Psychoanalysis and the GlObal

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Psychoanalysis and the GlObal

Edited and with an introduction by Ilan Kapoor

Cultural Geographies + Rewriting the Earth Series

342 pages
15 photos, 2 illustrations, index

Hardcover

September 2018

978-1-4962-0680-0

$65.00 Add to Cart
Paperback

September 2018

978-1-4962-0732-6

$35.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

September 2018

978-1-4962-0861-3

$35.00 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

September 2018

978-1-4962-0859-0

$35.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

Psychoanalysis and the GlObal is about the hole at the heart of the “glObal,” meaning the instability and indecipherability that lies at the hub of globalization. The contributors use psychoanalysis to expose the unconscious desires, excesses, and antagonisms that accompany the world of economic flows, cultural circulation, and sociopolitical change. Unlike the mainstream discourse of globalization, which most often assumes unencumbered movement across borders, these contributors uncover what Lacan calls “the Real” of the glObal—its rifts, gaps, exceptions, and contradictions.

Psychoanalysis and the GlObal adopts a psychoanalytic lens to highlight the unconscious circuits of enjoyment, racism, and anxiety that trouble, if not undermine, globalization’s economic, cultural, and environmental goals or gains. The contributors interrogate how unconscious desires and drives are externalized in our increasingly globalizing world: the ways in which traumas and emotional conflicts are integral to the disjunctures, homogeneities, and contingencies of global interactions; how social passions are manifested and materialized in political economy as much as in climate change, urban architecture, refugee and gender politics, or the growth of neo-populism; and how the unconscious serves as a basis for the rise and breakdown of popular movements against authoritarianism and neoliberal globalization. Psychoanalysis and the GlObal represents a major step forward in understanding globalization and also in extending the range and power of psychoanalytic critiques in, and of, geography.
 

Author Bio

Ilan Kapoor is a professor of environmental studies at York University. He is the author of Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity and The Postcolonial Politics of Development.
 

Praise

"For any geographer interested in the potential usefulness of political psychoanalysis in geography, this book is ‘the (Real) Thing’. This anthology proves not only that the theories are compatible, but they can also be fused in a lot of different creative ways, opening up a rather undiscovered realm of experimental studies in social studies overall."—Erik Hansson, Social and Cultural Geography

"What I find fascinating about Kapoor’s book is the extent to which Lacan’s work provides new lines of argument and perspectives for the numerous discussions of globalization. . . . Even for the uninitiated, this book provides worthwhile insights into a theoretical lens such as Lacan’s."—Vivi Djaja, Canadian Geographer

"[This] book differs from many edited volumes I have read in certain commendable ways. It is full of small bursts of insight, compelling examples and citations, and novel information and perspectives. . . . The book and its contributors are deeply engaging, even energizing."—Daniel Sullivan, Kritikon Litterarum

Psychoanalysis and the GlObal brilliantly confirms Jacques Lacan’s thesis that the unconscious is political. It not merely applies psychoanalysis to global economic and political movements; it reveals how the unconscious itself is already traversed by social and political antagonisms. For this reason alone, this edited volume by Ilan Kapoor is obligatory reading, not only for those who want to penetrate the dark underside of our social life but also for those who want to bring out the economic and political mediation of our most intimate traumas.”—Slavoj Žižek, senior researcher, Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

“This collection demonstrates the fecundity of thinking spatially through psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytically through space. Neither psychoanalysis nor geography will be the same. Entering these pages, readers find a world upside-down, where consciousness dissolves into its dirty, multifarious, and unconscious splendor, providing us with analytical and practical means for imagining a world beyond ‘the end of the Anthropocene.’”—Heidi J. Nast, professor in the International Studies Program at DePaul University

“There is no more pressing time to be using psychoanalytic theory than now, and this book demonstrates the urgency of this task almost with every turn of the page. It is a pathbreaking —‘next generation’—analysis, revealing the power of psychoanalytic geographies in addressing key global challenges.”—Steve Pile, professor of human geography at the Open University

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Chapter Summaries
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Ilan Kapoor
Part 1. Libidinal Economy and Political Economy
1. Faith, Fantasy, and Crisis: Racialized Financial Discipline in Europe
Dan Bousfield
2. The Logic of Humiliation in Financial Conquest
Maureen Sioh
3. Beyond the End of the World: Breaking Attachment to a Dying Planet
Robert Fletcher
4. Integrative and Responsive Desires: Resources for an Alternative Political Economy
Eleanor MacDonald
Part 2. Cultural Anxieties
5. “I Love Death”: War in Syria and the Anxiety of the Other
Anna J. Secor
6. Empowering Women: A Symptom of Development? 
Chizu Sato
7. Architectural Enjoyment: Lefebvre and Lacan
Lucas Pohl
8. Anamorphosis of Capital: Black Holes, Gothic Monsters, and the Will of God
Japhy Wilson
Part 3. The GlObal in the Local: Desire, Resistance, and the City
9. A Feminist Psychoanalytic Perspective on Glass Architecture in Singapore
Nathan F. Bullock
10. City Life: Glorification, Desire, and the Unconscious Size Fetish
Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn and Rubia R. Valente
11. Corruption, Left Castration, and the Decay of an Urban Popular Movement in Brazil: A Melancholy Story    000
Pieter de Vries
12. The Pervert versus the Hysteric: Politics at Tahrir Square
Ilan Kapoor
Epilogue: Affect and the GlObal Rise of Populism
Ilan Kapoor
Contributors
Index

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