Capitalism and the New Political Unconscious
Capitalism and the New Political Unconscious

Author: Fabio Vighi

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-03-23

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1350240273

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Taking seriously Jacques Lacan's claim that 'the unconscious is politics', this volume proposes a new understanding of political power, interrogating the assumption that contemporary capitalism functions by tapping into forms of unconscious enjoyment, rather than providing transcendental conditions for the articulation of political meanings and desires. Whether we're aware of it or not, political communication today targets the audience's libidinal response through political and institutional language: in policies, speeches, tweets, social media appearances, gestures and images. Yet does this mean that current power structures no longer need symbolic or ideological frameworks? The authors in this volume think not. Far from demonstrating a shift to a post-ideological age, they argue instead that such methods inaugurate an altogether novel approach to political power. Written by leading scholars from around the world, including Roberto Esposito and Slavoj Žižek, each chapter reflects on contemporary power and inspires consideration of new political potentialities, which our focus on politics in transcendental rather than immanent terms has thus far obscured. In so doing, Capitalism and the New Political Unconscious provides an original and forceful exploration of the centrality of both psychoanalytic theory and the philosophy of immanence to an alternative understanding of the political.

The Capitalist Unconscious
The Capitalist Unconscious

Author: Samo Tomsic

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2016-02-16

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 178478110X

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A major systematic study of the connection between Marx and Lacan’s work Finalist for the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize Despite a resurgence of interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly in terms of the light it casts on capitalist ideology—as witnessed by the work of Slavoj Žižek—there remain remarkably few systematic accounts of the role of Marx in Lacan’s work. A major, comprehensive study of the connection between their work, The Capitalist Unconscious resituates Marx in the broader context of Lacan’s teaching and insists on the capacity of psychoanalysis to reaffirm dialectical and materialist thought. Lacan’s unorthodox reading of Marx refigured such crucial concepts as alienation, jouissance and the Freudian ‘labour theory of the unconscious’. Tracing these developments, Tomšič maintains that psychoanalysis, structuralism and the critique of political economy participate in the same movement of thought; his book shows how to follow this movement through to some of its most important conclusions.

The Capitalist Unconscious
The Capitalist Unconscious

Author: Hyun Ok Park

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-09-01

Total Pages: 559

ISBN-13: 0231540515

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The unification of North and South Korea is widely considered an unresolved and volatile matter for the global order, but this book argues capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form. As Hyun Ok Park demonstrates, rather than territorial integration and family union, the capitalist unconscious drives the current unification, imagining the capitalist integration of the Korean peninsula and the Korean diaspora as a new democratic moment. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research in South Korea and China, The Capitalist Unconscious shows how the hegemonic democratic politics of the post-Cold War era (reparation, peace, and human rights) have consigned the rights of migrant laborers—protagonists of transnational Korea—to identity politics, constitutionalism, and cosmopolitanism. Park reveals the riveting capitalist logic of these politics, which underpins legal and policy debates, social activism, and media spectacle. While rethinking the historical trajectory of Cold War industrialism and its subsequent liberal path, this book also probes memories of such key events as the North Korean and Chinese revolutions, which are integral to migrants' reckoning with capitalist allures and communal possibilities. Casting capitalist democracy within an innovative framework of historical repetition, Park elucidates the form and content of the capitalist unconscious at different historical moments and dissolves the modern opposition among socialism, democracy, and dictatorship. The Capitalist Unconscious astutely explores the neoliberal present's past and introduces a compelling approach to the question of history and contemporaneity.

The Political Unconscious
The Political Unconscious

Author: Fredric Jameson

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2015-03-03

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 0801471575

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Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement or auxiliary to other methods current today. Jameson supports his thesis by looking closely at the nature of interpretation. Our understanding, he says, is colored by the concepts and categories that we inherit from our culture's interpretive tradition and that we use to comprehend what we read. How then can the literature of other ages be understood by readers from a present that is culturally so different from the past? Marxism lies at the foundation of Jameson's answer, because it conceives of history as a single collective narrative that links past and present; Marxist literary criticism reveals the unity of that uninterrupted narrative. Jameson applies his interpretive theory to nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, including the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. Throughout, he considers other interpretive approaches to the works he discusses, assessing the importance and limitations of methods as different as Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, dialectical analysis, and allegorical readings. The book as a whole raises directly issues that have been only implicit in Jameson's earlier work, namely the relationship between dialectics and structuralism, and the tension between the German and the French aesthetic traditions.

The Political Unconscious of Architecture
The Political Unconscious of Architecture

Author: Professor Nadir Lahiji

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-06-28

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1409482383

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Thirty years have passed since eminent cultural and literary critic Fredric Jameson wrote his classic work, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, in which he insisted that "there is nothing that is not social and historical - indeed, that everything is 'in the last analysis' political." Bringing together a team of leading scholars this book critically examines the important contribution made by this eminent cultural and literary critic, and breaks new ground in architectural criticism, offering insights into the interrelationships between politics, culture, space, and architecture. Fredric Jameson himself provides an afterword.

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Author: Fredric Jameson

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1992-01-06

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 9780822310907

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Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

Representing Capital
Representing Capital

Author: Fredric Jameson

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2014-01-07

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1781681570

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Representing Capital, Fredric Jameson’s first book-length engagement with Marx’s magnum opus, is a unique work of scholarship that records the progression of Marx’s thought as if it were a musical score. The textual landscape that emerges is the setting for paradoxes and contradictions that struggle toward resolution, giving rise to new antinomies and a new forward movement. These immense segments overlap each other to combine and develop on new levels in the same way that capital itself does, stumbling against obstacles that it overcomes by progressive expansions, which are in themselves so many leaps into the unknown.

An American Utopia
An American Utopia

Author: Fredric Jameson

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2016-07-12

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1784784540

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Controversial manifesto by acclaimed cultural theorist debated by leading writers Fredric Jameson’s pathbreaking essay “An American Utopia” radically questions standard leftist notions of what constitutes an emancipated society. Advocated here are—among other things—universal conscription, the full acknowledgment of envy and resentment as a fundamental challenge to any communist society, and the acceptance that the division between work and leisure cannot be overcome. To create a new world, we must first change the way we envision the world. Jameson’s text is ideally placed to trigger a debate on the alternatives to global capitalism. In addition to Jameson’s essay, the volume includes responses from philosophers and political and cultural analysts, as well as an epilogue from Jameson himself. Many will be appalled at what they will encounter in these pages—there will be blood! But perhaps one has to spill such (ideological) blood to give the Left a chance. Contributing are Kim Stanley Robinson, Jodi Dean, Saroj Giri, Agon Hamza, Kojin Karatani, Frank Ruda, Alberto Toscano, Kathi Weeks, and Slavoj Žižek.

Capitalism and Desire
Capitalism and Desire

Author: Todd McGowan

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-09-20

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0231542216

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Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

The Jamesonian Unconscious
The Jamesonian Unconscious

Author: Clint Burnham

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780822316138

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Imagine Fredric Jameson--the world's foremost Marxist critic--kidnapped and taken on a joyride through the cultural ephemera, generational hype, and Cold War fallout of our post-post-contemporary landscape. In The Jamesonian Unconscious, a book as joyful as it is critical and insightful, Clint Burnham devises unexpected encounters between Jameson and alternative rock groups, new movies, and subcultures. At the same time, Burnham offers an extraordinary analysis of Jameson's work and career that refines and extends his most important themes. In an unusual biographical move, Burnham negotiates Jameson's major works--including Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism--by way of his own working-class, queer-ish, Gen-X background and sensibility. Thus Burnham's study draws upon an immense range of references familiar to the MTV generation, including Reservoir Dogs, theorists Slavoj Zizek and Pierre Bourdieu, The Satanic Verses, Language poetry, the collapse of state communism in Eastern Europe, and the indie band Killdozer. In the process, Burnham addresses such Jamesonian questions as how to imagine the future, the role of utopianism in capitalist culture, and the continuing relevance of Marxist theory. Through its redefinition of Jameson's work and compelling reading of the political present, The Jamesonian Unconscious defines the leading edge of Marxist theory. Written in a style by turns conversational, playful, and academic, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Marxism, critical theory, aesthetics, narratology, and cultural studies, as well as the wide circle of readers who have felt and understood Jameson's influence.