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96 6 / Disappearances T he disappearance of subjects in an ethnography of addiction does not offer closure or finality to the ethnographic encounter but instead raises difficult questions regarding the stakes and values inherent in anthropological work—perhaps especially work that takes as its object disorder and suffering. Two of the adolescents I followed died and two others became lost to me in the tangle of clinical and criminal-legal institutions in Baltimore. Rather than taking death and loss as tropes to frame and organize meaning in the lives of these adolescents, I suggest that addiction and treatment—and their aftermath—force a broader definition of self-care as a technology of living, one that recognizes that the conditions of a life must incorporate the lived realities of local moral worlds and, at times, severely constrained agency at the level of the individual. Disappearances I want to address the problems and realities of disappearance in an ethnography of addiction. In the clinic and other environments through which I would follow adolescents receiving treatment for drug dependency, my interactions were episodic and often unpredictable. It was not uncommon for there to be one or two months between the times I would connect with the young men and women I was attempting to follow. For my part, the times in between were filled with anxiety and the promise of failure. There was no guarantee that I would see or talk with them again. Every interaction , whether a conversation in a living room or a shared meal in the treatment center cafeteria, felt like it might be the last. Disappearance is a problem in an ethnography of adolescents abusing drugs not because it shatters the illusion of continuity in the ethnographic encounter, but because it foregrounds a set of concerns regarding the values Disappearances 97 and assumptions shared between anthropological and clinical work, complicating what would otherwise be a straightforward narrative of addiction, recovery, and very often relapse. Disappearance is a reality because it reflects the conditions and circumstances in the lives of individuals that require centering on the pages of anthropological writing. I’m thinking especially of Arthur Kleinman’s formulation of “writings at the margin,” which not only signals overlapping disciplinary commitments, but also helps to locate something near the edge of experience that nevertheless becomes central to anthropological writing itself.1 Life and Thought The headings “technologies of the self” and “the care of the self” have given anthropology—for a long time now—the space to move out from under previous frameworks of selfhood or personhood. Anthropologists have challenged psychologically centered ideas of selfhood by showing how moral and historical exteriority is folded inward at the level of the individual,2 and by calling for more nuanced renderings of subjectivity, although these are nevertheless “riddled by structural forces, cultural sensibilities, subjective vicissitudes, political tensions, pragmatic forces, and rhetorical pitches.”3 The individual experience of therapy can be articulated, in the terms Michel Foucault offers, as the formation of subjectivity by the individual as the condition of self-care.4 However, the nature of the individual (subject, person, self)—as an object of study—needs to be clear. The distinction between “the individual” as a general category and “the individuated subject” as (someone ) singular is best articulated in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon. To talk about the experience of therapeutics as “self-care” is to speak of the individuated subject.5 However, just as the (medical) subject comes under different headings, life comes under different headings as well. What does it mean to be human, or, more specifically, to make claims of the living? To talk about the value and worth of life is to speak about the value of a life.6 To follow the argument from the introduction of Georges Canguilhem’s Knowledge of Life, thought and the living are not separate or contradictory, but come to rest upon one another—nothing of life absents itself or is unmade by thought.7 Yet, as both François Dagognet8 and Georges Canguilhem9 have 98 Chapter 6 shown, there is an implicit split between thought and living (knowledge and life) in research science and clinical medicine. Life is an object examined from the outside. But if we turn our attention to the “speaking subject” (even when that subject is formed through techniques of confession and concealment, as Foucault argues), we find an alternative way of being that is taken up by adolescents under pharmacotherapy. Life and thought...

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