1. A previous selection of essays from this conference has appeared as a special edition of Diacritics, edited by Marc Redfield. Two of those essays (Weinstone's and Waller's) are reprinted here. Readers interested in essays of a literary and philosophical cast will want to examine Diacritics 27, 3 (fall 1997), as well as the present collection.

2. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1976], 87–93. The entries "Aesthetic," "Art," and "Civilization," among others, are also of interest in this context. The quotations that follow in this paragraph are from the "Culture" entry. For a fuller account of and reflection on the rise of modern aesthetics, see Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); and The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002).

3. The OED does, however, record a case from 1779 in which Samuel Johnson speaks of an "addiction to tobacco"; it seems plausible that during the nineteenth century the word would occasionally have been used in a context in which its ancient sense of binding ("enslavement," "attachment," "devotion") was employed in relation to a substance we now call "addictive" (tobacco, alcohol, opium).

4. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

5. For histories of drug use and policies see, for example, Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987); H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800–1980 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1981); David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and for an excellent overview of changes in U.S. drug policies and the impacts on women, Stephen R. Kandall, Substance and Shadow: Women and Addiction in the U.S. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

6. For a history of late-nineteenth-century legal interventions in private sexual behavior, see Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).

7. Among the Wne historical studies of the development of addiction discourse, in addition to the studies cited above, see Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains; Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995) for a study focused more sharply on the ideological link between opium and the "orient" in nineteenth-century Britain. For current official definitions of "addiction," see ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioral Disorders: Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Guidelines (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1992); and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994).

8. Much important work on addiction discourse has been influenced by the work of Michel Foucault: for an account of disciplinary society, see especially Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); on the "invention of sexuality" and the pathologization of identity, see above all Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978). To varying degrees the work of Eve Sedgwick and Mark Seltzer cited below fall within the Foucaultian tradition.

9. The two wings of "culture" fold together in Richard Klein's Cigarettes Are Sublime (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), where the appeal of the cigarette, in both popular and elite contexts, is identified as "sublime"the aesthetic category that, in the Kantian tradition, is associated with acculturated taste. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), section 29, "On the Modality of a Judgment about the Sublime in Nature": "In order for the mind to be attuned to the feeling of the sublime, it must be receptive to ideas.… It is a fact that what is called sublime by us, having been prepared through culture, comes across as merely repellent to a person who is uncultured and lacking in the development of moral ideas. Thus (as Mr. De Saussure relates) the good and otherwise sensible Savoyard peasant did not hesitate to call anyone a fool who fancies glaciered mountains" (124).

10. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Epidemics of the Will," in Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 132.

11. See Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–171.

12. Jacques Derrida, "The Rhetoric of Drugs," trans. Michael Israel, in Points … Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 236.

13. Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 13, 40.

14. Sedgwick, 133–34.

15. Mark Seltzer, "Serial Killers (I)," differences 5, no. 1 (spring 1993): 101.

16. Ronald Bayer and Gerald M. Oppenheimer, eds., Confronting Drug Policy: Illicit Drugs in a Free Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1993); various aspects of the global drug trade are discussed in Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A. Bock, eds., War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotics Policy (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1992).

17. For a rigorous reading of the trope of war in this context, see Ronell, esp. 19; for a more recent study, see Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

18. William S. Burroughs, "Introduction: Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness," in Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1966), xxxiv.

19. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1:163. For the German, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1960), 23:85.

20. "Morphine becomes a biologic need like water and the user may die if he is suddenly deprived of it. The diabetic will die without insulin, but he is not addicted to insulin. His need for insulin was not brought about by the use of insulin. He needs insulin to maintain a normal metabolism. The addict needs morphine to maintain a morphine metabolism, and so avoid the excruciatingly painful return to a normal metabolism" (Burroughs, 239–40). This quotation and the following one are taken from the appendix to the Grove edition of Naked Lunch, "Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs."

21. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), xi.

22. See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).