[…] hunger, fatigue, and despairing hopelessness had numbed his brain […]

Tobacco is an excisable commodity.

(see more in main entry)

I have noted that throughout La vie la mort Derrida calls attention to this programming machine, a machine that operates effectively to auto-reproduce biological, political, and pedagogical sameness and that in so doing, attempts to reify (“cadaverize”) the living body and the living body of language (for this, see especially Derrida's “Nietzsche and the Machine”).