Abstract

This article takes a clinical perspective on the phenomenon of addiction in order to open up wider questions of the posthuman. The author identifies two distinct drives, prosthesis and addiction itself. It is pointed out that both drives share a common distance from the mediation of language and address directly, without the support of fantasy, the real of the body. However, the two drives are distinct in that the prosthetic drive lends itself to social control whereas the addictive drive constitutes a pathological limit to socialization. The final section of the article characterizes the various clinical responses to addiction as simultaneously political responses to the rise of the prosthetic drives in the context of late capitalism.