Critical Limit: Addiction's Critique of Capitalist Society Open Access
Horwedel, Isaac (Spring 2023)
Abstract
This dissertation argues that addiction is an expression of the objective conditions of capitalist society that dominate our personal, social, and spiritual lives. Dominant approaches to addiction rightfully deny that it is strictly a choice. But they frame it as a pathological transgression of the norms of the good life under capitalism. Addiction ultimately remains a failure to live up to norms of individual agency, responsibility, work-life balance, and mental and bodily health. Within this frame, recovery from addiction continues to be evaluated against the standard of achieving these norms of success and selfhood in contemporary society. Countering this view, I argue that addiction emerges exactly within our compulsion to pursue these normative standards of success as they are conceived under conditions of capitalism. Not reducible to an individual pathology, addiction names a particular way that our compulsory participation in capitalist social relations of production, consumption, debt, and exchange necessarily reproduces the processes by which capital is extracted and accumulated toward all manner of destructive personal and social outcomes. Individual addictions within capitalist society express the objectively addictive dynamic of capitalist society; the objectively addictive dynamic of capitalist society is reproduced by and through individual addictions within capitalist society. The suffering central to addiction, and the limited theoretical explanations for addiction dominating contemporary addiction discourse, reveals and negates the promises of freedom and progress central to capitalist society. A critical analysis of addiction thus ultimately presses us to consider the terminal limits of capitalism and what is at stake when we ignore them.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Real Appearances of Actual Inversions 1
Chapter One: Disordered Diagnosis 16
Chapter Two: Choosing Disease 47
Chapter Three: Desiring Relief 78
Chapter Four: Social Concerns 106
Chapter Five: Objective Compulsions 140
Chapter Six: Critical Limits 184
Bibliography 216
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