Continuing Narratives Of The Pharmakos: Trans-ethical Perspectives Through The Liminal Performativity Of Material Agencies In Drug Genre Film

Abstract

In American film and television, the drug user or producer is often associated with narratives of the pharmakos, or "scapegoat," seemingly serving to expel the contamination of American identity and ethics. By analyzing the critically acclaimed TV series Breaking Bad and Nurse Jackie, I examine how these popular culture series are influenced by, or influence, apparatuses involving drugs, New Materialist theories, and more broadly, ethical values. Specifically, I examine how these TV series deconstruct classic narratives and depict ethical relationships with the pharmakos through a New Materialist understanding of the liminal agencies between human and nonhuman matter. More specifically, I endeavor to further goals that writers such Alaimo, Ingram, and Barad enact, showing the important relationship between ethics and ontology by conceiving of ethics as the potential for material agencies to produce non-representational indeterminate configurations that do not position the `other' (specifically, drug-bodies in my account) as a ground for the transcendence of the autonomous, rational, Cartesian subject and instead propose a world of integration rather than separation, rethinking culture/nature and taught/embodied binaries.