Between scanner and object

drugs and ontology in Philip K. Dick's a scanner darkly

Marcus Boon

pp. 69-82

in: Alexander Dunst, Stefan Schlensag (eds), The world according to Philip K. Dick, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

Summary: Our minds are occluded, deliberately, so that we can’t see the prison world we’re slaves in, which is created by a powerful magician-like evil deity, who, however, is opposed by a mysterious salvific entity which often takes trash forms, and who will restore our lost real memories. This entity may even be an old wino. Drugs, communism, and sex and fake plural pathological pseudo worlds are involved, but the pluriform salvific entity, as mysterious as quicksilver, will save us in the end and restore us to true human state. We will then cease to be mere reflex machines. This is the summation of my Kerygma, spread out throughout my works.1