The theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that addiction isn’t about the substance so much as “the surplus of mystical properties” the addict projects onto it. Granting the substance the ability to provide “consolation, repose, beauty, or energy,” she writes, can “operate only corrosively on the self thus self-construed as lack.” The more you start to need a thing, whether it’s a man or a bottle of wine, the more you are unwittingly—reflexively, implicitly—convincing yourself you’re not enough without it.
