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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2012
In the forty years since its publication, Hunter S. Thompson's most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has received relatively little attention from scholars, in spite of its continuing popularity and acknowledged influence. Because the narrative is so thoroughly rooted in what Thompson called “this foul year of Our Lord, 1971,” the novel is generally approached (when it is discussed at all) as a historical artifact, a gonzo first draft of history, with its fortunes rising and falling with the counterculture of the 1960s. This article argues that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, far from being merely an epitaph for the 1960s, actually anticipates the more recent work of political theorists Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Thompson's work, like Agamben's, concerns the emergence of the state of exception and the homo sacer as new paradigms for the relationship between citizen and state; and, like Hardt and Negri, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas attempts to formulate a response to the emergence of global empire.
1 Thompson, Hunter S., “Fear & Loathing in America,” ESPN.com: Page 2, 12 Sept. 2001Google Scholar, available at www.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id = 1250751, paras. 6 and 10 of 14.
2 The Obama administration officially uses the term Overseas Contingency Operation rather than War on Terror, but the original phrase remains in use by the media, politicians, and some government operations.
3 The frequency with which it has been used as a cultural touchstone attests to its popularity, with scholarly work across a variety of disciplines invoking Thompson's signature dyad in article titles such as “Fear and Loathing in the Spiritual Quest,” “on Reality Television,” “in the State of Denmark” (a literary study of Hamlet), and “in Jus Cogens: A Journey to the Heart of International Law” (but, alas, not a savage journey). This convention is also common in the print media and is pervasive online.
4 Sickels, Robert, “A Countercultural Gatsby: Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Death of the American Dream and the Rise of Las Vegas,” Popular Culture Review, 11 (2000) 61–73, 62Google Scholar.
5 Banco, Lindsey Michael, “Trafficking Trips: Drugs and the Anti-tourist Novels of Hunter S. Thompson and Alex Garland,” Studies in Travel Writing, 11 (2007), 127–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wright, Greg, “The Literary, Political, and Legal Strategies of Oscar Zeta Acosta and Hunter S. Thompson: Intertextuality, Ambiguity, and (Naturally) Fear and Loathing,” Journal of Popular Culture, 43 (2010), 622–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; DeKoven, Marianne, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 DeKoven, 86.
7 Cooper, Ken, “‘Zero Pays the House’: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette,” Contemporary Literature, 33 (1992), 528–44, 541CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Thompson, Hunter S., Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories (New York: The Modern Library, 1996)Google Scholar, 1–204, 21.
9 Menand, Louis, “Life in the Stone Age,” New Republic, 7 and 14 Jan. 1991, 43Google Scholar.
10 Michael Hardt, “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” in Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, eds., Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–10, 2.
11 Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1988), 43.
12 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36.
13 Early examples of this tradition include Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1965), Thompson's own Hell's Angels (1966), Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night (1968), which bore the subtitle “history as novel, the novel as history.” For an early history of New Journalism see Everette E. Dennis and William L. Rivers's Other Voices: The New Journalism in America (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1974). For a study of the nonfiction novel, see Robert Augustin Smart's The Nonfiction Novel.
14 Thompson, Hunter S., “Jacket Copy for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,” in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories (New York: The Modern Library, 1996), 207–15, 208, italics in original.Google Scholar
15 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 23.
16 Thompson, “Jacket Copy,” 213.
17 Escobar, Edward J., “The Dialectics of Repression: The Los Angeles Police Department and the Chicano Movement, 1968–1971,” Journal of American History, 79 (March 1993), 1483–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 “Salazar Facts Still Unknown,” Los Angeles Times, 7 Oct. 1970, OC 10 (Proquest).
19 Thompson, Hunter S., “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories (New York: The Modern Library, 1996), 217–62, 228.Google Scholar
20 Ibid., 238.
21 Ibid., 224.
22 Thompson, “Jacket Copy,” 207.
23 Ibid., 207–8.
24 Ibid., 207.
25 Thompson, Hunter S., “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat,” in The Great Shark Hunt (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 495–516, 497Google Scholar, ellipsis in original.
26 Thompson, “Strange Rumblings,” 238, ellipsis in original.
27 Agamben, State of Exception, 7.
28 Ibid., 238.
29 The military associations of the War on Drugs extend beyond mere rhetoric: news reports about the “drug problem” in the 1960s and 1970s paid particular attention to the rates of usage and addiction among soldiers in Vietnam (see “President Orders Wider Drug Fight,” New York Times, 18 June 1971, 1 (Proquest)); an infamous Super Bowl advertisement in the January after 9/11 equated using drugs with financing terrorism (aee “Anti-drug Ads Play the Terror Card – Linking Street Buys to Funding Militant Networks Draws Fire,” San Francisco Chronicle, 4 Feb. 2002, A1 (Access World News)); and Barry McCaffrey, who was appointed the nation's “drug czar” during the Clinton Administration, was actually a retired general.
30 “Excerpts from President's Message on Drug Abuse Control,” New York Times, 18 June 1971, 22 (Proquest).
31 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 149.
32 Ibid., 149.
33 Nissen, Adolph, Das Iustitium: Eine Studie aus der römischen Rechtsgeschichte (Leipzig: Gebhardt, 1877)Google Scholar; quoted in Agamben, State of Exception, 45.
34 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 106.
35 Ibid., 193.
36 Ibid., 155.
37 Ibid., 155–56.
38 As Las Vegas represents, for Thompson, his fear of the 1970s to come and the emerging reality of the state of exception being subject to the whims of capital, Mike Davis describes its frightening realization in “Fear and Money in Dubai” (New Left Review, 41 (Sept.–Oct. 2006), 47–68). Dubai, Davis writes, “has already surpassed that other desert arcade of capitalist desire, Las Vegas, both in sheer scale of spectacle and the profligate consumption of water and power” (49), and where “feudal absolutism … has been spruced up as the last word in enlightened corporate administration” (61). In Dubai, “the state … is almost indistinguishable from private enterprise” (61), and “personal liberty … derives strictly from the business plan, not from a constitution, much less ‘inalienable rights’” (62).
39 Ibid., 5.
40 Ibid., 197, ellipsis in original.
41 Ibid., 94.
42 Ibid., 100.
43 Ibid., 173.
44 Ibid., 173.
45 Luis-Martinez, Manual, Countering the Counter-culture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003)Google Scholar, 184.
46 Koch, Wendy, “U. S. Urged to Apologize for 1930s Deportations,” USA Today, 4 April 2006Google Scholar, available at www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006–04–04–1930s-deportees-cover_x.htm.
47 Thompson, “Strange Rumblings,” 232.
48 Notable clients included the East LA Thirteen, who were arrested following the East LA Walkout at local schools in 1968; the Biltmore Six, who were arrested after protesting a speech by then-governor Ronald Reagan in 1969; and Chicano poet and activist Corky Gonzales, who was arrested for allegedly inciting a riot following the Chicano Moratorium. Acosta's Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), provides an account of his tactics in these and other cases, as well as an account of the birth of the Chicano movement. As with Thompson's approach in Fear and Loathing, the story draws heavily from real experiences but also incorporates elements of fiction. For instance, his defense of the Biltmore Six and Gonzales are combined as the “Tooner Seven.”
49 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 104.
50 Ibid., 23–24, emphasis and ellipses in original.
51 Ibid., 24.
52 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 109, italics in original.
53 Ibid., 108.
54 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 3.
55 Ibid., 19, emphasis in original.
56 Ibid., 36.
57 Ibid., 139.
58 Ibid., 46.
59 Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 136. Hardt and Negri acknowledge this frontier as, from the beginning, a fiction which conceals the brutalities of slavery and the destruction and displacement of the indigenous population.
60 This relationship also helps to explain the difference in tone between the two analyses. The movement towards permanent and universal exception outlined in Agamben is daunting, while Hardt and Negri, in analyzing the operation of power in a world in which this process is largely complete, find cause for optimism in the tools available and opportunities for resistance. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, of course, lacks the historical perspective of the latter work, written as it was while Thompson was painfully and personally experiencing the expansion of exception Agamben outlines; the novel, accordingly, also lacks the sense of utopian possibility contained in the work of Hardt and Negri.
61 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 178.
62 Ibid., 22.
63 Hardt and Negri, 70.
64 Ibid., 72.
65 Ibid., 75.
66 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 65.
67 Ibid., 179, emphasis in original.
68 Ibid., 179. Though he did not go to the Vatican to do it, Dylan did kiss the Pope's ring (twenty six years after Thompson wrote that line) after performing for Pope John Paul II in Bologna.
69 Ibid., 179, ellipses in original.
70 Ibid., 178, emphasis in original.
71 Ibid., 180.
72 Though the quote is among Thompson's most famous, and is repeated in numerous news stories, websites, and quotation books, the provenance is unclear.
73 Hardt and Negri, 214–15.
74 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 132, emphasis in original.
75 Ibid., 93.
76 Ibid., 171.
77 Ibid., 170.
78 Ibid., 198.
