A Poverty of the Spirit? Law, Property and Addiction

Abstract

What I would like to speak of in this piece is not only to discuss the way addiction is formulated by the practices and tactics of law whether through poverty law or otherwise, but to say that law itself is addition, and addiction is law. Combining desire and destruction through the work of Gilles Deleuze and Catherine Malabou, both addiction and law are explored as cumulative processes of material and immaterial yearning emanating from and within thermodynamic movements of order/disorder, destruction/creation and the tightrope of equilibrium known better as entropy, within and outside, human and other bodies. Addiction is described as rule-making, through the funneling of attention to sediment layers of law as habit, routine and custom through repetition, leading to the ultimate expression of law, that of subjectivity and the crystallization of form - the institutionalization of property and the overcoming of uncertainty through control. Addiction is argued as the very extremity, the ultimate meaning, the very motor of legal morphology itself; the striving of life against death, a speculative genesis and the baroque pathways carved in the process.