UC Santa Cruz

This thesis examines the addict as an ontological, medical, and aesthetic category in the context of psychoanalysis, biopolitics, and cinema. Organized in two parts consisting of distinct but thematically conversing papers, I offer a reading of the addict as an ethical subject of desire. The first paper, entitled "Mastering Death, Rejecting the Future: The Peculiar Sovereignty of the Addict," investigates what it is about addiction that engenders strong and conflicting views and media representations. In this paper, I contend that anxieties regarding the addict's attempts at mastering death by closely encountering it explain biopolitical modalities of addiction rhetoric and policy. By exposing the similarities between the addict and Foucault’s homo economicus, I argue that the addict's disruptive social and political impact stems from a refusal to valorize longevity/futurity and the self-administration of jouissance. The second paper, entitled "Leaving Las Vegas and the Ethics of Addiction," takes this line of inquiry to a specific cultural text, the 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas. By parsing the intricacies of the film's unique addiction narrative, I reveal the ethics of desire, what Jacques Lacan calls "the ethical act" at the heart of the protagonist's, Ben Sanderson's, story. I frame the discussion with psychoanalytic film theory, which studies film as a collective dream where a culture's repressed fantasies emerge. Leaving Las Vegas tells a story of an addict whose singular desire is allowed to exist as it is and illustrates the often-unrecognized ethical structure of addicted desire.