Nixit and the Pharmaco-Capitalist Soul: Hauntings Under Piramal Pharma
Nixit and the Pharmaco-Capitalist Soul: Hauntings Under Piramal Pharma Posted on 27th October, 2025 (GMT 07:40 hrs) ABSTRACT This essay interrogates Nixit —a nicotine lozenge produced by Piramal Pharma—as an artifact of contemporary bio-political control. By examining its chemical composition, rhetoric of health, and psychopolitical subtext, the paper situates Nixit within the neoliberal economy of purification, where addiction is not eliminated but reformatted for consumption. Drawing on Freud’s psychoanalysis and Foucault’s biopolitics, alongside the cinematic allegory of Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking (2007), the article reveals how the pharmaco-industrial complex transforms rebellion into obedience, recoding the smoker’s desire into a commodified act of self-regulation. Incorporating Nietzsche’s genealogy of internalized violence and Derrida’s notion of hauntology, it further argues that the lozenge embodies the spectral persistence of repressi...