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This article explores how the field of critical addiction studies – which can be traced back to the late twentieth century – has used Foucauldian social theory on governance to challenge dominant biomedical and moralistic models of addiction and to account for the ways in which addiction discourse and practice reproduce purifying, essentialist and singular assumptions about behaviour, bodies and desire. Starting from Foucault’s late critique of the neoliberalist phobia of the state, and Dean and Villadsen’s subsequent analysis of how this phobia ironically appears to haunt Foucauldian as well as other versions of poststructuralist social theory, the article asks whether a similar phobic tendency can be identified in Foucauldian accounts of addiction, although in this case directed towards addiction as a discursive centre. Analysing accounts of addiction provided by several critical addiction scholars, the article investigates how this more general tendency in relation to Foucauldian and poststructuralist theory is enacted in and structures a number of key points in contemporary critiques of addiction. Through detailed analyses of how critics have framed addiction as governmentality and an epidemics of the will, related addiction to habit, dealt with tensions within the discourse of addiction, raised issues of materiality, and aligned themselves with the heterogeneity of bodies, behaviours, and desires, the article claims that the field of critical addiction studies reduces addiction to abstract governance and avoids seriously engaging with the structure and dynamics of addiction from a decentred social theoretical perspective.

Addiction phobia: Foucault, abstract governance, and the fascination with materiality in contemporary critical studies of addiction