Vital Forces to Be Reckoned With: Towards an Alternative Critical Pathway for Affirming Addiction’s Loss of Control

Abstract

Critical addiction studies since the field’s purported turn to matter has largely favoured nominally materialist conceptual approaches more conducive to continuing de/constructivist projects of de-essentialising drugs and their presumed causal relation to loss of control. This essay demonstrates, however, that it is precisely in their attention to the pervasiveness of ‘thing power’, and to the banal, daily reality of things’ causal relation to our compulsions, that thing-focused theories – in this essay, Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and archaeologist Ian Hodder’s entanglement theory – provide an alternative means of depathologising addiction, by depathologising compulsion and loss of control themselves.