Reframing Addiction: Devotion, Commerce, Community

Like so many accounts of addiction, this special issue begins with a solitary figure: Picasso's The Absinthe Drinker: Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto (1903) captures a moment in time, a wobbly drinker with a drained glass (fig. 1). The image in blue and gray might stand as an emblem of the hope and challenge of conceptualizing addiction. For even as the painting showcases a single figure, holding a pipe with a glass of absinthe at his table, de Soto is not alone. The absinthe bar serves a community, one that is implied yet invisible. There is bar staff providing the drinks to customers. There is Picasso himself, who captures de Soto, a friend and fellow painter, on canvas. This preoccupied drinker is lost in thought, yet he is surrounded by those who supply and chronicle his addiction.

This opening paragraph telegraphs a shift in the field of addiction studies itself: turning away from a broken brain model of addiction, addiction studies is experiencing what we might call a "humanist turn." This special issue of English Language Notes contributes to such a turn: devoted to the topic of addiction and the humanities, "Addictions" draws attention to the range of fields—from history, literature, and critical race studies to theology, philosophy, and creative writing—that wrestle with this phenomenon, shaping the portraits and stories around it. In the same spirit of considering the people around Picasso's de Soto, this special issue is born of a desire to investigate around and behind familiar portraits of addiction, reframing the conversation in several key areas: addiction and history, addiction and bias, and addiction and the author. This introduction takes up each of these concerns in turn, laying the groundwork for the essays that follow.

First, this issue approaches addiction not as the story of an isolated individual but instead as a study in relationships. An addict exists, most obviously, in relation to a substance or behavior, figured in Picasso's framing of the man and his glass. And there has been much to say about this singular addict, with a body driven by a set of compulsions or desires: the field of addiction research routinely approaches its subject by considering biology,¹ personal history, or what has been called the damaged will.² But, as the absent presence in Picasso's barroom reveals, the phenomenon of addiction relies on a human community. This community might include others who share the addiction, or the structures and people that supply the addictive substance or provide the occasion for addictive behavior. The community includes the figures who support, exploit, condemn, or sit with the addict. This group might be chosen or assigned, a group of believers or of those profiled by policies, a set of friends or those figures structurally positioned together. This issue brings greater visibility to that addict community, reaching out beyond the singular figure to locate addiction in a group, culture, or nation.

Figure 1.

Picasso, The Absinthe Drinker: Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto (1903). Oil on canvas, 70.3 × 55.3 cm (27.67 × 21.75 in). Private collection.

The issue's second major intervention is the link of addiction to historical epistemes and capitalist systems, which is again implied yet invisible in Picasso's portrait. The figure of de Soto, a friend and studio mate of Picasso's who later dies in the Spanish Civil War, speaks to a time and place: he is a young man, as Picasso himself describes him, an "amusing wastrel" who is part of a community of artists and drinkers.³ Does de Soto see himself as a wastrel, imbricated in this specific time and place and conscripted to tell a particular story of addiction for an audience? De Soto does not, at least here, seem to be telling his own story. He instead stands in for an interwar community of artists, and his image becomes a highly commercialized one.⁴ The necessity of studying addiction in terms of historical and political epistemes—and in connection to capital, from the sale...