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What's Wrong With Addiction?
"Keane's work is thoughtful and thought provoking and incorporates elements of medical history and philosophy."— Psychiatric Services
"A theoretically engaging exploration of the arbitrariness of the field of addiction studies."
—Robert Granfield, co-author of Coming Clean
We assume that there is something wrong with addiction. But how exactly is it bad to be an addict? What's Wrong with Addiction? explores the ways in which our views of addiction categorize certain ways of being as unnatural, diseased, and self-destructive, often working to reinforce existing social hierarchies. Under the rubric of addiction, pleasure and desire are demonized, while the addict is viewed as damaged and in need of physical and moral rectificaiton.
Keane examines the ambiguities in medical science's quest to construct addiction in chemical and biological terms, revealing the strains in the oppositions between disease and health, and addiction and normality. She demonstrates how these strains have become more insistent as the net of addiction has spread wider, moving beyond chemical substances to other problems of consumption and conduct such as compulsive eating and sex addiction. The book also critically examines the ideals of health, freedom, and happiness found in popular self-help literature, suggesting that it is the practices of self-surveillance and self-interrogation promoted in recovery guides which actually produce the inner self as an object of concern.
"A theoretically engaging exploration of the arbitrariness of the field of addiction studies."
—Robert Granfield, co-author of Coming Clean
We assume that there is something wrong with addiction. But how exactly is it bad to be an addict? What's Wrong with Addiction? explores the ways in which our views of addiction categorize certain ways of being as unnatural, diseased, and self-destructive, often working to reinforce existing social hierarchies. Under the rubric of addiction, pleasure and desire are demonized, while the addict is viewed as damaged and in need of physical and moral rectificaiton.
Keane examines the ambiguities in medical science's quest to construct addiction in chemical and biological terms, revealing the strains in the oppositions between disease and health, and addiction and normality. She demonstrates how these strains have become more insistent as the net of addiction has spread wider, moving beyond chemical substances to other problems of consumption and conduct such as compulsive eating and sex addiction. The book also critically examines the ideals of health, freedom, and happiness found in popular self-help literature, suggesting that it is the practices of self-surveillance and self-interrogation promoted in recovery guides which actually produce the inner self as an object of concern.
228 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 4, 2017
Excellent book that was well ahead of it’s time by challenging not just the epistemological claims of addiction discourse, but also the ontological ones. Discusses how addiction has come to be an object of study, the effects of this production, and how it in turn also produces the ‘addict’ as a subject. Particularly examines AA/twelve-step, self-help, and recovery discourses as well as sex, alcohol, food, and smoking.
January 3, 2012
This book is the most refreshing and interesting one I've read in a long time. Keane conducts a sort of Foucauldian discourse analysis of contemporary self-help and recovery books and problematizes them within the framework of postmodern social constructivism. She goes through how the concept of drug is defined and how notions of normal health as opposed to disordered bodies are used within this discourse.
Some interesting uses of Deleuze/Guittari Bodies without organs stuff but most fruitful is perhaps the employing of Foucault's notion of techniques of the self as related to the process of recovery. The chapters on 'sex addiction' and eating disorders are also really interesting.
Keane also criticizes AA and NA methods as well as the medicalization of dependency/addiction, so I guess neuro-scientists, medical practitioners and 12 step folks might not look too kindly on the view presented.
I can really recommend this book to anyone interested in drugs and addiction, and I'd put it forward as top-notch sociology literature. I also found it to be a really pleasurable read, Keane writes really straight-forward and skips the often convoluted sentences sometimes plaguing postmodern writing.
Some interesting uses of Deleuze/Guittari Bodies without organs stuff but most fruitful is perhaps the employing of Foucault's notion of techniques of the self as related to the process of recovery. The chapters on 'sex addiction' and eating disorders are also really interesting.
Keane also criticizes AA and NA methods as well as the medicalization of dependency/addiction, so I guess neuro-scientists, medical practitioners and 12 step folks might not look too kindly on the view presented.
I can really recommend this book to anyone interested in drugs and addiction, and I'd put it forward as top-notch sociology literature. I also found it to be a really pleasurable read, Keane writes really straight-forward and skips the often convoluted sentences sometimes plaguing postmodern writing.
January 25, 2023
A little tedious to get through (for me) but definitely worth it. Such incredible insight and awareness into not only the social, political and medical regimes that valorize 'addiction' as simultaneously normal and abnormal but also carefully and seriously dissects and encourages the readers to question the philosophical and psychological foundation of it all... that there is a "benign, rational, orderly, autonomous self" beneath who/that is/can be/has been led astray by drugs, food, sex etc, and can be freed but also disciplined through therapy, medication, rehab etc.
She articulated a lot of the meandering and unanswered questions I'd been having about why/how addiction discourse had penetrated so deeply into Western life.
She articulated a lot of the meandering and unanswered questions I'd been having about why/how addiction discourse had penetrated so deeply into Western life.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews