From Need to Needle: “The Cult of Addiction” in William Burroughs’s Junky

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.