Toward a Posthumanist Understanding of Addiction

This essay critically assesses both biological accounts of addiction as a brain disease and social constructionist accounts of addiction as mere label, myth, or narrative. It finds both approaches limited in important respects. Most urgently, neither approach can distinguish whether the clinical treatment of addiction is empowering or repressive to those who undergo treatment in any actual case. Ethnographic data from three clinical settings are used to demonstrate how addictions take form as embodied nonhuman agents, how a posthumanist approach provides the best understanding of the relationship between selves and addictions, and, therefore, how a posthumanist approach is best able to discern if and when treatment is empowering or repressive.