>Dear Doug and the Left Business Observers,
>To me the defition of a jones, is that of somthing that is almost an
>addiction. For example, when Tyrone Shoelaces sang of his basketball "
>jones" in that old song about basketball. If I am wrong about this
>correct me.
You're correct. And it's very important to observe that addiction is not substance specific. It is also very important to observe, contrary to one ideological current, that one is not *born an addict*, *so to speak*, that addiction is not body-type specific.
I mentioned an Eve Sedgwick essay awhile ago, an essay that has great merits. She deconstructs the various sites of addiction, starting with the substance, domestic (food: bulemia, anorexia) or "exotic" and illegal (heroin, cocaine); then to the body (drug addict vs. "exercise addict"), and arrives at a critique of the notion of Free Will (as she puts it, "*to choose health freely*"). The homonculus icon, the capitalist grostesquery of Free Will ideology is the body builder "addicted" to steroids. Endemic to capitalist motivation, she argues, is this notion of free will. That it informs some of capitalism's lauded values: independence, strength, individualism, shopping.
But the other side of the free will coin is compulsion (the shopaholic, for instance, or the basketball jones or compulsive weight lifter working out I don't know what kind of fantasies). Free will and compulsion, she argues, occupy the same horizon, and require one another. Free will requires the negative expulsion of compulsion in order to positively define itself as free will. She reads the particularly salient origin of this construction in the works of Neitzsche.
Isn't their an anecdote about that powerhouse Neitzsche at one point late in life breaking down, possibly crying, at the sight of a horse that had been, I think the story goes, hurt by its master?
Ecce Homo indeed!
-Alec
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