The Cracked Subject of the Death Drive

This paper embraces the association between drug use and the death drive, but refuses its damning implications. To make sense of this disarticulation, I work through material drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Vancouver’s drug user community to explore a model of the death drive that unsettles the moribund trajectory attributed to the prevailing medical model of addiction.

It does so by exposing the pull towards repetition as a constitutively ambivalent characteristic of desire itself, meaning that the desire at work in the drug user’s relationship with their substance of choice partakes in the same psychic structure that shapes our daily habits and patterns of consumption. In turn, an account of the relationship between repetition and desire—constitutive elements in the death drive—blurs the line separating normality from pathology and exposes how the notion of pathological consumption has been arrogated onto the figure of the addict. By demonstrating how we externalize, and in turn disavow, the ambivalences that animate the death drive, psychoanalytic theory allows us to take an ethical stand.

Following philosopher Joan Copjec’s invocation of what she calls the sole moral maxim of psychoanalysis—Do not surrender your internal conflict, your division—I take up this injunction and sketch out a politics that refuses to displace the difficulties attached to desire and consumption onto the figure of the poor drug user.