E-raamat: On Addiction: Insights from History, Ethnography, and Critical Theory

"On Addiction is a collection of essays exploring a socio-cultural context of addiction and addiction sciences, complicating ethical questions of control and alienation in the face of addiction. Mainstream addiction science is polarized: seeing addictioneither as a biomedical disease rendering one incapable of self-control, or as a voluntary activity engaged in freely, always by choice. Instead, Weinberg argues for flexibility, a new theoretical framework of addiction studies that allows for movement into and out of self-control, through various social and natural processes always in flux. Utilizing an ethnomethodologically informed, post-humanist orientation to the history and sociology of addiction science and clinical care, this collection forms a more holistic approach, an "intellectual gestalt," into the fundamental nature and ethics of addiction"--

Darin Weinberg offers a new theorization of addiction that incorporates history, ethnography, and critical theory as the means to break the current impasse in mainstream addiction science.

Mainstream addiction science either sees addiction as a biomedical disease that renders one incapable of self-control, or as a voluntary practice engaged in freely. In On Addiction, Darin Weinberg shows how this dynamic is deeply influenced by a series of binaries (free will/determinism, mind/body, objectivity/subjectivity) that hinder our understanding of addiction. Here, he offers a new theorization of addiction in which he breaks down these contradictions and incompatibilities, calling into question the taken-for-granted distinction between the “biological” and the “social”. To the extent that it is understood as a loss of self-control over one’s behavior, addiction, Weinberg contends, requires a supple theoretical framework that provides for movements into and out of self-control, the social and natural processes that influence these movements, the historical contexts within which they occur and the ethical ramifications of taking them seriously. To create this framework, Weinberg brings together history, ethnography, and critical theory as well as the clinical and social sciences. In this way, Weinberg takes a more holistic approach to examining the fundamental nature and ethics of addiction.