초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This presentation will examine the pathology of addiction from a psychoanalytic perspective instead of proposing a policy alternative. In addiction the object is only temporary, and the addict is in a sense always anxious of the threat of the loss of object. The result is the peculiar circularity of movement between melancholy and fanatic attention in addiction. That he addict is trapped in a circle means that an encounter with an authentic object, as with Winnicott's transitional object, never occurs. And then, I will also borrow the lens of cinema in suggesting that the mechanisms of addiction is relatable to the logic of production of neo-needs (néo-besoin) in the capitalism of drive. More specifically, I will rely on David Cronenberg’s cinematic world, who interestingly shows how mechanisms of addiction are generated by the production of “new desires” in modern societies. His films Videodrome (1983), Crash (1996) and eXistenZ (1999), directly bear on the theme of the modern man’s alienation in sex and game addictions. They can be seen as a cinematographic response to the desolate landscape drawn by Bernard Steiger, who called modern capitalism a “libidinal economy”. It hence appears that the pathology of addiction is intimately linked to the logic of libidinal economy, which functions by constantly rechanneling desires to possible objects. The result is a destruction of the unique feature of desire, its infinity; it signifies that the desiring experience shall be reduced to a mere libido, thereby stripping it of its moment of ethical question, “how will I learn to desire?”
