixties,” Thompson argues, came with the first Ali–Frazier fight on 8 March 1971, when “Frazier, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand – at least not out loud.”Footnote 15 Part of the novel's project, then, is to identify the reasons why Nixon prevailed and the counterculture failed. However, as my analysis will show, the novel also seeks to map the new social and political terrain as well as to conceive of a navigational strategy for those not willing, in Thompson's words, to “fall back on the Good German, Panicked Sheep syndrome.”Footnote 16
FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE STATE OF EXCEPTION
Though the novel takes place over a few days in March 1971, the genesis of the project actually dates to 29 August 1970, when the National Chicano Moratorium demonstration against the Vietnam War drew twenty to thirty thousand demonstrators to East Los Angeles. The rally was generally peaceful, but following a minor disturbance nearby, the LAPD declared the gathering illegal, ordered the protesters to disperse, and fired tear gas into the crowd gathered at Laguna Park. Some people fled, some resisted, and in the rioting that ensued three people were killed and forty more injured.Footnote 17 Among the casualties was LA Times columnist and chairman of the National Chicano Media Council, Ruben Salazar, who as the news director for KMEX, a local bilingual television network, had given airtime to critics of the LAPD, including Acosta. Salazar was killed by a high-velocity teargas projectile – not an ordinary teargas canister, but one “designed for, and ordinarily used only for, piercing walls of buildings in which suspects barricade themselves”Footnote 18 – fired into a bar where he was drinking a beer. The Salazar killing, police attempts to cover it up (they initially claimed he was killed in the park by a civilian sniper), and the ensuing inquest (which ruled it accidental) exacerbated tension between the LAPD and the city's Mexican American community. While the police insisted that Salazar was killed by mistake, many Mexican American Angelenos believed that Salazar had been intentionally targeted.
With Acosta's encouragement, Thompson began researching the killing and its aftermath for an article that later was published in Rolling Stone as “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan.” The prospect of the LAPD having intentionally silenced a powerful activist voice was frightening: “If this was true it meant the ante was being upped drastically. When cops declare open season on journalists, that will be a very ugly day – and not just for journalists.”Footnote 19 Thompson's investigation found police practices that evoke a state of increasing exception, as Agamben would define it: extreme police actions were justified by the threat that the Chicano movement allegedly posed to the community as a whole. Thompson writes,
Within hours after the Times hit the streets with the news that Ruben Salazar had in fact been killed by cops – rather than street-snipers – the sheriff unleashed a furious assault on “known dissidents” who had flocked into East Los Angeles that weekend … He praised his deputies for the skillful zeal they displayed in restoring order to the area within two and a half hours, “thus averting a major holocaust of much greater proportions.”Footnote 20
Following the logic of the state of exception, an excessive crackdown in this particular is necessary, in the sheriff's view, to maintain the general order.
That “furious assault,” and the tension it provoked, made Acosta and Thompson all the more uncomfortable. Acosta felt that he might be targeted because of his own prominence as an activist and his adversarial relationship with the local forces of law and order. In his court defense of Corky Gonzalez, who was arrested in the aftermath of the Chicano Moratorium, for example, he subpoenaed more than a hundred superior court judges in “a spectacular attempt to overturn the entire Grand Jury selection system” by demonstrating that it was biased against Mexican Americans.Footnote 21 Moreover, the experience of covering the story left Thompson “a ball of nerves & sleepless paranoia (figuring that [he] might be next).”Footnote 22 If not for that anxiety, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might never have been written, as it made the pair eager to escape from the “angry vortex of that story” to a place where they could discuss it in a more relaxed atmosphere. That opportunity soon came when Sports Illustrated offered Thompson a trip to Las Vegas to write a “250-word caption” for an off-road motorcycle race.Footnote 23
Though this connection between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the Salazar story has long been noted in passing, it has received insufficient critical attention. The connection appears to have been wholly insignificant to the novel's contemporary reviewers – although several reviewers connect Thompson with the main character of Raoul Duke, Oscar Zeta Acosta receives no mention, and many reviewers repeat the novel's ethnically inaccurate description of Thompson's traveling companion as a “300-pound Samoan.” For his part, Thompson apparently felt the connection important enough that the first three paragraphs of the original “jacket copy” for the novel discuss his investigation of the Salazar case, the pressure of which made him feel “like [he] was in the midst of a prison riot.”Footnote 24 Though Thompson never commented directly on the political philosophy of the novel itself, this emphasis on the novel's roots in what amounts to a state of exception is telling. Looking back at the events in later years, too, Thompson continued to see a legitimate threat to their safety. In “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat,” his 1977 eulogy for Acosta (who disappeared in 1974) in Rolling Stone, Thompson affirmed that the lawyer had good cause for his concern: “When you get into bear baiting on that level,” he said of Acosta's legal maneuvering, “paranoia is just another word for ignorance … They really are out to get you.”Footnote 25
This context is essential to understand fully the novel's political insight and contemporary significance. The situation in Los Angeles disturbed Thompson precisely because it forced him to confront his relation to state power: “I knew they were capable of [deliberately killing Salazar],” Thompson explains in “Strange Rumblings,” “but I was not quite ready to believe they had actually done it … because once I believed that, I also had to accept the idea that they are prepared to kill anybody who seemed to be annoying them. Even me.”Footnote 26 The context for both the writing of the novel and the events depicted therein, then, find Thompson confronting the same political realities that Agamben has clarified in the state of exception, which removes the limits on the exercise of state power, and the homo sacer, which revokes the protections of citizenship.
Rather than a superficial similarity between 1971 and the present, this continuity contextualizes Thompson's analysis and response within the historical development of the state of exception over the course of the twentieth century, as the atmosphere of tension and police repression that Thompson and Acosta leave behind in Los Angeles anchors the book in a state of exception. The second half of the novel, too, creates an explicit connection to these exceptional circumstances. In the course of their original assignment (covering the Mint 400), Duke and Dr. Gonzo consume copious amounts of drugs, have a number of bizarre interactions with the locals, and run up a large hotel bill that they have neither the means nor the inclination to pay. Fearing the legal consequences of their admittedly illegal behavior, Dr. Gonzo flies back to LA and Duke, too, makes plans to flee. His plans are interrupted, however, by the opportunity to cover the National Conference of District Attorneys, which is holding a “Four-day seminar on narcotics and dangerous drugs” at another hotel across town. “Part Two” of the novel covers their experience at the drug conference.
The state of exception left behind in Los Angeles – a state of exception which is explicit, particular, and localized – is thereby replaced, in the second half of the novel, with a state of exception that is implicit, general, and paradigmatic: the “Drug War.” This move from isolated exception to exception as paradigm anticipates one of Agamben's central arguments in State of Exception: that in the twentieth century the state of exception increasingly became the rule. Beginning with the state of siege in World War I, the structure of most governments has seen an expansion of the executive power coupled with diminishing powers in legislative bodies: “One of the essential characteristics of the state of exception – the provisional abolition of the distinction among legislative, executive, and judicial powers – here shows its tendency to become a lasting practice of government.”Footnote 27 This structure remains clearest in cases of war. Only Congress can declare war, for example, but America's military interventions since World War II have been enabled not by a formal declaration of war but rather by the revocation or reduction of the limits on the executive's power to deploy troops. For one of the mechanisms by which the state of exception transitions from individual event to a paradigm of government, Agamben points out, is in the deployment of war metaphors in other contexts:
Because the sovereign power of the president is essentially grounded in the emergency linked to a state of war, over the course of the twentieth century the metaphor of war becomes an integral part of the presidential political vocabulary whenever decisions considered to be of vital importance are being imposed.Footnote 28
The so-called War on Drugs is a prime example: in response to the perceived threat posed by illegal drugs, constitutional restrictions on search and seizure are suspended via such mechanisms as the no-knock warrant or aggressive asset seizure strategies against those convicted of drug-related crimes.Footnote 29
The nation's War on Drugs was officially declared in June 1971 (between the events depicted in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and its original publication) when Richard Nixon made a major policy announcement about the administration's plans to combat drug use: “The problem has assumed the dimensions of a national emergency,” Nixon said. “I intend to take every step necessary to deal with this emergency.”Footnote 30 The “national emergency” of drug use resulted in a state of exception. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas does not address the metaphor of the Drug War specifically, but it does tease out the relationship between the perceived threat of drugs and the suspension of the normal legal order. Posing as a “special investigator” and “an expert in ‘criminal drug analysis,’” Duke and Dr. Gonzo regale a Georgia district attorney with stories of how the drug culture in California has morphed into widespread rituals of satanic sacrifice, killing six to eight people per day in Malibu alone. The DA, horrified, accepts both their tall tale and the exceptional response: with the help of trained Dobermans, they explain, cops in California capture the perpetrators and “cut their goddamn heads off.”Footnote 31 The DA is shocked, but understanding, and the exchange pokes fun at how out of touch the DA (and, by extension, the conference itself) is with the drug culture, as well as his gullibility regarding nightmare scenarios of its excess. But the DA's response also reveals how readily his gullibility and fear enable a state of exception. When the pair urge him not to talk about such tactics, particularly with the press around, the DA agrees: “We'd never hear the goddamn end of it.”Footnote 32 Drugs, in the mind of the Georgia DA, constitute so great a threat that such extralegal measures are conceivably necessary in order to preserve the community itself; moreover, the DA, who has a responsibility, ostensibly, to uphold the authority of the law, is perfectly willing to look the other way while those charged with enforcing the law set it aside.
Thompson's Las Vegas resembles the state of exception in another important way as well. Agamben finds a classical antecedent for the state of exception in the iustitium, a mechanism by which Roman law, if no longer able to guarantee public welfare, was simply set aside. He quotes Adolph Nissen, who says that the iustitium “suspends the law and, in this way, all legal prescriptions are put out of operation. No Roman citizen, whether a magistrate or a private citizen, now has legal powers or duties.”Footnote 33 Restrictions are lifted not only on those with power but also on the average citizen; this, essentially, is at the heart of Las Vegas's appeal, in our time as well as in Thompson's, as the city's famous ad campaign slogan reflects: “What happens here, stays here.” This is not to say that there are no restrictions on behavior in Las Vegas, and Thompson observes that possession or sale of marijuana and vagrancy are treated particularly severely. But he does feel confident that much of his outrageous behavior can go uncontested: “This is one of the hallmarks of Vegas hospitality. The only bedrock rule is Don't Burn the Locals. Beyond that, nobody cares. They would rather not know. If Charlie Manson checked into the Sahara tomorrow morning, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big.”Footnote 34 The state of exception removes restrictions on the excesses of the state, and the iustitium “would rather not know” about the excesses of citizens. Still, this iustitium is conditional – Charlie Manson would have to tip big. The flow of capital sustains the iustitium.
Capital also controls the state of exception. Among the central conceits of the novel is the representation of Las Vegas, with its repression of the drug culture and associated weirdness, its invitation to excess, and its overwhelming interest in commerce and the flow of capital, as stand-in for America as a whole. Nixon, Thompson muses, “would have made a perfect Mayor for this town; with John Mitchell as Sheriff and Agnew as Master of Sewers.”Footnote 35 If the sovereign, as Carl Schmitt says, is the one who determines the exception, then the truly sovereign presence in Las Vegas, as in the new America, is big money. “The big hotels and casinos pay a lot of muscle to make sure the high rollers don't have even momentary hassles with ‘undesirables,’” Thompson says. The “syndicate men on the Strip” can decide, to use one of Thompson's examples, which prostitutes are allowed to operate on the Strip and which are exiled to North Las Vegas when they are “no longer much good for business out there with the high rollers.”Footnote 36 The mafia “syndicate men” Thompson refers to, of course, have since given way to a syndicate of a different sort; corporate conglomerates have taken over Las Vegas, as they have so much of the American marketplace. But in terms of how Las Vegas functions, that transition is neither unexpected nor consequential: “it makes no difference, in terms of the day to day life-style of the place, whether the Man at the Top is Lucky Luciano or Howard Hughes … big money, in Vegas, is synonymous with the Power to protect it.”Footnote 37 That power contains not only the state of exception, but also the homo sacer, since it entails the ability to determine both when the law applies and whom the law does (or does not) protect.Footnote 38 Historically in Las Vegas the “undesirables” Thompson mentions – be they cheats, addicts, vagrants, or any others who may disrupt the free flow of capital and its attendant illusions – are dealt with violently through extralegal means, though with the tacit approval of the legal system. In other words, undesirables, like the homo sacer, have no protection from the law.
THE HOMO SACER IN LAS VEGAS
Animal metaphors abound in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: the forces in charge of the country are “weasels” or “swine”; the staff and guests at his Las Vegas hotel transform into lizards; and various cops, regular citizens, and even the protagonists are referred to as “pigs.” Such metaphors suggest a state of nature rather than a state of law, and the most telling examples concern Duke's relationship with the police. After picking up a hitchhiker on the way to Las Vegas in the novel's opening pages, for example, Duke begins to worry that their hallucinatory ranting might so frighten their passenger that he would report them to “some nazi outback law enforcement agency” who would “run [them] down like dogs”;Footnote 39 later, as he waits for his plane at the Las Vegas airport, he feels as though “the net [is] closing down … it [is] only a matter of time before they [run] me down like some kind of rabid animal.”Footnote 40 Duke imagines himself abandoned to nature, like the homo sacer, and no longer human in the eyes of the law. More than simple arrest, he expects no protection from extrajudicial violence: he anticipates being “a ball of tar and feathers dragged onto the prison bus by angry natives,”Footnote 41 or having the authorities lock him up “in some hellhole of a jail and beat [him] on the kidneys with big branches – causing [him] to piss blood for years to come.”Footnote 42 The satiric exaggeration of Duke's fears of “piss[ing] blood for years to come” is characteristic of the novel's tone, but then, given that Thompson and Acosta came to Las Vegas to escape the fear of violence at the hands of the state in Los Angeles, the trip is no occasion for understatement. Instead, Thompson's rhetoric emphasizes the vulnerability of a subject without any legal protection from violence.
Duke has reason to fear arrest, of course, having “abused every rule Vegas lived by – burning the locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help,”Footnote 43 but even those who have committed no crime are subject to the whims of the law in Las Vegas. The narrator recounts the experiences of a neighbor of his who had recently been arrested on suspicion of vagrancy on the Strip: “He was standing on a street-corner near the Circus-Circus, watching the multi-colored fountain, when the cop-cruiser pulled up. Wham. Straight to jail. No phone call, no lawyer, no charge.”Footnote 44 Since he only had twenty dollars and the fine for vagrancy was twenty-five, he had to wait in jail for more than a week for his father to wire him money. In Las Vegas, Thompson suggests, the normal protections of citizenship do not apply.
Everyone, that is to say, is potentially a homo sacer. As with the state of exception, the concept of the homo sacer clarifies the connection between the subject of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the unrest in Los Angeles that provided the context of its genesis. “The killings and inquest convinced the Chicano community that their constitutional rights as citizens in the United States would be blatantly and viciously violated,” observes Manuel Luis-Martinez.Footnote 45 Of course, citizenship for Mexican Americans had always been subject to restriction and even to revocation, as was the case for tens of thousands – perhaps as many as 400,000, according to a USA Today reportFootnote 46 – of natural-born citizens who were deported forcibly and without legal recourse to Mexico during the 1930s. Still, the violent response to the Chicano Moratorium was a new level of explicitly violent repression and came at a time when radicalism and Chicano nationalism were increasingly popular in the Mexican American community. Acosta captured this mood in the speech he gave at an anti-brutality rally held addressing the Salazar killing: “We are not trying to overturn our own government. We don't have a government! Do you think there would be police helicopters patrolling our communities day and night if anybody considered us real citizens with rights!”Footnote 47 Not merely a people oppressed by their government, Acosta argues, Mexican Americans have no government and lack the protections of citizenship; he suggests, in other words, that the community is outside the protection of the law, in the realm of the homo sacer. Acosta's activism intensifies his anxiety about the homo sacer. If, as Acosta believed, Salazar had been targeted by the police, his frequent and effective criticism of institutional racism in the Los Angeles courts and police department while defending several high-profile Chicano activists made him a legitimate target as well.Footnote 48
Both Thompson and Acosta felt the pressure of the status of the homo sacer, fearing they might be the next target. This prevailing mood seems a reasonable explanation for the zeal with which Duke and Dr. Gonzo skirt their own self-destruction in their trip to Las Vegas – a city where, Duke muses, “they kill the weak and deranged.”Footnote 49 Though the opening chapters find Duke and Gonzo moving from the desert wilderness into civilization, their arrival in Las Vegas is actually rendered as an abandonment to nature, as the workers and guests at their hotel are transformed (thanks to a large amount of LSD ingested in the car) into giant, fierce lizards. The drug begins to take effect as Duke checks into the hotel with the desk clerk: “The woman's face was changing: swelling, pulsing … horrible green jowls and fangs jutting out, the face of a Moray Eel! Deadly poison!”Footnote 50 Like the werewolf, the clerk is both man and beast, but the transformation continues until the hotel itself is a state of nature: “Terrible things were happening all around us. Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman's neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge.”Footnote 51 “It won't be long,” he muses to Dr. Gonzo, “before they rip us to shreds.”
By rendering the arrival in Las Vegas (the state of exception which he presents as emblematic of the post-counterculture national order) as an abandonment to nature, Thompson anticipates one of Agamben's arguments – that the rhetoric of the social contract obscures the true nature of the constitution of society: “The understanding of the Hobbesian mythologeme in terms of contract instead of ban condemned democracy to impotence every time it had to confront the problem of sovereign power and has also rendered modern democracy constitutionally incapable of truly thinking a politics freed from the form of the State.”Footnote 52 That is to say, by implying a relationship that is entered into freely and is binding on both parties, the concept of the social contract confuses the true relationship between state and subject, which remains always under threat of abandonment to nature through the sovereign ban.
Thompson, acutely aware of the ban that lies at its heart, offers Las Vegas as paradigmatic of a new American social order steeped in a state of exception. Moreover, the novel's epigraph, a quote from Samuel Johnson, offers the novel as a response to that ban: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Thus are the homo sacer and the sovereign intimately connected, Agamben argues, because both exist on (and reveal the porous nature of) the boundary between nature and society. The figure of the werewolf is again illustrative: Agamben's interpretation of Marie de France's Bisclavret reveals the relationship between sovereign and homo sacer – a werewolf, trapped in his lupine form, throws himself on the mercy of the sovereign, who adopts the animal. “What is important, however,” Agamben notes, “is that Bisclavret's final transformation back into a human takes place on the very bed of the sovereign.”Footnote 53 In this configuration, then, the homo sacer, abandoned to nature, seeks the mercy of the sovereign to restore him to the community – to get rid of the pain of not being a man. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, like its epigraph from Johnson, turns this formulation on its head: being subject to the ban of the sovereign becomes part of the pain of being a man, and Raoul Duke, acutely aware of the sovereign ban, turns not to the sovereign who can restore him to the obviously corrupt inside (the corruption of which is now clear), but rather turns to outside the law.
This privileging of the outside as a base of operations is reflected, finally, in the geography of the novel. The narrative begins not in the city, but in the wilderness: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”Footnote 54 There are animals, too – fierce swarms of bats that attack the car – though they are only hallucinatory. The assault on the “inside” that Las Vegas represents must be staged from this outside, and so it is only after establishing the desert as the novel's starting point that the narrator can return via flashback to Los Angeles, where the story ostensibly begins with their preparations for the trip to Las Vegas. Like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) or Coppola's film adaptation Apocalypse Now (1979), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas takes place along these zones of indistinction, but rather than venturing from the inside to the outside, Thompson presents the journey from outside to inside as even more treacherous. While the treacherous journey to the outside reifies the distinction between society and nature (and privileges the former), Duke and Dr. Gonzo's journey to the inside reveals the extent to which these distinctions have collapsed.
The relationship between Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo reflects the close relationship between the sovereign and the homo sacer, who both operate on the borders of law and nature. While it is true that Duke and Dr. Gonzo, aware of the ban that defines their relation to the law, turn to the outside rather than appealing to the mercy of the sovereign, it is also true that they attempt to renegotiate the boundaries by parodying the function of the sovereign. Duke, for example, gives himself the job title of “doctor of journalism” to assert his legitimate place within the system: “Actually, we're both doctors of journalism,” he reassures the hitchhiker (who has been startled by their strange behavior) whom they pick up in the desert outside Barstow.Footnote 55 Dr. Gonzo, too, relies constantly on his “authority” as a lawyer when advising Duke to commit various illegal acts – he often prefaces his advice with, “As your attorney, I advise you to …” (“drive at top speed,” “tell me where you put the goddamn mescaline,” or “take a hit out of that little brown bag in my shaving kit,” among other instances). In taking on the role of homo sacer, they seek not to yield to the sovereign authority, but to make their very existence a parody of it.
That sense of parody also informs Thompson's satiric style throughout the novel, which is markedly different from his previous book Hell's Angels (1967). While the earlier title, which details Thompson's experience with the outlaw motorcycle gang, distinguishes itself from traditional journalism through its unique voice and Thompson's open involvement in the story, its prose is relatively restrained and functions to distinguish the author from the subject of his inquiry. Fear and Loathing offers no illusion of objectivity, however, and its rhetorical strategy is as committed to excess as the characters themselves. Thompson's descriptions of people and places are bolstered by a satiric exaggeration – the Mint 400 off-road race is “in some circles … a far, far better thing than the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby and the Lower Oakland Roller Derby Finals all rolled into one”;Footnote 56 the DA conference's keynote speaker “writes like somebody who once bearded Tim Leary in a campus cocktail lounge and paid for all the drinks,” whose book on marijuana is “a compendium of state bullshit”;Footnote 57 and the casino Circus Circus is “what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.”Footnote 58 Given that a removal of restraint is Las Vegas's organizing function, such stylistic flair is perfectly natural; as Duke tells his attorney shortly after they check into the DA convention, “you can't be subtle in this town.” Both Duke's behavior and Thompson's prose, in turn, suggest that the state of exception, too, is no place for subtlety. Indeed, Thompson's style both underscores the anxieties that animate the text and performs in prose the commitment to excess that his protagonists offer in response to those anxieties.
BARBARIANS AND EMPIRE
The desire to escape or move outward is an urge that Hardt and Negri identify as central to their analysis of postmodern empire. They offer the history of the evolution of the United States Constitution – not the document itself but the interpretations and practices surrounding it since its inception – through four distinct stages, each powered by the desire of its subjects to find and occupy an outside. This is true from its earliest phase, where “the open space of the frontier became the conceptual terrain of republican democracy.”Footnote 59 The geographic limits of this project of expansion resulted first in failed attempts at a European-style empire, and then ultimately in the transition into postmodern empire. This postmodern empire is a system of global sovereignty that has no outside, marked not by the nation-states of modern sovereignty but rather by complex networks of transnational power. In contrast to Agamben's analysis of the increased concentration of power in the sovereign's ability to determine the state of exception, these networks facilitate the dispersion of power rather than its centralization. In spite of this apparent contrast, though, this analysis puts Hardt and Negri in contact with Agamben in that the universalization of exception, in obliterating the distinction between a state of law (inside) and a state of exception (outside), creates a condition of possibility for this dispersion of power. Whereas Agamben argues that the state of exception has increasingly become the norm (the temporal expansion of exception), Hardt and Negri explore the implications of the global circumscription effected by postmodern sovereignty (the geographical expansion of exception); when sovereign power contains the entire world – when there is, at last, no outside – then the distinction between a state of law and a state of exception is essentially obliterated.Footnote 60
This fear of final enclosure and desire for an outside is but one of several points of contact between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hardt's and Negri's analysis of postmodern sovereignty, but it is an important one because it illuminates Thompson's response to the spread of the state of exception. Drugs, which play such a central role in the novel, also evoke the desire for an outside. The quasi-geographical rhetoric of drug use confirms this, as users may speak of taking “trips” to get “high” or of being “gone.” Like the “magic swirling ship” of Bob Dylan's “Mr. Tambourine Man” (1965), narratives of drug use often reflect a desire to cross borders or to occupy a space outside the norm. But Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is anything but mere escapism, and despite his firm commitment to better living through contraband chemicals, Duke rejects the ability of drugs to offer access to a genuine outside: “This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling ‘consciousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim, meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously.”Footnote 61 The idea that drugs transport the user to an outside – that they offer “consciousness expansion” – is for Thompson a dangerous illusion, destructive on a personal level and on a social level, and also (as we shall see shortly) destructive to the political project of the counterculture.
The true value of drugs, instead, is revealed in Dr. Gonzo's warning to Duke on the highway approaching Las Vegas: “You're full of acid, you fool. It'll be a goddamn miracle if we can get to the hotel and check in before you turn into a wild animal.”Footnote 62 Rather than taking the man to the outside, drugs bring the beast to the inside. Marie de France's werewolf submits to the sovereign ban, offering fealty to the sovereign in order to be readmitted into the sovereign space as a man; Duke, on the other hand, accepts the reality of the sovereign ban but does not submit to it, choosing instead (with some chemical assistance) to use the sovereign space to transform back into a beast. In the closed horizon of global empire, where there is no outside, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas finds the main characters attempting to produce a temporary, mobile, and personal outside – a state of exception produced not by the authority of the sovereign, but by the creativity and audacity of the homo sacer himself.
To put it another way, the appeal of drugs for Thompson's characters is based on an experience of immanence – of bringing one's creativity to bear on the world – rather than transcendence. The tension between immanence (which is revolutionary, according to Hardt and Negri) and transcendence (which they argue is counterrevolutionary) is a central theme of Empire. These two forces constitute the “original tension” of modernity, which was instigated by the “revolutionary discovery of the plane of immanence”:Footnote 63 “In those origins of modernity, then, knowledge shifted from the transcendent plane to the immanent, and consequently, that human knowledge became a doing, a practice of transforming nature.”Footnote 64 Traditional transcendental (religious) authority could no longer contain the energies of the multitude, and so a new transcendental apparatus was required to quell the revolutionary immanent humanism:
Although it was not possible to go back to the way things were, it was nonetheless possible to reestablish ideologies of command and authority, and thus deploy a new transcendent power by playing on the anxiety and fear of the masses, their desire to reduce the uncertainty of life and increase security … Peace had become the miserable condition of survival, the extreme urgency of escaping death.Footnote 65
The desire for peace and security provides an opening for the transcendental apparatus of the modern state; in the interest of personal security, immanent power of the multitude is subjected to the authority of the state.
Like Hardt and Negri, Thompson analyzes revolution and Thermidor (when the energy of revolution falters); Thompson's analysis, too, perceives transcendence to be counterrevolutionary. He has little patience for transcendence as a political strategy – “Ginsberg, far gone in the Om,”Footnote 66 is how he refers to Allen Ginsberg's belief that thousands of protesters could end the Vietnam War through mass meditation outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. It is not drugs themselves, according to Thompson, but their use as a transcendental crutch that makes them a destructive force among users who “never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody – or at least some force – is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.”Footnote 67 If religion is the opiate of the masses, then the mysticism of the late 1960s is the same analgesic in new form, one that sapped the energy of the countercultural moment: “One of the crucial moments of the Sixties came on that day when the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharishi. It was like Dylan going to the Vatican to kiss the Pope's ring.”Footnote 68 In comparing the Beatles' guru to the Pope, Thompson suggests that the Eastern religions often embraced by the counterculture are not functionally different from the Western religious institutions they often opposed. Moreover, Thompson links this focus on individual authority, whether of the Maharishi or of the Pope, with “the military ethic … a blind faith in some higher and wiser ‘authority. The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister … all the way up to ‘God.’”Footnote 69 The turn towards transcendence, then, is a disguised turn towards authoritarianism, which explains the success authoritarian cult leaders (including Charles Manson) had recruiting from the ranks of the ostensibly antiauthoritarian counterculture.
The narrator's assessment of the state of affairs in the wake of the 1960s reflects the “miserable and humiliating peace” that Hardt and Negri suggest brings an end to the revolution of immanence, in which the desire for security overwhelms the desire for progress. “We are all wired into a survival trip now,” Thompson writes,Footnote 70 and the counterculture's energies have been “aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation.”Footnote 71 But Thompson's characters refuse to submit to this peace, and the drug-fueled havoc they wreak in Las Vegas represents an insistent allegiance to the power and experience of immanence. “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone,” Thompson once said, “but they've always worked for me.”Footnote 72 In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, they work precisely to resist that imperfect peace based on a desire for security rather than for progress and justice. Not content merely to survive, not willing to surrender to security, Duke and Dr. Gonzo use drugs to exert force on the world of Las Vegas; rejecting the approach to drugs as a transcendent experience, in their frenzied, drug-fueled behavior they seek to productively disrupt the established order.
The characters' drug use, then, is part of the novel's attempt to reassert the importance of immanence and to critique a reliance on transcendence. In bringing the outside and its immanent power to the inside, Duke and Dr. Gonzo represent an early and imperfect manifestation of what Hardt and Negri call the new barbarianism: “Those who are against, while escaping from the local and particular constraints of their human condition, must also continually attempt to construct a new body and a new life. This is a necessarily violent, barbaric passage, but as Walter Benjamin says, it is a positive barbarism.”Footnote 73 At its most extreme point, Duke's drug use attempts even literally to construct a new body, when he takes a hit of pure adrenochrome, the only source of which is “the adrenaline glands from a living human body.”Footnote 74 It is a thoroughly unpleasant experience for Duke, and one that he has no desire to repeat, but a large degree of unpredictability and unpleasantness are to be expected in the process of resisting the sovereignty of empire. Unpleasant or not, such resistance is the only viable option for Thompson, since, as the multiple attempts to leave Las Vegas demonstrate, escape is at best an uncertain prospect.
LEAVING LAS VEGAS
Scenes of departure are fraught with anxiety in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, beginning with Duke's first attempt to leave (after the Mint 400). His attorney has already flown back to Los Angeles, leaving Duke alone to skip out on their massive hotel and room service bill. He finds a bar on the outskirts of Las Vegas to prepare himself for the run to LA, which will leave him exposed and conspicuous in the bright red convertible they have been using in Las Vegas. The scene evokes the historical context in Los Angeles that grounds the novel in a state of exception, with Duke sitting on a bar stool at a nearly empty bar sipping a beer, as Salazar was right before being killed. As he is speeding back across the desert, though, Duke is stopped by a highway patrolman. He gets off with a warning that comes with one condition – the cop wants him to pull over to rest and will be waiting on the far side of town to arrest him if he tries to “make a run for L.A.”Footnote 75 The border has effectively been sealed, and Duke has no choice but to return to Las Vegas for the District Attorney convention.
After that second convention, their attempts to leave are again fraught with difficulty. The day before Duke leaves, he takes Dr. Gonzo to the airport. But since they are running late for the flight, Duke has to improvise, turning suddenly off the highway, crashing through a chain-link fence, and doing sixty “across the runway – then cactus again, then runway”Footnote 76 towards the terminal, where he could drop Dr. Gonzo off right by the plane. The adventure reminds Duke of yet another airport departure. Running late for a plane out of Peru, he had run across the runway towards the plane, which had already started its engines and moved away from the boarding ladder. Seeing him coming, the airport cops gathered at the gate to stop him. Duke tried to run through them, but “it was like running full bore into a closet full of gila monsters. The fuckers almost killed me. All I remember is seeing five or six billyclubs coming down on me at the same time, and a lot of voices screaming: ‘No! No! It's suicide! Stop the crazy gringo!’”Footnote 77 Once again the border is sealed and the state prevents movement from the inside to the outside. Navigating the airport for his own departure is even more frightening because the airport is “full of cops: the mass exodus after the climax of the District Attorney's Conference.”Footnote 78 Though Duke does manage to get onto his plane and out of Las Vegas without major incident, the implications of these anxious departures are clear: the state of exception absorbs much more easily than it relinquishes.
Thompson's post-9/11 prediction that we would “stay at war with that mysterious enemy for the rest of our lives” is based on the same understanding of the stamina and centripetal force of the state of exception. But while the post-9/11 environment has intensified and clarified such structures as the state of exception, the homo sacer, and global sovereignty, their origins go back much further, and my reading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas demonstrates that Thompson was attempting to identify and negotiate similar concerns at an earlier stage of their development. If the work of Agamben and of Hardt and Negri helps us better understand the political realities we face in the present, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas helps us better understand their scope and history. Not merely, as it is often treated, a snapshot of its time, static in its representations and useful to contemporary audiences only to the extent that its social moment mirrors our own, Thompson's novel offers an early sketch of complex issues of citizenship and law that continue to shape our world today.
