Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

from death. In the ritual of the Roman Catholic Mass, for example, Christ is sacrificed upon the altar, life coming to the world and to those who consume the transubstantiated blood and flesh. One can give oneself to an addiction—sacrifice oneself, as it were, to an addiction or a belief system—and gain freedom, which might be another trap. Perhaps the phrase “problematic usage” is more accurate, although it is far less sexy, less close to death, the end, beautiful friend. The word addicted originated in the Latin verb addicere, meaning “to declare,” and an obsolete sixteenth-century English adjective meaning “bound or devoted to someone.” Etymologically and at its core, addiction concerns devotion, worship, and ritual. The purpose of this book is to understand this culture of ritual and devotion, often an acceptable and fashionable private and public religion, for this is essential to knowing what and who humans are, both their being and their Being.

So-called addictions encapsulate the state of contemporary humanity, including the desire for freedom and escape. Addictions paradoxically trap individuals in delusions but free them from prescribed reality and humanity. The age of sometimes comic excess has in part moved on, and yet it still tragically lingers on, with morbid obesity a major issue in the United Kingdom and the United States. Addiction has been normalized, the myth being that human beings cannot be human without it. The global economic meltdown from the middle of the first decade of the third millennium was a stark reminder of the price of unbounded excess; the relationships among capitalism, consumption, and addiction are symbiotic. The ubiquity of addiction is exemplified in the international and interdisciplinary nature of this collection, which unites work from the social sciences and humanities. Chapter subjects include the lost writings of women, the addict and the city in Canada, Alcoholics Anonymous groups in Mexico, rock lyrics, comics and pornography in the United Kingdom and Japan, celebrity culture and the Internet, and films and television shows that examine “addictions” to technology, violence, and therapy.