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  1. Comment on Sedgwick’s Foucauldian comment on the addict. Try to translate it back into Foucault’s own argument on the homosexual.
  2. What is the importance of the transformation of the subject into an object?
  3. What is the main argument of the 2d paragraph on p. 131.?
  4. What is the paradox involved in the “exercise addict”?
  5. What is new in Sedgwick’s approach to addiction?
  6. What does Sedgwick link to Nietzsche?
  7. What is the paradox involved in 12 steps programs?
  8. What is common in homosexuality and addiction?
  9. Enumerate the implications of steroid use. What kind of boundaries does it destabilize?
  10. Which is the concept that can shatter the voluntarity-compulsion binary?
  11. What is Sedgwick’s argument on smokers?
  12. “the powers of our free will are always already vitiated by the ‘truth’ of compulsion, while the powers attaching to an acknowledged compulsion are always already vitiated by the ‘truth’ of our free will” – what does this have to do with smoking advertisements?
  13. What does Reith mean by “the emergence of an oppositional set of discourses” (i.e what are the elements of this discourse)? What is agency?
  14. What is the relationship between Freud’s concept of civilisation and addiction as an issue of control?
  15. Can you reconstitute Foucault’s argument?
  16. How are addict identities defined?
  17. What is the relationship between consumption, freedom and the narrative of the self?
  18. What is the paradox outlined in the bottom paragraph of p. 285.?
  19. What is Reith’s own definition of addiction? (286)
  20. Why does the notion of addiction turn the sovereign consumer on its head?
  21. What is the effect of the substance usually described as a ‘drug’? (By the way: why is the “drug” put between quotation marks?)
  22. What does Marx mean by commodity fetishism? (287)
  23. What happened toward the end of the 19th century?
  24. Which paradox does Reith repeat on pp. 287-8?
  25. What was the argument of the medical profession?
  26. What is the relationship between the 19th century emergence of the concept of the homosexual and that of the addict?
  27. What is disciplinary and bio-power?
  28. What does Reith mean by saying that addicts served as a repository for widespread fears of unrest?
  29. What is biological determinism, and what is the problem with it, according to sociologists?
  30. What are the medical criteria for addiction (and the ‘related problems’), and why are they ultimately subjective? (291)
  31. Why does the phrase “every aspect of human behaviour can exist in a pathological form” explain the use of quotation marks around the term “drug”?
  32. What does the emergence of self-help groups testify? (292)
  33. What is the trap involved in one’s identification with any “addict identity”? (293)
  34. Explain: “control is individualised and internalised”; the move from “act to identity based governance.”
  35. What do “psy sciences” do? (not as Rose puts it…)
  36. Who are the engineers of the human soul and what is their task? (295)
  37. What is the importance of the notion of risk? (295)
  38. What is the parallel between risk and addiction? (296)
  39. What is the general therapeutic solution and why? (297)