Jamie Saris - Hungry Subjects: What the Appetites of Addicts and the Undead Can Tell Us About Our Society

Montag, 13. Januar 2014 - 18:15 Uhr

IFK

This paper explores the issues of choice and need satisfaction through the lens of "addiction." Jamie Saris begins his lecture with a brief description of a woman whose subjectivity seems to emerge only in the play of her unmanageable desire for various pharmaceuticals. In other words, she is a self-described "addict." This leads him to an analysis of the centrality of what Jamie Saris is calling "recursive need satisfaction" in much of Western (especially Anglophone and French) Social Theory which, he argues, relies on a particular understanding of "appetite" in establishing the political-economic subjectivity that lies at the heart of market-oriented state. This same understanding also pushes this formation in a specific historical direction of increasing growth and organisational and technological complexity. As a globalised Western society in the last few decades has become ever more anxious of its place in the world, its impact on various interdependent systems, and the validity of the grand récits that served as its charter, such growth and complexity have emerged as objects of anxiety, even apocalyptic fear, and the terms "addict" and "addiction" have seemed ever more useful for modelling these concerns. Yet, emerging into literary and popular consciousness from about the same time as the modern notion of addicts and addiction are seemingly distinct species of the undead, vampires and zombies, who are also hungry. Like "addicits", even when we are repulsed by them, we still find the undead good to think, and we use them to think through some of the same issues of unchecked and damaging consumption.

Lecture
JAMIE SARIS
Hungry Subjects: What the Appetites of Addicts and the Undead Can Tell Us About Our Society
13 January 2014, 6.15 p.m. at the IFK (in english, free entry)

Jamie Saris is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth, Ireland and IFK_Senior Fellow. He has been working for more than fifteen years in medical and psychological anthropology in Ireland, North America, and parts of Africa, where he has researched and published on such diverse issues as the social life of mental hospitals, the experience of major mental illness, colonialism and its aftermath, poverty and structural violence, drug use and abuse, and HIV risk and treatment.

Selected publications: Committed to Will: What’s at Stake for Anthropology in Addiction, in: Eugene Raikhel and William Garriot (ed.), Addiction Trajectories, Durham 2013, p. 263–283; with Thomas Fillitz (ed.), Debating Authenticity: Concepts of Modernity in Anthropological Perspective, New York 2013; The Addicted Self and the Pharmaceutical Self: Ecologies of Will, Information, and Power in Junkies, Addicts, and Patients, in: Janice H. Jenkins (ed.), The Pharmaceutical Self: The Global Shaping of Experience in an Age of Psychopharmacology, Santa Fe 2011, p. 209–229; with Fiona Larkan and Brian Van Wyk, Of Remedies and Poisons: Recreational Use of ARVs in the Social Imagination of South African Carers, in: African Sociological Review, 14(2), Dakar 2010, p. 62–73.

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Pudel Design

Jamie Saris, Vortrag, Zombies

Montag, 13.01.2014 18:15

IFK
Reichsratsstraße 17
1010 Wien

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