The experience of habit: Empiricism, subjectivity, literature, and addiction

The dissertation examines four experiences of habit in literature and philosophy, and four examples of the subject of habit. These are: first, the relationship habit has to subjectivity is explored in David Hume's philosophy; secondly, the habit of drug addiction in its relationship to aesthetics and ethics in the development of a theory of addiction and literature; third, the advent of the drug addict in the work of Thomas De Quincey; and fourth, an aesthetic derived from the experience of withdrawal, or "kicking the habit," in the work of William S. Burroughs.;Chapter one examines the empiricism of David Hume in which habit is constitutive of subjectivity and the self. Hume proposes an immanent subject, whose nature is revealed in its habits. The Humean subject is a partial or preferential one whose subjectivity is constituted in being subject(ed) to the tendencies, preferences, and biases that define his or her own, self, or property. Given the narrow compass of the subject's concerns, the partial subject contrasts with its empire such that Hume's self-centered concept of the subject is read in terms of the problems it poses for larger communitarian, national, and global interests.;Chapter two advances a theory of addiction that is posed in terms of its literature. Consideration is given to issues of aesthetics and ethics. Aesthetics are viewed from the perspective of the "body" the drug habit creates, its temporality, and the use of tropes to evoke the experiences of being-on-drugs and drug addiction respectively. The question of ethics is examined in terms of the drug addict's relation to others, and to the question of what he or she wants from an other who is "holding" or not holding the substance the subject wants.;Chapter three further elaborates both the ethics and the aesthetics of drug addiction and its literature in the works of Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey's work inaugurates the advent of the drug addict as a figure that haunts western modes of production and consumption, and as a much maligned by-product of the industrial revolution. De Quincey's English opium-eater reveals the experience of a subject who is qualified by his addiction, and by a specifically "English" use.;Chapter four concludes the dissertation with a reading of the work of William S. Burroughs. By writing about the experience of being addicted to drugs and his various attempts at quitting or "kicking" them, Burroughs constructs a savoir (an unconscious knowledge), that challenges and disrupts the prescriptive habits to which he is subjected. The tropes of kicking drugs, kicking the habit, and the kick, or pleasure, of drugs are posited as two interdependent yet distinct poles whose tension result in a work that is devoted to the description of, and the liberation from a variety of "control" systems. As Burroughs's work demonstrates, one can make a habit of "kicking" drugs just as well as one can make a habit of pursuing their purported kick, rush, or pleasure.