My research focuses on the ways that addicts and treatment for addiction are understood at the current moment across a variety of discourses and global spaces. I trace the history of addict and addiction, following (and building on) the work of earlier scholars. I also track their current manifestations in several social cultural, philosophical, psychological, and biological discourses, while weaving in my own ethnographic work amongst drug addicts and treatment services in Ireland over the past decade. My basic hypothesis is that the proliferation of addictions and much of the current social anxiety around addicts (as well as how to contain the individual and social disorder perceived in their wake) is part of the slow-motion crisis of the grand-récits of the Enlightenment, especially the understanding of the Humanistic Subject (whose discursive emergence and potential dissolution was so brilliantly developed by Michel Foucault in „Les mots et les choses“). At this moment, the addict has emerged as a privileged site for reflecting on everything from the biological basis of rationality to the possibility of the social contract to forms of global disorder, and, perhaps, the understandings of the treatment of this state can at least outline what might be called a post-Humanist Subject.

A. Jamie Saris is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth. He holds advanced degrees in Social-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and he has completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Clinically-Relevant Medical Anthropology in the Depart¬ment of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School. He has been working for more than fifteen years in medical and psychological anthropology in Ireland, North America, and parts of Africa.