What Happens in Vegas: Hunter S. Thompson's Political Philosophy

Abstract

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.