Addiction Becomes Normal

Book excerpt: "Over the last forty years, a variety of developments in American science, politics, and culture have reimagined addiction in their own ways, and yet they share something in common. Increasingly, addiction is understood as deeply normal, resembling our most ordinary attachments. On this view, a potential for addiction, or even a drive to addiction, is latent in all of us and a natural response to what now so often surrounds us, namely, an ample and sure supply of potent thrills and pleasures. This book documents where and how this view has taken hold in society and considers what its rise and wide circulation can reveal about how we imagine the human subject in the late-modern United States. Just as addiction has been reimagined as extreme yet ordinary attachment, and the addict as a suffering yet normally constituted subject, so too has the 'human as such' become reimagined in striking and significant ways. Jaeyoon Park argues that studying addiction's normalization promises not only to expand our knowledge of the recent history of thought about addiction, but to reveal and reflect what may well be an increasingly common, even commonsensical, understanding of the human subject in our time as constructed by accretion"--