In A Thousand Plateaus, a theory of alcoholism is proposed as a model for ‘an economics of
everyday life’. What motivates the alcoholic in Deleuze’s conception is to get to the ‘last glass’,
to exhaust the series of drinks constituting the alcoholic assemblage. What makes alcoholism a
pathology, however, is that the last glass is never reached through the alcohol itself. What the
alcoholic calls the last drink is last only in relation to the next drink, which enables the series to
be repeated under different conditions. Various factors relating to the tolerances of the organism,
physical and mental health, money etc., intervene to force the alcoholic to break off drinking and
begin again at another time and place. These factors are what allow the assemblage to be
repeated, and last drink (which is never reached via the assemblage itself) is what allows desire to
be fix within the assemblage's repetition. All 'value' is 'conferred' by the last term (hence the
emphasis on economics) and this is how desire is governed in any assemblage. The truly last
drink, however, would take the alcoholic beyond the assemblage altogether, and thus beyond the
pathology. The example Deleuze and Guattari find for this is Henry Miller in Sexus, who
manages to get drunk on a pitcher of pure water. This literary image expresses the practical
emphasis schizoanalysis puts on thought: altered perceptions of drugs should be possible with
concepts alone and without the intoxicating substances themselves, which always have the
propensity to enslave the user to the unproductive repetitions of addiction. This paper examines
the conceptual logic that Deleuze was able to extract from alcoholism and shows how this helps
us to understand how a non-philosophical, unthought or purely bodily compulsion or pathology is
necessarily involved in the genesis of philosophical abstraction.
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