Loaded
Subjects : Psychoanalysis, Money and the Global Financial Crisis
Edited by
David Bennett
Responding
to the trauma of the current global financial crisis, this book brings together
an eclectic group of psychoanalysts, philosophers, cultural theorists and
historians to debate the links between psychology, money and economic crashes.
It issues a double challenge - to economists who define economic behaviour
as necessarily rational and self-interested, while relegating other models
of monetary thought to psychopathology; and to psychoanalysts who find it
hard to confront the economics of their own profession as a business, while
neuroticising and biologising any economic behaviour that exceeds their own
unspoken yardstick of 'commonsensical' financial self-interest.
Contributors to this book
investigate issues as diverse as: the century-old divorce between psychological
and economic explanations of human behaviour and current efforts to repair
it; the gender-politics, ethics and psychology of economists' attempts to
explain today's rolling crisis in money markets; psychoanalytic theories of
financial investment, risk and the 'jouissance' of devastating loss;
the rise and cataclysmic fall of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme; the squandering
of fortunes on rubbishy art in times of financial crisis; the attraction of
Deleuzian speculation versus Freudian investment; the nexus between political
economy and libidinal economy; the mystifying effects of treating 'the market'
as a subject capable of 'speaking', 'reacting' and 'punishing'; and the fate
of desire in postmodern, hyper-commoditised culture.
Contributors:
David Bennett, Geoff Boucher, Claire Colebrook, Paul Crosthwaite, Karl Figlio,
Bruce Fink, Stephen Frosh, Jean-Joseph Goux, Campbell Jones, Viktor Mazin,
Manya Steinkoler, Matthew Sharpe, Bernard Stiegler and Tan Waelchli.
A number of the essays
in this book are based on contributions to the conference on Psychoanalysis,
Money and the Economy hosted by the Freud Museum at Birkbeck College, University
of London, in 2010, which were subsequently collected in new formations
72.
David Bennett is Principal Research Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at
the University of Melbourne and Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Psychoanalytic
Studies at the University of Essex. His books include Multicultural States:
Rethinking Difference and Identity (1998 and 2002); and the forthcoming The Currency of Desire: Essays in Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and
Sexual Revolution (2013).
CONTENTS
Part I. Psychoanalysis
and Financial crisis
1. David Bennett
Homo Oeconomicus vs Homo Psychologicus: A Critique of Pure Reason in Economics
and Psychoanalysis
2. Karl Figlio
The Financial Crisis: A Psychoanalytic View of Illusion, Greed and Reparation
in Masculine Phantasy
3. Bruce Fink
Analysand and Analyst in the Global Economy, or Why Anyone in their Right
Mind Would Pay for an Analysis
4. Manya Steinkoler
Customer Satisfaction Guaranteed: A Lacanian Reading of the Bernie Madoff
Scandal
5. Claire Colebrook
Beyond (Good) Investment and (Evil) Speculation
6. Paul Crosthwaite
What a Waste of Money: Expenditure, the Death Drive, and the Contemporary
Art Market
Part II Psychoanalysis,
Money and the Economy
7. Campbell Jones
What Kind of Subject is the Market?
8. Viktor Mazin
The Meaning of Money: Russia, the Ruble, the Dollar and Psychoanalysis
9. Tan Waelchli
Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Nature of Money: Authority, Regulation of
Standards, and the Law of the Father
10. Jean-Joseph Goux
Pleasure and Pain: At the Crossroad of Psychoanalysis and Political Economy
11. Geoff Boucher
Financial Crisis, Social Pathologies and 'Generalised and Matt Sharpe Perversion':
Questioning Žižek's Diagnosis of the Times
12. Stephen Frosh
Psychoanalysis, Antisemitism and the Miser
13. Bernard Stiegler
Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-Based Capitalism and Libidinal Dis-economy
Paperback, 224pp, All rights
L&W.
ISBN: 9781907103551
Publication date: September
2012
Also available on Kindle
