ABSTRACT
Consumer capitalism is like a natural pathogen that has run out of control, that has become unnatural in its tendency to consume the two elements it cannot do without work and natural resources, prominent among which is the human body. If self-starvation was first of all a paradoxical act of consumption, it now signifies the predicament of the subject brought to crisis by consumption. Consumption is the way in which one crushes one's opponent, and the opponent is initially any other, and then, as the dynamic of opposition gains momentum, the Other. Addiction is a structure defined by a certain configuration of desire and pleasure. Capitalist consumption then seems more than capable of replacing diachronic subjective desire with synchronic desire as de-subjectified need. Ethical consumption, if such a practice is really possible and not merely a hopeless oxymoron, must find some way of coping with the consumerist blurring of the distinction between desire and need.
