Review of Lorenzo Servitje’s “Of Drugs and Droogs: Cultural Dynamics, Psychopharmacology, and Neuroscience in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange

摘要

The infamous “Ludovico treatment”, from Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A ClockworkOrange, remains an enduringly relevant (and seemingly irresistible) vignette forscholars of biopolitics. Sensationalizing the mid-century relationship betweenpsychiatry and pharmacology, the experimental intervention suffered by Burgess’santihero, Alex, continues to speak to contemporary fears about biotechnology, socialcontrol, and individual autonomy. Lorenzo Servitje’s essay offers a new reading of AClockwork Orange in terms of its medico-historical context, and, in particular, theneuroscientific and psychopharmacological developments of the 1950s and 1960s.Only by appreciating important shifts in ideology and infrastructure during the postwarperiod, Servitje argues, can the significance of the novel’s critique of “a specific andcrucial biopolitical moment” be recognized (118).