Psychoanalysis and the GlObal

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.

Reviews of Psychoanalysis and the GlObal

"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 — Steve Pile "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 — Heidi J. Nast "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 Zizek, senior researcher, Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia — Slavoj Zizek