“Hallucination, that strange guest” : the Limits of Reason at the Club des Hachichins

Abstract

In the framework of the literary representation of drugs, their raison d’être, their effects, and their consequences, this study will mainly address key texts by Baudelaire and Gautier, two of the boldest explorers of ivresse in the nineteenth century who were both participants in the Club des hachichins under the tutelage of Dr. Moreau. The condition of possibility of their liminal experiences is the taking of drugs that allows them to get lost, voluntarily, in a space beyond the landmarks of conventional thought on the moving, and often untenable, threshold between reason and madness.