- 期刊
From Need to Needle: "The Cult of Addiction" in William Burroughs's Junky
求「針」以為「生」：巴羅茲小說《毒蟲》中的「癮物崇拜」
摘要
Toward the end of Junky, William Burroughs makes it quite clear that he is going southwards to Colombia in search of yage, allegedly a sure warrant of "uncut kick" (152). With the novel first published in 1953, this journey of Burroughs' appears to herald the upsurge of the Beat generation in the late 1950s and the early 1960s in the States. As Greg A. Mullins indicates, he even becomes "an icon of underground drug culture" during the Beat movement (49). Accordingly, it leads to a violent alteration of the cultural code, from submission to counter-institutional gestures. Drug, then, serves as an avatar of one of the gestures, giving rise to the cult of addiction that promotes this substance for the sake of reinvigorating the long repressed selves. However, as psychoanalytic reading of addiction shows, drug may be glorified only if dominance of the death drive is a cultural aspiration. So, this paper aims to look into the cult of addiction as depicted by Burroughs, to clarify the meaning of "uncut kick" in sub/cultural contexts and what it can bring about to one's psychic infrastructure-finishing with holding individual subjectivity in abeyance.
並列摘要
巴羅茲於小說《毒蟲》末尾裡表明，他即將南下哥倫比亞尋找一種名為「耶局」的蔓生植物（yage音譯，可泡製成致幻飲料），因其據傳是「通體過癮」的確切保證（152）。小說是一九五三年問世的，所以巴羅茲的此趟旅程顯然預告了「垮掉世代」的到來。而如穆林斯所言，他甚至變成整個垮掉運動中代表「地下藥物文化的聖像」（49）。這個運動採取了一連串反抗制度的舉動，不再順從傳統，隨之而來的是對於文化符碼的強行改造。具體行動之一便是訴諸藥物以之鼓舞長久以來受到壓抑的自我而形成所謂的「癮物崇拜」。然而，由精神分析的理論視之，癮物之所以能夠受到讚揚的前提是死亡驅力必已形成文化上的想望。所以，這篇論文將探索巴羅茲筆下人物對於藥物的膜拜，進而釐清在次／文化的脈絡下究竟「通體過癮」的意義為何，以及「上癮」會如何改寫人類心靈機制而致使主體性擱置的現象。