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.

“"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”

"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

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.
 

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.