Add-er-all
Sarah Birgani
“I sometimes joke that when I was in high school people did drugs to check out, and now people do drugs to check in. And that says something about our culture right now.”
This is a quote by Anjan Chatterjee, a neuroscientist who was interviewed for the Netflix documentary, “Take Your Pills,” which stresses the strong presence of the drug “Adderall,” especially for high school students in America. From a medical point of view, it is a drug meant to be prescribed for those diagnosed with ADHD. But already in the name there is the program of the drug inscribed: A.D.D. for All, add-ed for all. In this example, the present medicalization of everyday-life becomes palpable. Add-er-all!
“Aderall definitely helps you to become a better capitalist,” says one of those interviewed. It brings the promise of “becoming the best version of yourself,” which is a slogan that goes hand in hand with the push to jouir, it is a push to an endless “more.” It is therefore no coincidence that the suffering of the modern subject is often connected with different forms of addictions in response to a present discontent in culture.
But why does it work? It is there where a connection to the object in the Lacanian use could be made.
The Lacanian object a is a very special kind of object. It is not an object of the world; it rather marks a loss. The Freudian object is always the lost object. It is both innermost and exterior, since it does not have any possible representation but is at the place of the cause of desire, as Lacan elaborates in Seminar X[1]. It is therefore extime.
Because there is something that cannot be satisfied, the speaking being is pushed to an endless search. The modern capitalist discourse operates at this very point as an illusive promise of satisfaction without the detour through the Other – Add-er-all. It promises one “more” after the other, without needing to wait. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud situates the drug as a way of lightening the unease by influencing the body of the speaking being. He calls it “the crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence.”[2] The drug is a promise of satisfaction without the Other, an invitation to a jouissance all alone. Object a is therefore no longer searched in the Other. It is a way of avoiding contact with the Other by dosing the effects without the disturbances of an unpredictable encounter.
With analysis, the encounter is a condition. It requires the bodily presence of the Other, the analyst in the place of object a, who is interested in reading the phenomena of the unconscious, to open up something for the subject. Instead of add-er-all, psychoanalysis is orientated on a one-by-one, not for lightening the discontent of the subject, but for following the symptom of a singular one to find out in which way it answers to a present discontent in culture.
References
[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, Anxiety (1962–1963), ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. A. R. Price, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2016, p. 100.
[2] Freud, S., “Civilisation and Its Discontents” (1930), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI, London, Hogarth Press, 1964, p. 78.