ABSTRACT
The second half of the twentieth century has seen a major change in emphasis in philosophy towards a study of language and its crucial role in knowledge and subjectivity. This so-called linguistic turn went in many directions while sharing one essential feature: language was not an arbitrary bystander on the way to truth. Language itself contributes to and constitutes truth and subjectivity. Bringing this development together, this chapter will explore the extent to which the contemporary phenomenon of addiction is determined symbolically. I want to define the symbolic more broadly than just language and include the sedimented beliefs and practices, retained and elaborated via language, that persist in Western culture. In other words the symbolic is at least partly sociological. The symbolic is nothing other than the persistence, through time, of a meaning set, embodied as spoken words and actions, that helps determine the behaviour of the members of a particular group. For our purposes here, that group is addicts in Western culture at the turn of the millennium.
