Addictive Potential: Regimes, Transformations, Circulations

Kayleigh E. Shield, The University of Western Ontario

Abstract

This thesis employs a poststructuralist framework to consider the possibilities for agency and resistance in consumer capitalism. The argument begins with an examination of figures who emerged in nineteenth century psychiatric discourses, and the roles that those figures play in poststructural and postmodern critiques of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, specifically in the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I then argue that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest presents us with a new figure—the addict. My reading of Wallace is informed by poststructuralist critiques of psychiatric power and by Wallace’s own affinity for the fiction of Franz Kafka. I argue that the addict is a configuration of subjectivity that emerges under consumer capitalism, and through a Deleuzian reading of Infinite Jest, I prove that the addict is both a complicit and resistant figure, who personifies the grounds for human agency under consumer capital.