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	 Radical Indulgence: Excess, Addiction, and Female Desire

      *Karen Kopelson *
      / University of Louisville/
      karen.kopelson@louisville.edu 

      (c) 2006 Karen Kopelson.
      All rights reserved.

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          What exactly is morally objectionable about excess?

          --Stuart Walton, Out of It


            By Way of (an Excessive) Introduction

   1. In the introduction to The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo writes
      that feminism has often "stood for and with the normal"; that in
      efforts not to alienate men (or other women) made uneasy by
      departures from "proper" femininity, feminists have made sure we
      do not make "spectacles" of ourselves, consistently offering
      "reassurances that feminists are 'normal women' and that our
      political aspirations are mainstream"--efforts that have resulted,
      in Russo's view, in a "cultural and political disarticulation of
      feminism from the strange, the risky, the minoritarian, the
      excessive, the outlawed, and the alien" (12). Yet in the midst of
      these efforts, and sometimes as corrective responses to them,
      feminism /has/ also undeniably linked itself with the alien and
      excessive. Indeed, the notion of "excess" has for some years now
      served as a productively disruptive trope for a variety of
      postmodern feminist theories working to counter and subvert
      dominant, masculinist logics. Both psychoanalytic and
      sexual-difference theories, for example, have made use of ideas of
      excess to release feminine desire from its supposed basis in
      "lack" and refigure it as fluid, abundant, overflowing, and
      diffuse. Alternatively, but to similar ends, these and other
      theories have reclaimed the prevalent cultural associations of
      female desire /with excess/--with a "formlessness that engulfs all
      form, a disorder that threatens all order" (Grosz 203)--to
      capitalize on the potent force of these longstanding associations.
      In other contexts, French feminist writers have posited excess as
      an insurgent characteristic of feminine language/writing, one that
      can derail phallogocentric, disciplinary expectations for
      discursive linearity and closure. Feminist discussions of body
      image as well, academic and activist alike, have for over two
      decades attempted to recuperate excess, in the forms of
      voluptuousness and largeness, as modes of what Susan Bordo and
      others have repeatedly called "embodied protest" against cultural
      demands that women at once contain their appetites and remain
      diminutively un-threatening to men. More recently, queer feminist
      theorists have appealed to excess, at least implicitly, in
      conversations that have sought to extricate sex from gender, sex
      and gender from sexuality, and to multiply all of the above beyond
      any notions of correspondence or of binary construction. In short,
      excess has become a postmodern feminist rescue-trope, if you will,
      with some of us even suggesting that excess can rescue feminism
      from itself--and not only in the sense that Russo describes, but
      from dualistic models of generational conflict, or, conversely,
      from demands for transgenerational "paradigmatic coherence," both
      of which would prohibit non-identical feminist practices, and
      diverse theoretical assumptions (see Weigman).

   2. Yet a particular, and particularly derided, notion of excess that
      has not been as thoroughly redeployed to postmodern feminist ends
      is the excess of addiction and/or intoxication.[1 <#foot1>] I must
      note immediately that in making such a claim I hardly mean to
      suggest that the concept of "addiction" has not been thoroughly
      interrogated and problematized. Culturally dominant understandings
      of alcoholism, addiction, and drug use have been contradicted, and
      convincingly up-ended, from historical, sociological,
      anthropological, literary-critical, philosophical/ theoretical,
      and medical/scientific perspectives alike, and, as I show in this
      essay, feminist theorizing has played no small role in advancing
      this broadly interdisciplinary critique. However, while feminist
      critics have performed many counterintuitive, deconstructive
      readings of addiction--Melissa Pearl Friedling's 2000 book,
      Recovering Women: Feminisms and the Representation of Addiction is
      exemplary here--these critiques usually stop just short of
      actually /rehabilitating/ addiction, fearing, as Friedling puts
      it, that such a strategy potentially "insists on female suffering
      as the prerequisite for feminist agency" (3), or, at the least,
      risks re-establishing associations of femininity with passive
      receptivity and dependence. In short, feminist critics (and
      others) who have theorized the subject of addiction have often
      been wary, and justifiably so, of arguing for, or being perceived
      as arguing for, the "emancipatory possibilities in compulsive drug
      use" (Friedling 31; see also Keane, Ronell, and Derrida).

   3. Another boundary that feminist critiques of addiction have tended
      not to cross separates the figurative from the "real," lived
      experiences of "excessive" drinking and drugging, and I mean this
      in two crucial senses. In one sense, and perhaps because of a
      reluctance to disregard the sometimes catastrophic results of drug
      use, we have tended to privilege analyses of media representations
      of the addicted subject, rather than analyses of the ontology of
      addiction (/being/ on drugs). Friedling is careful to make this
      very distinction, saying in the introduction to her book: "Often
      the addict that I discuss only /looks/ or /acts/ like an addict."
      Friedling is most often reading the "stylized acts of addiction"
      (the "heroin chic" look in fashion journalism, for example, as
      well as performances of addiction in music, film, and television),
      and says that "mistaking performance for ontology is an error"
      (13). However, in a second sense, we have retreated from the
      "real" of being addicted to or being on drugs not by studying
      addiction's media representations, but by making addiction/drug
      use /representative of/ something else--a pattern, we might note,
      that far precedes postmodern feminist examinations. At least since
      Heidegger, perhaps since Schelling (according to Heidegger), and
      even perhaps as far back as Plato, addiction--framed variously,
      depending on the cultural parlance of the day, as /pharmakon/,
      narcotica, toxicomania, intoxication, being-on-drugs--has served
      as what David L. Clark calls a "figure par excellence" (25); it
      has been made an allegory for (among other phenomena) myriad forms
      of consumption, for writing and literature, for cultural anxieties
      about the invasion and contagion of the "foreign" across permeable
      borders, for our relationship to time, for the fundamental
      structure of all desire, and even for the structure and experience
      of being itself.[2 <#foot2>] True to its own definitive traits,
      then, addiction seems to have produced and sustained in us the
      desire to figure it repetitively, compulsively, to the point that
      Clark suggests figurations of addiction are "complexly
      symptomatic" of our addiction /to/ figurative language itself:
      "philosophical narratives about addiction," Clark writes, "have a
      habit of becoming evocatively pharmaceutical," of obeying--and
      remaining fixed within--the "logic of the supplement" (26, 10).

   4. I am not sure whether to read Clark's statement as a true
      indictment of philosophical discourses on addiction, or as playful
      philosophizing, though I tend toward the latter as he announces in
      his essay's introduction that his own analysis will "risk the
      hermeneutical equivalent of 'narcoticizing,'" "planting drugs," of
      "looking for contraband and finding it everywhere" (10). However,
      for the sake of my own argument, I take Clark literally, and posit
      as a flaw, or at least as a timid retreat-response, the tendency
      of discussions of addiction to get stuck in the figurative, to
      construct and deconstruct addiction as representative /of/
      something other than/supplemental to itself, or, alternatively, to
      examine performances of addicted subjectivity in film, literature,
      television, music, and a variety of other cultural texts. In this
      essay, therefore, I risk the hermeneutical counter-stance of
      analyzing the ontology of addiction itself (as it is embodied by
      the female subject), rather than making the ontology of
      addiction/intoxication metaphorical, and of interpreting the state
      of "/being/ on drugs," rather than "looking" or "acting" like one
      is on drugs.[3 <#foot3>] Specifically, I take the risk of
      rehabilitating addiction and/or "excessive" drinking/drug use as
      another form of women's lived, embodied protest against
      patriarchal structures of containment. While I offer my own
      concessions that drug and alcohol use wreaks havoc in the lives of
      many, it is perhaps precisely because these lived, embodied
      practices are among the most derided, dangerous, and (often
      literally) "outlawed" manifestations of excessive female desire
      that their interpretation can be productively, seditiously
      mobilized to postmodern feminist ends. To argue for the
      emancipatory properties of addiction and drug use may indeed seem
      unreasonable, even impossible. "Reason," however, is a hegemonic,
      masculinist logic par excellence, and the circumscription of
      possibility is what feminist deployments of excess have always
      aimed to transgress.[4 <#foot4>]


            What Do We Hold Against The Drug Addict?

          What are the antecedents of this infuriated, unforgiving
          attitude to intoxication in others?

          --Stuart Walton

   5. As Alcoholics Anonymous and its many offspring make clear, any act
      of rehabilitation must start at the proverbial "rock bottom," and
      so in order to rehabilitate addiction from a postmodern feminist
      perspective, we must begin by reviewing some of the primary bases
      for the addict's abjection more generally. In his interview, "The
      Rhetoric of Drugs," Jacques Derrida answers his own, now famous
      question, "What do we hold against the drug addict?" by arguing
      that our discomfort arises because "his is a pleasure taken in an
      experience without truth." The search for pleasure is not itself
      always socially condemned, Derrida clarifies, but we condemn the
      drug addict's pleasure because it is obtained by escapist,
      artificial, inauthentic means removed from "objective reality."
      The question of drugs, Derrida says, is thereby one and the same
      with "the grand question--of truth. Neither more nor less" (7-8).
      But the question of drugs is related to another grand question,
      which Derrida also acknowledges: the question of citizenship and
      social responsibility. And here we condemn the drug addict,
      Derrida continues, because he "cuts himself off from the world,"
      because we perceive his pleasure as "solitary and desocializing"
      (7, 19). Jeffrey Nealon, in "'Junk' and the Other: Burroughs and
      Levinas on Drugs," similarly concludes that we hate the drug
      addict because of his "attempt to withdraw from contact with and
      responsibility for the other," because he "is inexorably and
      completely for himself" (56, 62): "junkies want to be inside,"
      Nealon writes; "they want the pure, interior subjectivity of the
      drug stupor" (54). Or, as Levinas himself dramatically put it,
      "the relaxation in intoxication is a semblance of distance and
      irresponsibility. It is a suppression of fraternity, or a murder
      of the brother" (qtd in Nealon 56).

   6. Many of the critics who have disrupted dominant views of addiction
      would remind us, however, that intoxication is not inherently
      desocializing, or inherently "stupefying." Far from it, many
      intoxicants facilitate social connection, and lend considerable
      conviviality to social engagement, while others actually
      accelerate productivity. As Stuart Walton writes in his cultural
      history of intoxication, Out of It, a "working mother of the
      1960's, zipping through the ironing on prescription speed," or the
      "superstar chef on cocaine," immediately reveal the inadequacy of
      the "hazed out trance" to serve as the "paradigm state of 'being
      on drugs,'" and so Walton asks "what sort of agenda is served by
      such a malevolent act of synthesis" (11). Answering his own
      question, Walton asserts that "to posit the existence of a single,
      compendious substance called 'drugs,'" and to construct "drugs" as
      always "inimical to social functioning," is to "get away with the
      fiction that taking them is an eccentric pursuit found only in a
      deviant, dysfunctional subculture" (11). In other words, the
      paradigm serves, as paradigms will, to squelch any differences
      that would disrupt the order of exclusion which produces and
      constrains normative, "authentic" subjects.

   7. Like Walton, I seek to call attention to these differences within
      the master-category of "being on drugs" primarily to call
      attention to the paradigm itself, and it is within and against
      this hegemonic, socially constructed (because necessary) paradigm
      that I perform my analysis. I do this not to squelch differences
      myself, but in order to reveal, from a feminist perspective, what
      sort of agenda is served by ignoring the zippy ironer (or today,
      the female superstar chef), by rendering the female drug user, in
      particular, a socially dysfunctional deviant.

   8. In Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body,
      Bordo firmly established that the cultural need to control woman's
      appetite for food is a symbolic crystallization of the need to
      police her appetites and desires more generally, in order to
      ensure that she "develop a totally other-oriented emotional
      economy." "The rules for the construction of femininity," Bordo
      writes, "require that women learn to feed others, not the self,
      and to construe any desires for self-nurturance and self-feeding
      as greedy and excessive" (171). Though Bordo never makes the
      connection between eating and drug use, the overlap is obvious:
      women's drug use is a self-indulgence--verboten because it may
      take her away from her social and, especially, familial duties. In
      What's Wrong with Addiction?, Helen Keane similarly reminds us
      that "normative femininity includes sociability and caring for
      others. Women who are obsessed with a solitary activity which they
      find more rewarding than family life are much more disturbing than
      men who neglect family and friends for the sake of a solitary
      pursuit, whatever those pursuits might be" (118). For women, it is
      hardly just clandestine drug use, but, as Keane says, /any/
      "desire for uninterrupted time alone" that is considered
      "pathological" (118), while for the male subject--as long as he is
      ultimately productive in the fraternal order--the withdrawal from
      family life is not only accepted as his rightful reward, but is
      even rewarded as his correct investment in the home. Clearly, as
      provider, the ideal family man must spend much time removed from
      the domestic space.

   9. However, when we remember that drug use is often not a solitary
      pursuit, that it is as often a communal activity as it is a
      withdrawal from community, we glimpse another way in which women's
      drug use becomes an expression of female desire presented as
      inauthentic because dangerous to the social and familial order.
      While the hazed out, interiorized subjectivity of a drug stupor
      certainly constitutes woman's improper removal from a domestic
      sphere that requires other-orientation, the other-orientation of
      much drug use itself becomes an improper sociality that similarly
      threatens to, and often literally does, take women away from
      familial space, and which must therefore be curtailed. A bit of
      transcontinental history here can serve to make the surveillance
      and punishment visited upon women for partaking in intoxicated
      public life most apparent: As both Walton and criminologist
      Mariana Valverde have documented, the Habitual
      Drunkards/Inebriates Acts instituted in Great Britain in the late
      nineteenth/early twentieth centuries were subject to much "gender
      specific enforcement," and while many of the women put away under
      the acts (usually into Inebriates Asylums) were prostitutes, most
      were mothers charged with child neglect--charged, essentially,
      with the act of "enjoying themselves in pubs" and thereby causing
      "domestic chaos" (Valverde 52-53; also Walton 262). Several years
      later, and across the pond in Post-Repeal Massachusetts, women
      were officially barred from taverns altogether, and were forced to
      remain seated while drinking in other types of establishments
      where they were permitted entry (Valverde 157). In sum, women were
      punished by such legislation not for partaking of a desocializing,
      solitary pleasure, but for attempting to enjoy the male
      prerogatives of inhabiting public space, and for prioritizing
      sociality over domesticity. Through the threat of literal
      commitment (in the case of the Inebriates Acts), and through other
      more subtle but still effective forms of control, women's
      commitment to, and confinement within, the private sphere was thus
      publicly enforced.

  10. U.S. society today has not overcome such expectations of women's
      other-orientation in the domestic sphere, nor has it given up
      related denunciations of their inappropriate, /because
      other-oriented/, participation in the public sphere. Thus, if we
      think back to Walton once more, and revisit from a feminist
      perspective the question why the "hazed out trance" has become
      misrepresentatively representative of all drug use, it is possible
      to conclude that we must characterize the woman drug user as a
      deviant (non)subject removed from the reality of public life
      precisely because she is not sufficiently removed from it; we must
      present her search for pleasure as inauthentic and inimical to
      social functioning in order to keep her functioning properly. But
      the hazed out trance is not only non-paradigmatic of women's (or
      anyone's) drug use, it is the least of the woman drug user's
      offenses. Society may claim--for the ideological reasons just
      mentioned--to hate the female drug addict for her self-containment
      and interiorized absorption, or for her determination to put her
      own desires first, whether that be socially or in private, but it
      hates her all the more for her resolute lack of self-containment
      in other, more obvious senses and incarnations of that term.
      Society has left the Inebriates Acts behind, but it is not beyond
      gender-specific discipline of public inebriation. Women must still
      be seated while drinking.


            Unruly Women

          "What the fuck am I doing here?" I mumble as the center of our
          attention, a big loud drunk woman, hops onto her dining room
          table with a Japanese Kitana sword, strips off her blouse and
          begins to gyrate to an old Van Halen tune . . . . "Nothing, I
          repeat,/ nothing,/ is worse than a woman who can't handle her
          booze."

          --Jim Marquez, "Girl Crazy"

          There is a phrase that still resonates from my childhood. Who
          says it? . . . "She is making a spectacle out of herself."

          --Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque

  11. As Russo explains, "making a spectacle out of oneself" seems a
      "specifically feminine danger" (53); the phrase is almost
      singularly associated with women's public transgressions of the
      rules surrounding femininity. While men may occasionally get
      bounced from the bar for bad behavior, the "big loud drunk woman"
      inevitably becomes an object of derision and disgust, and not only
      because she is associated with largeness, with taking up too much
      space, or, as Russo puts it, "step[ping] into the limelight out of
      turn" (53), but because she is (again significantly) associated
      with an inappropriate, because excessive, sexuality. When a drunk
      woman steps into the limelight, she clambers onto tables and rips
      off her clothes. She stumbles onto center-stage and acts like a slut.

  12. Though this essay hopes to move beyond analyses of stylized
      performances of addiction, I would like to take a particularly
      illustrative detour into an analysis of one such performance: that
      of rock star turned general icon of inappropriateness Courtney
      Love. In her Bad Subjects article, "Staging the Slut," Kim
      Nicolini asks the Derridean question, "Why does the world love to
      hate Courtney?" and answers, "because she is a slut; because she's
      totally fucked up; . . . because she's totally out of control."
      Nicolini remembers that audiences at typical (and still legendary)
      Hole performances of the 1990s were often seduced by Love's
      apparent drunken/drugged accessibility and voracious sexuality,
      and yet repulsed by her sloppy, pornographic qualities, and
      repelled as well by the interplay of Love's staged-slut persona
      with the band's music: "equipped with electric guitar," Nicolini
      writes, Love "denies her audience the satisfaction of a pure
      pornographic/erotic moment by disrupting its sexual pleasure with
      a bunch of ugly noise." Nicolini sees this "slut/audience
      relationship" as a productive and positive dynamic, claiming that
      it unsettles audience members into confronting their expectations
      of a quiet and constrained female sexuality, and goes so far as to
      suggest that we may read Love, and other female performers like
      her, as "taking control of their bodies by losing control of their
      bodies."

  13. This may seem like a generous, or at least a very optimistic
      reading. Performances are only actualized in their reception,
      after all, and Nicolini does acknowledge that her radicalizing
      interpretation of the Love-spectacle might not be shared by those
      "less conscious"--those who are more likely to ridicule and
      trivialize Love before she can even become (because she is about
      to become) unsettling. But the very need to ridicule and
      trivialize guitar-or-sword-brandishing women who make spectacles
      of themselves is a testament to their power, to what Kathleen Rowe
      calls their "vaguely demonic" threat to "the social and symbolic
      systems that would keep women in their place" (3). (Love has a
      lyric in which she calls herself "a walking study in demonology.")
      What may be especially threatening about Love, moreover, is that
      she is not /just/ performative spectacle; she does not just look
      or act like an addict, does not just look or act like a slut for
      that matter. Before she was a star, Love worked in the sex
      industry across the globe, and has for over a decade now had a
      very public, very troubled relationship with drugs and alcohol.
      With Love, though she is a cultural icon delivered to us via the
      media, we are nonetheless in the realm of the real and the lived,
      and she forces us to reckon with the unwelcome image/reality of a
      woman on drugs, a woman on, and often way past, the verge. Whether
      Love and other women who step into the limelight as
      drunken/drugged-out sluts are taking control by losing control, or
      are wholly beyond the horizon of intention, is not important.
      Rather the drunk/drugged, "addicted" female body, because it is
      equated with a confusing sexual excess at once inviting and
      repellant, and because it enacts the male prerogatives of
      occupying--or, we might say, spilling into--public space in
      forceful ways, disturbs several normative ideals of what is
      befitting gendered, sexual conduct for a woman. The
      drunken/drugged woman's way of living and being in the world,
      intentional or not, read as radical or repulsive, becomes an
      embodied refusal of gender-specific enforcements around inebriated
      and other "indecorous" acts.

  14. Finally, and perhaps much more counterintuitively, the spectacle
      of women's intoxication is potentially subversive not only of a
      femininity that would keep women in their place, but of a
      hegemonic /masculinity/ as well. While men are permitted their
      public rowdiness in certain contexts, and while they are generally
      permitted more than women the indulgence of appetites of all
      kinds, they are also required in other contexts, particularly the
      civic or professional, to display cool self-discipline. For these
      reasons Bordo has suggested that anorexia (or thinness more
      generally) can be read not, or not only, as the absolute
      non-spectacle of women's diminution and fragility, but, because of
      the intense self-discipline that anorexia entails, as an embodied
      cooptation of professionalizing "male virtues," and that fatness,
      conversely, can be read as a "lack of discipline, unwillingness to
      conform, and absence of all those 'managerial' abilities that . .
      . confer upward mobility" (171-72, 195). I am arguing by
      extension, then, that women's intoxication/addiction, even if it
      does take a more interiorized form, can be interpreted as--can
      enact--a similar unwillingness to be disciplined into the
      fraternal order.

  15. In The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, Michel
      Foucault describes in great detail the supreme "virility" that was
      associated with moderation and self-restraint in ancient Greece,
      and hence the centrality of these qualities to the constitution of
      the proper male subject. To properly "rule," man had first to be
      ruler of his own passions, and to take his pleasures only in ways
      that were considered "right use." When a man was immoderate, he
      was considered to be feminine: in a state of weakness, passivity,
      non-resistance, and submission. These mandates of masculinity,
      however, did not mean that women were not also expected to be
      moderate and self-restrained; rather, the ideal female
      subject--that is, the woman befitting of her self-mastering
      husband's company--was expected to transcend her feminine nature
      and achieve a "domination over herself that was virile by
      definition." Yet, even when a woman did attain this idealized
      because masculinized state, /her/ virtues of self-mastery,
      according to Foucault, were not considered "ruling virtues," as
      were the man's; they were considered "serving virtues," precisely
      because they made her a worthy wife (82-84). It is in the context
      of this simultaneous demand for virility in women and the denial
      of virility /to/ women that we might discern what I see as the
      triple-threat wrought by the woman-on-drugs. One, she rejects what
      Bordo and Foucault both see as definitive male traits of
      self-control that have long served to confer masculine (and
      upper-middle-class) power and privilege. Two, in this refusal to
      master herself, the drugged/addicted woman refuses to be the
      servile, docile counterpart to the ruling, virtuous male; and
      three, to invoke my earlier discussion, in her (self)indulgence
      she casts off demands for masculine self-discipline and for
      feminine appetitive restraints that help ensure her
      other-orientation. Addiction is simply "wrong use." It is only an
      "irrational being," says Foucault of Plato's views on moderation
      and excess, who would pursue the desire for pleasure beyond
      satiation (87).


            Irrational Desire, or, Women Who Love Too Much

  16. In the introduction to her memoir, Drinking: A Love Story,
      Caroline Knapp waxes eloquent about her past relationship with
      alcohol:

          A love story. Yes: this is a love story . . . . It's about
          passion, sensual pleasure, deep pulls, lust, fear, yearning
          hungers . . . I loved the way drink made me feel . . . I loved
          the sounds of drink: the slide of a cork as it eased out of a
          wine bottle, the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a
          glass, the clatter of ice cubes in a tumbler. I loved the
          rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warming,
          melting feelings of ease and courage it gave me. (5-6)

      Such nostalgic descriptions are a common enough feature of
      addiction narratives: authors recount what was, and what now can
      never be, much as one remembers a romantic relationship before its
      ruin. But these descriptions are usually trumped by Reason. They
      are rewritten--or at least written over (as on a palimpsest) and
      thus obscured--by the addiction memoir's inevitable turn to tales
      of despair, and while Knapp, too, ultimately hits her "rock
      bottom" and enters an equally glorious relationship with recovery,
      what distinguishes her story is that she lets this portion of her
      narrative stand, and even dominate; that even in the end she
      frames her "addiction," as her book's title suggests, as love and
      desire. If the question of drugs is one and the same with the
      grand question of Truth, as Derrida says, here we have a truth
      impermissible, and thus no truth at all. "In the modern definition
      of alcoholism," George Levine writes in "The Discovery of
      Addiction," "the problem is not that alcoholics love to get drunk,
      but that they cannot help it--they cannot control themselves. They
      may actually hate getting drunk, wishing only to drink moderately
      or socially." Levine notes that in older views, however, that is,
      before the emergence in the mid-nineteenth century of the
      medicalized model of "addiction" as "disease," and that model's
      attendant understanding of the disease as marked by destructive
      compulsion, "drunkards" were perceived as driven not by a
      tormenting force they "truly" wanted to reject, or at least to
      control, but by the /love/ for drink that Knapp expresses so well;
      by a "great affection"--a too great affection perhaps, but
      affection nonetheless--for the state of intoxication. The
      drunkard's pursuit of intoxication was seen as the simple pursuit
      of happiness, the /choice to pursue/ the object of his deepest
      desire, even if that choice was considered by some to be a bad one
      (Levine 4-5 of 16; see also Sedgwick).

  17. Today, however, the excessive drinker or drugger is not only
      making bad object choices, she is also in a state of bad faith
      (Keane 79). The addict does not "really" want what she wants, and
      it is not just her desires and pleasures that are inauthentic but
      her whole way of being that is void of truth. She is an
      ontological error. Such a conception becomes most pragmatically
      apparent when we think of that most pivotal of moments in the
      addict's life: the Intervention, the moment when the drug user is
      corralled by friends and family members, reasoned with, told in no
      uncertain terms that she is in "denial," and then shipped off to
      treatment which will return her to reality and "recover" her
      authentic self. As Keane says of this process, "the addict and
      truth are being constructed in such a way that they cannot
      coincide. The discourse and structure of intervention produce the
      addict as a subject excluded from the truth, because the truth
      resides in the story of disease and loss of control." Any other
      story, like the speech of Foucault's madman, is considered "null
      and void, mere noise" (81-82).

  18. There have been theoretical accounts of the displacement of
      earlier understandings of drinking and drugging by a current model
      that inserts pathology into the place of pleasure, and dishonesty
      into the space of desire. For my purposes, the question is to what
      effects this newer model is mobilized against the female subject,
      and to what counter-effects one might revisit older, or simply
      different, conceptions of drug and alcohol use to rewrite the
      validity of women's desire, and to continue to upset dominant
      structures that work to contain it. In response to these questions
      I will suggest that the woman who loves her drugs too much
      disturbs society--and does it so productively--because in this
      love she lays claim to a virility not hers for the taking, /and/
      because she needs nothing of man's virility at all.

  19. While it is "true" that in many historical contexts excess
      (because understood as a weak-willed, irrational submission to
      desire) has been gendered feminine, there have been other,
      intervening historical moments characterized by quite
      different--and differently gendered--truths. For example, Valverde
      claims that at the time of the Inebriate Acts in Great Britain,
      when women were incarcerated for public intoxication and neglect
      of domestic duties, male inebriates, at least male inebriates of
      the upper classes, were often viewed positively because in
      possession of a /hyper/-masculinity. Though their pursuit of
      intoxication /was/ considered excessive, that excess was seen to
      arise from the fact that these "gentlemen" "simply possess[ed] too
      much desire, too much virility"; men's excessive drinking (in the
      U.S. of this time period as well) was seen "as rooted in an excess
      of masculine animal spirits." Valverde concludes that though the
      association of excess, alcoholism, and addiction with femininity
      has come down to us as a "timeless truth," it was only in the
      early 1940s that men's drinking began "to be regarded as a symptom
      of dependence, of feminized weakness," and that male drunkards
      were reconstituted as "a bunch of weak willed daydreamers of
      questionable virility" (92, 109).

  20. However, despite claims like Valverde's that addiction is now
      thoroughly feminized, there is a sense in which, still today, the
      addict remains the masculine, too-virile subject associated with
      earlier epochs, for even though today's addict is "diseased," and
      thereby "powerless over alcohol," the primary manifestation of
      this pathology is considered to be a focus on oneself bordering on
      egomania: a self-serving pursuit of what one wants
      (drugs/alcohol), without regard for others and at all
      costs--usually considered "masculine" traits (see Van Den Bergh).
      When we revisit the denial of virility to women described by
      Foucault, as well as the expectations for women's
      other-orientation emphasized throughout this discussion, we can
      read women's addiction as the forbidden cooptation of masculine
      attributes, and of masculine rights to self-privileging and
      self-indulgence. The female addict, rather than being redundantly
      feminized, is still in possession of too much selfish desire. She
      is too virile for her own--and certainly for the "greater"--good.

  21. In addition to its potential incursive affront to masculinity,
      there is another, definitive characteristic of addictive desire
      that makes the woman who loves her drugs too much particularly
      threatening. As Knapp's account of her entrancement with drinking
      attests, addiction is indeed an all-consuming love; it is fiercely
      self-sufficient. Though I have argued against viewing intoxication
      as only interiorized absorption, to a certain extent it always is:
      intoxication, whether achieved with others or alone, needs nothing
      but itself to /be/, and it is the bodily "being" of intoxication,
      rather than the being with others, that the addict often seeks.
      Knapp can continue to serve as our exemplar here, when she
      describes her typical drinking outing:

          A drink or two at the Aku with work friends. Then dinner at a
          restaurant with someone else, three or four glasses of wine
          with a meal, perhaps a glass of brandy afterward. Then home,
          where the bottle of Cognac lurked beneath the counter, a
          bottle of white wine always stood in the refrigerator, cold
          and dewy and waiting. (25)

      Knapp's fellow drinkers in this scenario are little more than
      props, the jovial "camaraderie with others" that she earlier
      mentioned alcohol facilitates secondary to satisfying the hunger
      for alcohol itself, secondary to the sensuous pleasure of
      intoxication, which is ultimately experienced most luxuriously at
      home alone. Knapp claims later, in the recovery portion of her
      narrative, that this pattern is hardly unique; that she discovered
      at AA meetings that "recovering alcoholics often talk about
      drinking 'the way they wanted to' when they were alone, drinking
      without the feeling of social restraint they might have had at a
      party or in a restaurant" (106). Alcohol is the paramour
      here--waiting at home--alcohol the "best friend," a relationship,
      Knapp points out, she and others experience "on the most visceral
      level": "when you're drinking," Knapp explains, "liquor occupies
      the role of lover or constant companion. It sits there on its
      refrigerator shelves or on the counter or in the cabinet like a
      real person, always present and reliable." Knapp continues to
      describe alcohol as "a multiple partner," since drinkers will have
      their "true love"--the drink they are most often drawn to--as well
      as "secondary loves, past loves, acquaintances, even (but not
      often) an enemy or two" (104).

  22. I focus on Knapp's descriptions in such "excessive" detail to call
      attention to the lavish, loving, lust-filled nature of these
      descriptions and, by extension, to illustrate the danger of the
      female addict's desire: Here we have a desire that is full and
      exclusive, a cathexis complete and non-transferable, a libidinal
      investment in an object for which there is no substitute. In fact,
      while addiction is often equated with and derided for its supposed
      narcissism, the "problem" here is quite the opposite. The
      social/sexual threat of addiction is not that it is an objectless
      investment, but that the certainty of the (bad) object choice
      obviates the need, even the possibility, for other (acceptable)
      choices. The female addict has what she needs, and in her
      fulfillment she threatens heteronormativity. Understood in this
      way, it is obvious why addiction cannot be what woman "really
      wants," cannot be her authentic desire, and it is obvious what
      agenda might be served by rendering such modes of being void of
      truth. In the next section of this essay, I elaborate the female
      addict's challenge to heteronormativity, and to the mandates for
      reproduction that heteronormativity entails. Addiction becomes
      productively disruptive in this case because, as I have begun to
      suggest, it /re/produces nothing but itself.


            Off the Biological Clock: Women with a Queer Sense of Time

          I believe that children are our future.

          --Whitney Houston

          What . . . would it signify not to be "fighting for the
          children?"

          --Lee Edelman, No Future

  23. In my introduction, I noted that addiction has been made
      allegorical of many psychical and social phenomena, and perhaps
      none more so than our relationship to time and our anxieties about
      its appropriate management and control, its "right-use." Addiction
      itself has often been characterized as a kind of "temporal
      disorder" (see Marder; Keane), a pathological inability or refusal
      to live in time: intoxication kills time, wastes time, seeks to
      escape the "objective reality" of time, and thereby leads to an
      apathetic failure to /produce/ in time. Levine writes that as
      early as 1637 in the American colonies, "wealthy and powerful
      colonials complained about excessive drinking and drunkenness" as
      a "mispense of time," and a "waste of the good creatures of God"
      (3 of 16). And Valverde observes that in the United Kingdom,
      Australia, and New Zealand alike, and I would say also in the U.S,
      "the history of licensing [for alcohol-serving establishments] has
      been largely a debate focussing [sic] obsessively on pub opening
      /hours/" (146-47, original emphasis), a debate that persists today
      (as does the related concern over hours during which liquor may be
      sold in stores). Even the determination of what constitutes
      addiction itself is dependent upon time: according to the National
      Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, and to one of the
      "warning signs" that drug use is slipping into addiction is more
      /frequent/ use of substances, while staying intoxicated for days
      in a row is considered symptomatic of the "final stages" of the
      disease (see Knapp; Keane). As Derrida summarily puts it, it is
      the "the possibility of repeating the act," the "crossing of a
      quantitative threshold that allows us to speak of a modern
      phenomenon of drug addiction" (5). If we return to Derrida's
      question, then, of what it is that we hold against the drug
      addict, another answer is, the "wrong use" of time.

  24. What kinds of physical bodies does the social body need? I have
      used the word "productive" repeatedly, and therein lies the
      answer. Since the seventeenth century, Foucault reminds us,
      networks of power have depended on "obtaining productive service
      from individuals in their concrete lives," have had to ensure the
      "accumulation of men," who could in turn produce an accumulation
      of capital (Power 125). There is simply no time in such a
      labor-reliant society for its "mispense." If addiction is as much
      an abuse of time as it is of drugs, what is so dangerous about
      women who have this "temporal disorder?" The answer should be
      clear. If historically we have needed male bodies that are
      industrious and productive, we have needed female bodies that are
      diligently reproductive. As Walton claims of the disproportionate
      punishment visited upon women during the Inebriates Acts, the
      cause of public outcry, at least implicitly, was not only that
      pub-dwelling women were being neglectful mothers, but that they
      were being neglectful "of their duty to bear children for the
      propagation of the empire" (262); they were refusing to devote all
      of their energies to the accumulation of men. In this refusal,
      however, the woman who mis-spends her time drinking or drugging
      not only shirks her heterosexual duty to reproduce male bodies,
      she rejects the even more encompassing heteronormative logic of
      what Lee Edelman calls "reproductive futurism."

  25. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman focuses on
      the sanctified figure of The Child as emblematic of our cultural
      commitment to reproduction above all else. The book is essentially
      an extended response to question in my epigraph--"what would it
      signify /not/ to be fighting for the children'?" (3)--and
      Edelman's dramatic answer is that it would signify, or at least
      provoke mass anxiety about, the "undoing of social organization,
      collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself" (13). Such
      provocations and undoings, Edelman argues, are exactly the types
      of disruptions queerness /should/ entail and enact, while instead
      gays and lesbians fight doggedly for the right to marry and become
      parents, to "kneel at the shrine of the sacred Child," as he puts
      it, shoulder to shoulder with their "comrades in reproductive
      futurism": a zealous Right Wing that seeks to deny us exactly
      these mundane futures (16-17, 19). Edelman's figure for the
      resistance to this social order based on reproductivity is the
      "/sinthom/osexual"--a complex neologism that connotes a
      "child-aversive, future negating" queerness devoted only to the
      excesses of /jouissance/ (113). I would like to extrapolate from
      Edelman's premise to offer up the addict as a similarly queer
      figure, and, again, move beyond the figural to demonstrate ways in
      which being on drugs enables women to dwell outside of a
      collective reality that demands that we genuflect at this shrine
      of tomorrow.

  26. "Intoxication has no clock other than the body's sheer physical
      capacity to withstand it," Walton writes (180). But it is not
      permitted to be "off the clock" in a culture that requires the
      consistent production of goods and services, and being off the
      "biological clock" is certainly impermissible in a social order
      that demands reproduction of itself and of the /life/ that ensures
      that ideological reproduction. For this reason Edelman takes the
      very queer position indeed of being "against" the future, for the
      future is always synonymous with reproduction of the same--a same
      that pathologizes in order to "other" all modes of being that deny
      its dominant values. As we have seen, the offenses of the woman on
      drugs are many: she abjures feminine (domestic) duties,
      appropriates masculine prerogatives and "virile" traits, makes a
      spectacle of herself, and loves too much, but not too well. Her
      cardinal sin may be that she lives primarily /in the present
      moment/, thereby rejecting not only her role as reproducer in, and
      of, what Edelman calls the "familial unit so cheerfully mom-ified
      as to distract us from ever noticing how destructively it's been
      mummified," but rejecting as well "the faith that properly fathers
      us all" (114): the various hegemonic religious doctrines that have
      always insisted we sacrifice and suffer in the present for an
      endlessly deferred hereafter.

  27. A counterintuitive reading may be necessary here once again, for
      the addict is commonly understood not as living in the moment, but
      as making a desperate and eventually, "diseased" attempt to
      /escape/ the present moment. Hers is the pathological inability to
      "authentically" /be/ in "real" time. Moreover, since the addict is
      always chasing "more" of the buzz, addiction can be read as a
      future-focused pursuit. However, this pursuit can also be read as
      seeking to prolong the perpetual /present/ of intoxication, and
      thus as an attempt not to escape time, but to be, and stay, in it.
      As Keane writes in What's Wrong with Addiction?, we can
      (re)conceive the addict not as a person who avoids the moment, but
      "as an active and skilful [sic] producer of time and pleasure" in
      the present, and in this reconception come face to face with what
      she calls "some positive attributes of addiction itself" (105).
      Though catchy slogans conspire to convince us otherwise, living
      "in the now"--or, as AA would have it, "one day at a time"--is not
      a culturally sanctioned mode of being, at least not when it
      persists beyond those few moments allowed us by the capitalist
      order for worry-free enjoyment; moments allowed us, moreover,
      precisely so we may return, refreshed and renewed, to the business
      of preparing for and producing the future. In fact, privileging
      the present over the future in ways that may put that future "at
      risk" becomes an expression of one of the /most/ inauthenticated,
      irrational forms of desire (in)conceivable in our social order:
      the desire /not to desire/ a life that lasts as long as possible.

  28. Judith Halberstam, in A Queer Time and Place, writes that within
      the "middle class logic of reproductive temporality," "we create
      longevity as the most desirable future, applaud the pursuit of
      long life (under any circumstances), and pathologize modes of
      living that show little or no concern for longevity" (4). Yes,
      there are exceptions to this rule. Athletes and soldiers, people
      who scale Mt. Everest or swim the English Channel, are cultural
      heroes, as is anyone who risks life and limb for a child. But much
      as the society condemns the drug addict's search for pleasure for
      its "artificiality," so it condemns her jeopardizing longevity
      (actions that are considered non-active) for its insignificant and
      "inauthentic" results. Unlike Edelman, Halberstam mentions drug
      addiction as among our most culturally disparaged, pathologized
      modes of living, "characterized as immature and even dangerous"
      for its seeming refusal to honor life itself (4). But as both she
      and Keane remind us, pursuing longevity at all costs, and living
      according to what Halberstam identifies as bourgeois, biological,
      "repro-time" (5), is one logic of living among many, or what Keane
      calls a matter of "taste, rather than truth" (109). While
      positioning oneself "against health" would seem more irrational
      still than taking a "child aversive" stance "against" the future,
      Keane takes this risk to argue that the "use of 'health' to
      encompass almost all that is worthwhile and valuable" is another
      manifestation of the reigning ideology of futurism, and that it
      "ignores the fact that the desire for a long and disease-free life
      can, and often does, conflict with practices which make us feel
      like we are doing more than merely existing" (109). According to
      alternative, queer logics such as Keane's, Halberstam's, and
      Edelman's, intoxication/addiction is not a "mispense" of time, but
      simply a different form of its expenditure--an expenditure derided
      because it refuses the logics of cost and of indebtedness to the
      future. The addict's sin is that she does not fear that one day,
      she will pay. According to such alternative logics, there may be
      nothing "wrong with addiction" at all, other than the fact that it
      is "wrong life": Complete in itself, moving toward nothing (and no
      one) but the excesses of /jouissance/, addiction, or prolonged
      intoxication, refuses to beget an "other," but is determined just
      to /be/. In so doing, it fails the future, and so becomes a very
      queer (mis)use of time indeed. A misuse, I have been arguing, most
      impermissible for women, whose time is never their own, and whose
      bodies are needed to ensure that tomorrow comes. In yet another
      improper act of self-indulgence, the female addict privileges her
      own body, or refuses to privilege her body, if we insist on
      holding to this dominant view. She refuses to save herself for the
      sacred child, and so sins not only against Father Time, but
      against the Father of Faith, and against the familial, mom-ified
      culture that is her inheritance and her task to reproduce.


            Conclusion: Freedom's Just another Word. . .

          The intersecting cut between freedom, drugs and the addicted
          condition (what we are symptomatologizing as "Being on drugs")
          deserves an interminable analysis whose heavily barred doors
          can be no more than cracked open by a solitary research.

          --Avital Ronell, Crack Wars

  29. There is not enough space (or time) here, nor, as Ronell suggests,
      the possibility even if there were, to perform a conclusive
      analysis of addiction's relationship to freedom, but, as I believe
      questions of freedom have been lurking at the edges of what has
      come before in this essay, a brief discussion of the intersecting
      cut to which Ronell refers seems in order. I have proffered
      several ways in which the woman on drugs poses threatening
      challenges to a social order that has long served to constrain the
      excesses associated with, or, more often, forbidden to, female
      desire. There are to be sure several potential challenges to my
      interpretations of (women's) drug use and/or addiction as a kind
      of embodied practice of freedom. (This portion of my discussion
      speaks in more general, rather than gendered, terms.) First is the
      objection, and the danger, voiced representatively by Friedling
      and acknowledged at the outset of this essay, that arguing for the
      "emancipatory possibilities in compulsive drug use" may move
      beyond counterintuitive possibility and slip into the realm of
      genuine peril. Even if we choose queer interpretive logics that
      refuse to consider drug use "wrong life"--even if and as it risks
      death--it /is/ often a life that potentially neglects
      other-orientation in such a way that it can put those others at
      significant risk--for loss, pain, and suffering. It would seem
      that even the most sophisticated deconstruction cannot escape the
      objective reality of drug use's potential for /de/struction, and
      this is perhaps a reason most theorists stop short of addiction's
      full rehabilitation. Ronell's own deconstructive reading of
      addiction seems to come closest to cracking the door of this
      conundrum, when she writes plainly, drawing on Heidegger's Being
      and Time, that in a state of "true" freedom "one can decide for
      destruction," that "true freedom involves the freedom to choose
      what is good /and/ what is bad" (45-46). Yet even this reading
      cannot circumvent, nor does it address, the potential consequences
      /to others/ of such "bad," destructive decisions. It does not
      circumvent, or address, what happens, what becomes of freedom
      itself, when its destructive force impinges upon freedoms (or
      lives) not ours for the taking. In addressing this question
      myself, I can do no more than suggest, problematically perhaps,
      that there is no Being which is free /from/ the consequences of
      being-in-relation-to-others, including destructive, addicted
      others; that to /be/ is always already to be in a state of peril.

  30. Ronell's own follow-up questions to her reading of Heidegger
      (questions she believes Being and Time leaves unresolved) are
      these: iffreedom can, and does, decide for destruction, what then
      happens not to others, but to decision itself? Is it not also
      destroyed? And if freedom turns on decision, what have we left of
      freedom after decision is gone (46)? Put differently, in
      Friedling's terms again, how can we argue for the emancipatory
      possibilities in compulsive drug use when emancipation and
      compulsion seem exclusive, or destructive, of one another?
      Compulsion is by definition an urge that trumps decision, an urge
      that /constrains/. But definition is the ultimate constraint, and
      this tidy dilemma actually becomes somewhat easier to outmaneuver
      than the one that cracks open into the ineluctability of others'
      pain. The first maneuver side-steps the binary that insists on
      framing freedom and compulsion as exclusive in the first place, an
      insistence that is itself compelled by what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
      points out is an anxious need to preserve "a receding but
      absolutized space of /pure/ voluntarity" (134).[5 <#foot5>] Yet
      the (fictitious) boundaries around this "absolute" space crumble
      immediately in the face of many human endeavors (I am compelled by
      my freely chosen profession to write this article), and certainly
      in the face of /all/ desire--"healthy," "addictive" or otherwise.
      Desire, by definition, compels, and then sustains both itself and
      its subject only by continuous compulsion.

  31. The second maneuver around the freedom/compulsion dichotomy points
      to the great irony that the "freedom" culturally sanctioned as
      "most true" turns out to be the least absolute. "True" freedom has
      most often been culturally constituted /not/ as the ability to do
      and live as one wants, nor, in Heideggerian terms, as the
      existential state of being radically "given over to the world"
      (Ronell 46), but as a practiced condition achieved only by
      self-control. Foucault has illumined for us the centrality of this
      ideal to cultures of ancient Greece, and its still hegemonic
      position shows no signs of erosion despite an already-interminable
      analysis which has sought to chip away at its foundations. Among
      the theorists whose work I have engaged in my own analysis, Keane,
      Valverde, Levine, Sedgwick, Ronell, and Russo have all
      interrogated, at a general level, this paradoxical understanding
      of what true freedom is, and many have noted as well its
      constitutive relationship to what counts as, and to what is "wrong
      with," addiction. Russo, for example, drawing on Deleuze and
      Guattari's reading of Franz Kafka's "A Report to an Academy,"
      writes of "the ludicrousness of the humanistic ideal of freedom as
      'self controlled motion.'" Within such an inhibiting ideal, the
      freedom "which makes 'us' human," Russo observes, "turns out to be
      another version of imprisonment" (51). Or, as Levine similarly
      observes of addiction specifically, the freeing act by which the
      addict is "released from his chains" turns out to be stringent
      self-control, or, in the disease model, the compelled submission
      to total self-denial/abstinence (13 of 16). Though freedom as
      self-control is understood /as freedom/ because it resists the
      supposed enslavement of compulsion and/as desire, within this
      paradigm freedom is oxymoronically attained via a socially
      compelled indentured servitude to the supreme values of moderation
      and restraint, values without which addiction as such could not
      exist. The official diagnostic criteria for addiction are again
      illustrative here, for the primary determinant of whether or not
      one is "truly" addicted (over and above even frequency of use) is
      the crossing of another nebulous threshold into "loss of control."
      If there is loss of control over consumption and/or intoxicated
      behavior, we are obviously in the presence of a "disease," for
      what else could explain such an "irrational" lack of restraint?

  32. The standard of self control as both a means and end of freedom
      traverses histories and cultures to such an extent that Valverde
      calls it "a common denominator for most of the history of the
      West" (18). Yet this consistency may attest more to the mutability
      of this idea(l) than to its /im/mutability, for it attests to the
      great anxiety to maintain it, to the tremendous transcultural
      efforts, to which Sedgwick, to carve out spaces of absolute
      self-determination--efforts that keep subjects functioning
      properly precisely because they believe they are functioning
      voluntarily. In Foucauldian terms, this "great fantasy" of "a
      social body constituted by the universality of wills," rather than
      by "the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of
      individuals," serves to obscure awareness of those structures of
      power, and, most particularly, to obscure the awareness that these
      structures often render self-determinism an impossibility in the
      first place (Power 55). So the third and final maneuver around the
      freedom/compulsion binary, to put it plainly, is to burst the
      bubble of this fantasy, or, more elaborately, to recognize the
      ways, the means, and to what ideological ends we are compelled to
      believe we are autonomous and free. When we do so, we may discern
      that another one of the emancipatory possibilities in "compulsive"
      drug use lies in its embodied protest against the regulative ideal
      of freedom itself.

  33. Bordo, whose term "embodied protest" I have used as a framework
      for this discussion, concludes her reading of women's eating
      "disorders" by reverting to the language of pathology, and by
      capitulating to the ideals of freedom scrutinized above. "To feel
      autonomous and free while harnessing body and soul to an obsessive
      body-practice is to serve, not transform, a social order that
      limits female possibilities," she writes. She indicts postmodern
      feminist theorists for their inattention to this "reality"--for
      "too exclusive a focus on the symbolic dimension" of these
      protests, and inattention to the practical life of the body (179,
      181). In other words, Bordo ends where I begin, and where I here
      end as well: with our tendency to get stuck in the figurative, and
      with a corrective call for renewed interest in the lived. Bordo's
      own response to this call is the typically cautious retreat that
      marks and curtails feminist and other deconstructive readings of
      addiction. While she works from the opposing premise--that
      remaining wedded to the symbolic is itself a risk, rather than the
      refusal of risk, as I have been arguing--the message, and the
      fear, is one and the same: Emancipation is at stake, and the real,
      lived body, the body meant for (consigned to) a long and
      disease-free life, must be handled with care. While I once again
      acknowledge that I do not seek to disregard suffering, I /do/ seek
      to exceed the confines of this typical retreat narrative, and to
      examine the ways in which the particular excesses of intoxication,
      addiction, being on drugs may be interpreted not only as symbolic
      crystallizations of cultural anxieties, and not only as symbolic
      subversions of gendered and other regulative constraints, but as
      lived, ontological protestations against these constraints. Excess
      has served postmodern feminists well in their rehabilitation of
      feminine desire, and I have attempted here to offer us one more
      for the road.

      / Department of English
      University of Louisville
      karen.kopelson@louisville.edu /

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          Notes

      1 <#ref1>. Because "addiction" is the arbitrary, recently
      constructed categorical term I am problematizing, I am conflating
      it with other terms, such as intoxication or "being on drugs,"
      rather than distinguishing between these states of being.

      2 <#ref2>. For fine overviews and contextualizations of these
      discussions, see the spring 1993 special issue of differences on
      addiction, the 1997 Diacritics special issue on addiction (and
      especially Clark's essay), Nealon's "'Junk' and the Other:
      Burroughs and Levinas on Drugs," from Alterity Politics, Ronell's
      Crack Wars, and Sedgwick's "Epidemics of the Will" from Tendencies.

      3 <#ref3>. To a certain extent, of course, the addict I am
      discussing here is also a "representation," and she is certainly
      an interpretive construction, as I do not have access to
      "ontology" other than through my synthesis of the theoretical,
      historical, and autobiographical accounts on which I draw.
      However, I seek to make this distinction between interpretations
      of the potential subversions wrought by an embodied subject, even
      as I construct and construe her and interpretations of
      subversively "stylized" media performances, and especially between
      interpretations of the "being" of addiction itself and the use of
      addiction to interpret and metaphorize other phenomena.

      4 <#ref4>. In calling upon excess I am by no means suggesting that
      "reason" is the property of men, or that reason is somehow
      antithetical to feminist criticism, or that reason is always
      appealed to and deployed toward oppressive ends. As many theorists
      have reminded us, such an anti-reason stance is unreasonable for
      feminists to take, as it would potentially negate the possibility
      of setting evaluative criteria, of constructing
      (counter)narratives of legitimization, and would exclude
      women/feminists from the realm of rational argumentation more
      generally (see, for example, Waugh's Feminine Fictions, Benhabib's
      "Feminism and Postmodernism" in Feminist Contentions, Clément's
      dialogue with Hélène Cixous, "A Woman Mistress," in The Newly Born
      Woman, and Felski's The Gender of Modernity). Indeed, it is
      precisely because reason has been equated with the masculine that
      feminists must reclaim and retain its powers, and it is /only/
      through reason that feminists can construct counternarratives that
      upset the idea of "Reason" as universal. In short, it is only
      through reason that we can expose what Felski describes as the
      "fundamental irrationaliy of modern [masculinist] reason" itself
      (5). This is the stance from which my essay proceeds, and the
      project within which my deployment of excess, and my
      counternarrativizing of addiction, seek to take their place.

      5 <#ref5>. Sedgwick, Valverde, and Keane all attempt to recoup the
      lost concept of "habit" as what Sedgwick calls "an otherwise" to
      addiction's absolutes of compulsion and voluntarity.


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