Toppling off the Stage into the Real: Addiction as Passage à L’acte

Toppling off the Stage into the Real: Addiction as Passage à L’acte Shane Cooney (bio) I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have perilled life and reputation and reason. It has been in the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories—memories of wrong and injustice and imputed dishonor—from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom. Edgar Allan Poe I in 1971, Richard Nixon famously declared drug addiction as “public enemy number one,” a statement that marked the commencement of the U.S.-led global war on drugs. Addiction has since become a more prominent part of moral, political, scientific, and medical discourses. Yet, despite the greater attention and resources given to the problem, redressing it has remained largely unsuccessful. Psychoanalysis has not involved itself much in the discourses on drug addiction. Freud and Lacan never discussed drug use or addiction beyond a few scattered remarks. In the last few decades, as patients are increasingly coming into clinics with complaints of addiction, psychoanalysts have started to focus more on the problem, although compared [End Page 101] to the other Unbehagen of the modern subject, the contributions of psychoanalysis are decidedly lacking. But psychoanalysis can still speak meaningfully to the problem, articulating novel theoretical frameworks for understanding addiction in ways that challenge underlying assumptions of the moral-medical discursive dichotomy. Lacan’s theory of anxiety is a particularly fecund starting point for a psychoanalytic conceptualization of addiction, as it allows one to situate drug use and addiction in relation to the subject’s last defenses against anxiety: acting-out and passage à l’acte. Such a conceptualization of drug addiction has yet to be developed at length. Elaborating addiction in these terms, I argue that addiction is a response to the anxiety-provoking encounter with a lack that lacks the support that lack normally provides (Book X 53). By positioning it in this way, drug addiction can be understood as the subject’s repeated efforts to exit the Symbolic order and drop themselves into the Real. The compulsive use of drugs is a fast-track to jouissance that purposively and entirely circumvents the Other; it is the subject’s desperate attempt to reduce themselves to a singularity, to exit the Symbolic and to return to a pure state of being, “a destruction of the ‘I think’ in favor of an ‘I am,’ without mitigation and beyond all thought” (Braunstein 227). Importantly, situating addiction in terms of passage à l’acte allows us to broaden our definition of addiction to see the true scale of the problem, namely, that the most destructive and widespread addictions today do not involve drugs or alcohol. The dominant discourses on addiction fail to adequately consider the sociopolitical causes and effects of addiction historically and in the present. A paradigm shift in the way we view addiction is needed if we are to develop and pursue effective solutions. The psychologist Bruce K. Alexander proposes the “dislocation theory of addiction,” a framework that identifies the root cause of the globalization of addictions as being the fragmentation of societies that began with the colonial projects of the fifteenth century and the subsequent rapid expansion of free markets. Following Alexander’s lead and drawing from Karl Marx’s theory of alienation, I argue that today we see the growing addictification of all societies in which capital has become a determining factor, and, indeed, the proliferation of these addictions is one of the primary driving forces of the global economy. II Before beginning, some preliminary remarks are in order. First, while I attempt to support my claims with concrete examples, this work remains [End Page 102] highly speculative.1 In the clinic, each analysand should be treated in their singularity, and I am, admittedly, painting with broad strokes here. In a sense, there is a general assumption that undergirds my argument, which becomes clearer in the second half of the paper, namely, that today all of us fall somewhere on a spectrum of addiction, that there is a fundamental human impulse—exacerbated by the exigencies and effects...

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