Class Society and Psychoanalysis. Despite being sidelined, Michel Clouscard was a prolific writer and taught sociology at the Université de Poitiers from 1975 to 1990. Clouscard focused on describing the peculiar discourse of emancipation that resulted from the marriage of psychoanalysis and Marxism, which was then termed Freudo-Marxism, and was gaining currency in the aftermath of May ’68. For Clouscard, the emancipation of desire and productivity upheld by the Freudo-Marxists went hand-in-hand with the emergence of new markets and (...) techno-structures which defined the development of social democracy in France. Two of his works, The Treatise of Mad Love and the Capitalism of Seduction are telling us the story of the birth of class society at the very dawn of Middle Age and his postmodern transformation. The first work is an interpretation of Tristan and Iseul myth. The second describe how the capitalism gave birth to a new category with veritable ferocity: parasitic non-productive jobs (a large category extending from the false artists of modern art to the intellectual sell-outs to the system, passing through publicists and other dealers). (shrink)

Partly in response to fundamental changes which have occurred in the social relations of actually existing capitalism, and to the concomitant political upheavals, partly as a result of the related debates and transformations in social and cultural theory, several social historians of the 1970s and 1980s began to rethink their ideas about class. Having previously made a powerful contribution to the history of working-class formation, the historians in question began to advocate the necessity of a decisive break with (...) Marxist and other materialist sociologies, by way of a turn to various forms of cultural and linguistic analysis (“the discursive approach to history”). By the end of the 1990s, forms of consensus had coalesced around this so-called cultural turn, stressing the complex and contingent relationship between a society’s forms of collective agency and identification (such as “class”) and its structural circumstances and characteristics (such as the organization of work and the distribution of inequality). During the first two-thirds of the 20th century, distinctive political traditions of the Left had developed around the given processes of capital development and their associated social histories, acquiring strong and long-lasting shape after 1945. Since the 1970s however, as capitalist restructuring under neoliberal auspices inexorably remade the social worlds of class, those earlier patterns of politics also ceased to work. In the light of the fundamentally different patterns of working-class formation, the terms of Left political practice consequently need to be radically rethought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 333 Michelle V. Rowley, Elora Halim Chowdhury, and Isis Nusair Refusing to Account: Toward a Pedagogy of Tectonic Instability The increasing commoditization of knowledge and corporatization of the academy have led to a drastic restructuring of higher education, and in particular, of public institutions of learning. There is a striking similarity to the strategies enacted across institutions, each (...) governed by modes of efficiency and profitability. These moves have included a preference for larger classes, curriculum decisions that are governed by seats rather than pedagogical possibilities, an expansion of online offerings, tuition increases, and ramped-up bureaucratization, with the latter being accompanied by fewer faculty hires, a greater dependence on contingent faculty, and a swell in the ranks of senior administrative staff. This restructuring has held very specific consequences for women ’s studies programs. While larger classes are not inherently at odds with a student-centered feminist pedagogy, they do require adjustments in order to achieve similar results with our students, and they do exact greater physical and emotional labor from us as instructors. These restructuring strategies have also positioned the field in a Catch22 in that a number of issues that we have lobbied to have valued within the academy have now come into the university’s line of vision only to be redeployed as part of the university’s public relations branding agenda. There are numerous examples if we would but look: campuses that are spotted with banners portraying faculty and students of color —a visual map to the institution’s “embrace of diversity”; committees 334 Michelle V. Rowley, Elora Halim Chowdhury, and Isis Nusair that are convened to review the institution’s sexual harassment policy while simultaneously refusing the involvement of women’s studies academics in the process, for whom these are scholarly and intellectual areas of study; the introduction of multicultural general education curricula, where the study of “difference” amounts to a banal presence of one or more categories of “otherness” in syllabi. This list is not exhaustive but the similarity that threads through is the commodification and the PR-ization of issues that sit at the heart of the field of women’s studies. Such cooptation notwithstanding, in this economic climate of profit maximization, small, interdisciplinary programs and departments such as women’s studies, ethnic studies, and LGBT studies have become woefully vulnerable to mergers, downsizing, and elimination.1 Our own program, now defunct, attests to this growing reality.2 So what then is the story to be told for a program that no longer exists? As alumna of Clark University’s now defunct women’s studies doctoral program, we consider the ways in which Clark, under the guidance of Cynthia Enloe, worked to move the field toward a more transnational bent. While we begin with an engagement with Clark’s specific institutional vulnerabilities, we use Clark’s commitment to a transnational praxis as our comparative point of departure to note the ways in which the importance and acuity of a transnational feminist critique have seeped away from the field. At various points in the article, we discuss how our individual trajectories emerged out of a transnational feminist sensibility. We interrogate the ways that the dominant logics of the field continue to be complicit with the very inequities and modes of representation critiqued within transnational feminist discourses. We point to the role that our scholarly pursuits play in an ongoing effort to hold the field accountable to a transnational feminist critique. Finally, 1. See Miranda Joseph, Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Privatized Citizens, Corporate Academies, and Feminist Projects,” in Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 2. The doctoral program at Clark began in 1992 and closed in 2008, graduating twenty-six PhDs and training many more who have gone on to make significant contributions at NGOs among other locations. For example, Parissara Liewkeat and Barbara Schulman have held positions with the International Labor Organization and Amnesty International, respectively. Michelle V. Rowley, Elora Halim Chowdhury, and Isis Nusair 335 we look back at our own training... (shrink)

In settler societies, upward social mobility by Indigenous people is seen in the growth of successful professional and entrepreneurial classes where both wealth creation and social power are significant resources. Yet, public and academic discourses perpetuate the belief that social mobility impacts negatively on Indigenous people by placing cultural identity in conflict with capitalist business practices. Using data from an international comparison consisting of interviews with 220 Indigenous entrepreneurs in research sites across three countries, this article shows that the belief (...) is unfounded and reveals how this duality creates an impossible tension when Indigenous cultural identity is framed as “at risk” because of social mobility. A discursive colonial mind-set remains a central, enduring and problematic organizing principle of the field of Indigenous social mobility, one that requires a shift in the kinds of research questions that are asked and the ways in which social mobility is ultimately defined. (shrink)

Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis is a sympathetic critique of Freud's work, tracing its political content and context from his early writings on hysteria to his late essays on civilization and religion. Brunner's central claim is that politics is a pervasive and essential component of all of Freud's discourse, since Freud viewed both the psyche and society primarily as constellations of power and domination. Brunner shows that when read politically, Freud's discourse can be seen to unite mechanics and meaning (...) into a plausible, fruitful and internally consistent theory of the mind, therapy, family and society. Part one deals with the medical and political background of Freud's work. It explains how Freud postulated mental principles that were the same for all races and nations. The second part is concerned with the logic and language of Freud's theory of the mind. Brunner also details how Freud introduced dynamics of dominance and subjugation into the very core of the psyche. Part three addresses dynamics of power in the clinical setting, which Freud forged out of a curious blend of authoritarian and liberal elements. Brunner focuses on how this setting creates an arena for verbal politics. He also examines various social factors that influenced the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis, such as class, gender and education. Part four explores Freud's analysis of the family and large-scale social institutions. Though Brunner is critical of the authoritarian bias in Freud's social theory, he suggests that it provides a useful vocabulary to unmask hidden psychological aspects of domination and subjection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural CriticismVera J. Camden (bio)Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Greg Forter and Paul Allen Miller. New York: SUNY P, 2008. 258 pp.This collection takes up the uses of psychoanalysis for cultural studies in the new millennium. Its editors and contributors ask, “Where is psychoanalysis in contemporary thought?” At a time when the empirically based psychologies have long repudiated (...) the “talking cure” to the extent that the unconscious is not visible or easily measured, and when, on the other hand, psychoanalysis has been associated in the humanities with a radical political and social agenda, disappointed hopes for change have led many to throw the baby of psychoanalysis out with the bathwater of a utopian vision of transformation. The question now remains: “Whither psychoanalysis?” To answer this question (which is also a demand), the editors first acknowledge that the critique and curtailing of psychoanalytic thought in the cultural studies programs across the country in the last decade or so has been influenced by the works of Michel Foucault, his disciples, and the New Historicism. At the same time, they believe that the political, psychological, and moral dangers of embracing a knowing and cynical postmodernism that fosters hollow consumerism premised on modes of subjectivity that “neither ‘express’ interiority nor bear any relation to a lived past” are a real and present danger in contemporary life. “That the triumph of such a view has coincided with intellectuals’ renewed suspicion of psychoanalysis should, we believe, give us pause” (8). The essays that constitute the present volume thus insist on the persistence of the desire of the analyst: for knowledge of self and other, and by those who long for interpretive insight into interior lives and social places. The volume thus poses for its readers twin questions: “Why do we continue to desire psychoanalysis, and what should its role be in the cultural criticism of the new millennium?”This collection grew out of a conference organized around this question and thus reflects the varied but not necessarily interconnected papers offered in that setting. In an effort to provide some interconnections, the collection is divided into four sections grouped around the topics of psychoanalysis and the future of cultural criticism, collectivity, the author, and sexuality. The grouping does not, in my estimation, provide unity or coherence to the volume as a whole; nevertheless, each article emerges on its own terms as a strong contribution to the general field of psychoanalytic cultural criticism and critical theory. Henry Sussman’s “Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Cultural Criticism at the Millennium” provides an anchoring perspective to the volume, addressing with particular urgency the mutually transformative desire of and for analysis modeled on the transference/countertransference clinical encounter. This analogy [End Page 153] suggestively sets the stage for a like transformative intervention by the analyst in a cultural critique, while acknowledging that cultural studies provides the best interpretation and assessment of the ways that psychoanalysis operates historically and clinically in contemporary society. Sussman—and indeed many of the contributors—underscores the editors’ organizing declaration that since psychoanalysis derived from lived human experience it stands to reason that “analysis is both the product of and answer to suffering” (15).Thus it comes as something of a surprise that one of its editors, Greg Forter, in “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Psychobiography, and the Fin-de-Siecle Crisis in Masculinity,” locks the subject of psychoanalysis into a stranglehold with his presuppositions about the limits of history and the origins of psychoanalysis in the modern moment: “Because the theory and techniques of psychoanalysis were developed by analyzing modern men and women, psychoanalysis may be a theory of modern subjectivity rather than of subjectivity as such, and its mode of inquiry may be best suited to analyzing the phenomena of modernity” (148). Contrast this limiting and limited sense of the place of psychoanalysis in history (and the concomitant restriction of its utility expressed ironically in a volume with two major articles on premodern cultural texts!) to recent remarks in a new book by Christopher Bollas: “For thousands of years there has been an unconscious preconception of psychoanalysis. We [...] human beings [...] have been searching for... (shrink)

Subjectivity, for Descartes, emerged when he doubted the veracity of his knowledge. Instead of truth, he counted this knowledge to be inherited myth. Cartesian subjectivity has been helpful for forming a critical education predicated on doubting ideology and hegemony. But Marx indicates a very different kind of knowledge in his analysis of capitalism. This knowledge cannot be doubted because we do not acknowledge it in the first place. For a Marxian critical education a different ground must be found for subjectivity. (...) Psychoanalysis provides the theoretical resources for this subjectivity. Instead of negating the Cartesian project, psychoanalysis represents its advance. (shrink)

The relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis has been frequently debated; nonetheless, one rarely comes upon a thoroughgoing, in-depth treatment of this connection. The Capitalist Unconscious is therefore a belated but welcome inquiry into the points of intersection between the two, a project whose contours could be traced back to the works of Marx and Freud. It is in the work of Lacan, however, that this correlation between Marxism and Psychoanalysis becomes visible. This article explores Samo Tomšič’s analysis of the (...) logical, epistemological, and political continuity of Marx’s critique of political economy and Freud’s theory of libidinal economy, meanwhile appraising the possible emancipatory potential of this project. (shrink)

This book’s basic argument is that the Freudian unconscious, far from constituting a radical break with the philosophy of consciousness, is merely the latest exemplar in a heritage of philosophical misunderstanding of the Cartesian cogito that interprets “I think, therefore I am” as “I represent myself, therefore I am” (in the classic interpretation of Heidegger, one of the targets of the book).

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 320pp. pbk. $19.95 ISBN-13: 978-0816666119. In Games of Empire , Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect of an emerging postindustrial, post-Fordist capitalism” (xxix) to argue that videogames are “exemplary media of Empire” (xxix). Their notion of “Empire” is based on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), which (...) characterizes the contemporary world order as a decentralized system of global economic, political, and economic power that transcends national boundaries. In the view of the authors, Hardt and Negri’s account sets itself apart from other analyses of international politics by offering a “comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital” (xx). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter thus divide Games of Empire into three sections to reflect each of these aspects of Empire ’s argument, seeing their work as the first account to explore “virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations, and radical struggle” (xxix). Books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Electronic Mediations series “explore the humanistic and social implications” of new technologies that spark “significant changes in society and culture, politics and economics, thinking and being.” That’s an abstract goal, and one that Games of Empire surely meets. Yet at times it can be difficult to understand exactly which specific intervention this book seeks to make. It is unclear whether the authors of Games of Empire see their work as an indictment of game scholars’ lack of attention to political economy, or whether it’s a work of political theory hoping to show that other disciplines should be paying more attention to the production and play of videogames. Because Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter don’t directly criticize previous political critiques of gaming—such as Edward Castronova’s exploration of the “porous membrane” allowing two-way traffic between virtual economies and those of the real world, or Alexander Galloway’s unraveling of control protocols in algorithmic design, or Ian Bogost’s idea of political procedural rhetoric—they sometimes leave the reader wondering how to situate the book in the broader discourse on games and politics, either separately or together. Thus, Games of Empire might best be seen as an introduction to the writings of Hardt and Negri for game players and designers, rather than as a text for communicating the basic concepts of game studies and design. It is neither a truly new theory of games or digital media, nor is it a new theory of Empire—and that’s not a criticism. It is instead an introduction to Empire through popular culture, as Zizek does for Lacan in Looking Awry . If one were teaching an introductory course on contemporary political theory, this book would offer obvious inroads into Negri and Hardt’s thinking for a number of reasons. Despite its radical ideological bent, the book isn’t off-putting to readers who don’t necessarily share the authors’ politics. It synthesizes complex ideas from difficult thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Guattari while integrating modifications and critiques of Empire theory itself. And although the book is dense, sometimes feeling longer than it actually is (just over 200 pages), Games of Empire maintains a breezy readability by tightly coupling core concepts of Empire theory to well-known games and widely-publicized conflicts within the videogame industry. The first section of the book focuses on immaterial labor, the accumulation of “cognitive capital,” and the global process of manufacturing videogame consoles. It is significant for the authors that videogames began as hacker experiments within research institutes of the military industrial complex, programmed on stolen time, before becoming a commodity (7). This is the first in a string of examples showing how creative dissidence and conflict fuel the continuing evolution of Empire’s control. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter explain that the videogame industry now constitutes an international production apparatus dominating both creative work in developed nations and manual labor in developing ones. Because game industries in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are predominately non-unionized, they serve as an exemplary system for analyzing how global capital exploits contemporary intellectual work—including an excellent analysis of the “EA Spouse” scandal of 2004. On the side of the consumer, the authors argue that rabid “console races” that drive the industry forward from a technological perspective serve to structure gamer identity and combat piracy; later in the book, these machines offer a window into the worlds of Congolese coltan mining and electronic waste (222-224). In the second section, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter move on to deep case studies of individual games to show how the most popular game genres embed imperial assumptions about conflict, exchange, and urban life. First they argue that military training games such as Full Spectrum Warrior —co-developed by university researchers, industry developers, and military contractors—contribute to the “banalization” of war, a subjective state wherein perpetual preparedness for war is accepted as a part of everyday life (100). Chapter five covers Michel Foucalt’s notion of “biopower,” the extension of capital accumulation to life itself. The authors argue that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft , which take market capitalism as a given and force players into essentialist roles and racial antagonisms, are organized to maximize control and profit (often on the backs of virtual currency “farmers” in China and southeast Asia). Finally, they criticize the naïve assumption that humor and cynicism in the popular sandbox game franchise Grand Theft Auto offer any remedy to its racialized, violent content. Instead, such games indulge and normalize the fantasy of getting rich at any cost by keeping the realities of contemporary urban life and corporate greed at a safe distance (181). Part three of Games of Empire focuses on “games of multitude,” a preliminary attempt to escape from Empire’s order through alternate modes of videogame development and play. Multitude is defined dialectically, as “the engine and the enemy” of Empire (187). This is the most important, yet also most contradictory section of the text. It lays bare the process by which Empire and its media feed our creative and intellectual development to overabundance. At a certain point, the force of the multitude reaches such a level that it threatens the stability of Empire; however, instead of following Hardt and Negri’s utopian assumptions about the radical potential of the multitude, the authors here follow Paolo Virno’s warning that Empire is “very good at adopting apparently iconoclastic practices and utopian ideas as management techniques and revenue sources” (188). At every turn, advances in player configurative power provide new sources of revenue and advertising angles for the game industry. A disappointing shortcoming of these latter pages is the lack of truly new examples for radical resistance within game development. Instead, it turns out that the radical left seems satisfied with the same mild successes that the left-of-center also has celebrated: artist’s mods, virtual world activism, and critical counterplay within strategy- and wargames. Having been frequently cited by many authors before Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, this idea of subversion or resistance through play feels tired and unpersuasive. It is unclear if the authors believe it is possible to embrace game design itself as a way of pursuing what they call “exodus” from Empire, or if an all-too-fashionable subversion is the only workable strategy. While the book does explore how the earliest independent game studios were eventually subverted and incorporated into the game industry proper, it doesn’t affirm or critique more recent non-commercial, DIY game development projects such as Klik-of-the-Month Club and Ludum Dare. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s analysis of so-called “tactical games,” including the editorial works of La Molleindustria, leads to an even more ambivalent take on the contemporary design ecology. At the conclusion of his essay on “Countergaming,” Galloway asserts that avant-garde videogame artists “should create new grammars of action […] should create alternative algorithms” (Galloway 125). Yet Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter characterize works such as McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy as didactic, suggesting that the role of radical political games might be “limited to that of agitprop” (199). They are concerned that games like those of Molleindustria rigidly structure the activities of their players in order to prove a point. Yet, despite their repeated assertion that the equation of greater interactivity with democratic digital liberation is flawed, the authors see potential in policy simulators that “allow players to edit or tweak” (202) their parameters in response to what Bogost has called simulation fever , the simultaneous drive toward and fear of simulation (Bogost 108). The possibility of practicing radical design is bucked, and early attempts at critical game development like those of Molleindustria’s seem to be relegated to the status of exceptions that prove the rule for player-centered exodus. Overall, there is one glaring question Games of Empire leaves unanswered: how exactly are videogames the “exemplary media” of Empire, and what are the implications of videogames being exemplary in this way? Presumably Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter want to avoid essentialist claims, so they’re not keen on following Wark’s desire to mark “the game’s difference from [legacy media] as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations” (Wark 225). It is also unclear how the production apparatuses, labor standards, and subjectivizing processes involved in the creation and use of other any other kind of digital media would fail to justify their equally exemplary status. Even the book’s concluding paragraph holds that virtual games “are one molecular component of this undecidable collective mutation” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 229) of intellect, labor, and daily life. In the end, the authors seem to back away from their focus on games as exemplary to bring their work in line with broader theories of the gradual digitization of the everyday, in line with Galloway and Manovich. Despite these flaws, there is an undeniable elegance to Games of Empire ’s contrasting of gaming’s overwhelmingly imperial content with its multitudinous form . And its ambivalence about the potential of independent or political game development might be seen by scholars of Empire as a strength rather than a weakness, an acceptance that every new expression of multitude offers another opportunity for the expansion of Empire. The book also functions as a strong, all-encompassing call to greater responsibility on the part of mainstream game developers to be more conscious of the ideologies they embed in their work, of the way their intellectual property is used and manipulated by those who employ them, and of the material impact their industry has on the world at large. For players it offers a toolbox of concepts for radical examinations of their own play activities, asking them to be more cognizant of the consequences of their consumption of digital media and the ways in which their virtual lives interface with the real. REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Castranova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games . Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Dyer-Witheford, Nick and de Peuter, Greig. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Marx's central concern, consistent throughout his works, is to challenge and overcome hierarchical oppositions, which he considers as the core of modern, capitalist societies and the cause of alienation. The young Marx critiques the hierarchical idealism/materialism opposition. In this opposition, idealism abstracts from and reduces all material elements to the mind (or spirit), and materialism abstracts from and reduces all mental abstractions to the body (or matter). The mature Marx sophisticates this critique with his (...) theory of the commodity fetish. The commodity fetish abstracts the exchange-value (the mind) from the commodity's use-value (the body). Although Marx aims to challenge capitalism by abolishing the hierarchical relation among binary oppositions, I show that in his early and later writings on the working-class woman, he reinforces hierarchical binaries, pointing at the gendered unconscious structure of capitalism. (shrink)

Today, the French word “syndicat” designates both an association of workers and a group of producers or business concerns. In the nineteenth century, it was identified with “associations of resistance” which the law called “workers’ coalitions” and which were associations of workers, de facto or de jure, formed to improve the lot of the working class by one means or another. In this study we shall consider such organizations exclusively.

This article examines the rise of foreign ownership in France and Germany. I argue that the firm-level institutional arrangements of workplace organization constitute the most significant variable to account for the greater attractiveness of French firms over their German counterparts to short-term, impatient capital—namely, hedge and mutual funds. I demonstrate how key notions of the Varieties of Capitalism perspective—institutional interaction, institutional latency, and the distinction between institutional framework and the mode of coordination that follows from these institutions—provide important theoretical insights (...) to account for the different structures of foreign ownership in France and Germany. (shrink)

In this article I address how one might develop states of freedom in analysis and in the analyst from the tangles of unconsciousness that exist in one’s unconscious mind, within the society that trained one, and from the unspoken depths of our European culture. How can one think about trauma in the individual without thinking of it in generational terms? In a similar way the cultural heritage that formed the backdrop to the development of psychoanalysis from within the Austro-Hungarian (...) Empire and its aftermath has its own value transmitting unconscious imprints on analytic societies. What are the interfaces between personal and historical trauma, and in particular the interface with unconscious processes? What we can grasp of the innermost life of the patient and of the world he or she lives in, and by which he or she is so profoundly affected, is also a part of a broader history and specific culture. Totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century have, of course, had a massive impact on Europe, including analytic societies, which I will argue is ongoing. How can the mind take a measure of history, when history will submit neither to the reason of the world nor to the mind that confronts it? (shrink)

In contrast to most literature on cosmopolitanism, which focuses on its elite forms, this article analyzes how ordinary people bridge racial boundaries in everyday life. It is based on interviews with 150 non-college-educated white and black workers in the United States and white and North African workers in France. The comparison of the four groups shows how differences in cultural repertoires across national context and structural location shape distinct anti-racist rhetorics. Market-based arguments are salient among American workers, while arguments based (...) on solidarity and egalitarianism are used by French, but not by American, workers. Minority workers in both countries employ a more extensive toolkit of anti-racist rhetoric as compared to whites. The interviewed men privilege evidence grounded in everyday experience, and their claims of human equality are articulated in terms of universal human nature and, in the case of blacks and North Africans, universal morality. Workers' conceptual frameworks have little in common with multiculturalism that occupies a central place in the literature on cosmopolitanism. We argue that for the discussion and practice of cosmopolitanism to move forward we should shift our attention to the study of multiple ordinary cosmopolitanisms. (shrink)

_Winner of the 2010 Sigourney Award!_ How has Hanna Segal influenced psychoanalysis today? Jean-Michel Quinodoz provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of Segal's life, her clinical and theoretical work, and her contribution to psychoanalysis over the past sixty years by combining actual biographical and conceptual interviews with Hanna Segal herself or with colleagues who have listened to Segal in various contexts. _Listening to Hanna Segal_ explores both Segal's personal and professional histories, and the interaction between the two. The (...) book opens with an autobiographical account of Segal's life, from her birth in Poland to her analysis with Melanie Klein in London where she became the youngest member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Quinodoz goes on to explain Segal's contributions in various fields of psychoanalysis including: the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic patients the introduction of the "symbolic equation" aesthetics and the creative impulse the analysis of elderly patients introducing the work of Melanie Klein. Quinodoz concludes by examining Segal's most recent contribution to psychoanalysis - exploring nuclear terror, psychotic anxieties, and group phenomena. Throughout the interviews Segal speaks of her close relationships with prominent colleagues such as Klein, Rosenfeld, and Bion, making this book both a valuable contribution to the history of psychoanalysis and an indication of the evolution of psychoanalytic ideas over the past six decades. This clear summary of Hanna Segal's life and her contribution to psychoanalysis will be an essential guide to anyone studying Segal and her contemporaries. (shrink)

Le but de cet article est de développer une hypothèse macrohistorique au sujet de la représentation et de la réalité du loisir qui est la suivante : aussi longtemps que l'humanité n'a disposé que d'instruments de production pré-industriels ou prétechnologiques, une représentation ou conception relativement stable du loisir a perduré à travers de nombreux siècles : son existence a été justifiée en tant que mode de vie privilégié pour les classes sociales dominantes, en parfaite dichotomie avec le travail qui était (...) l'apanage exclusif des classes dominées. À partir du moment où la révolution industrielle va transformer les modes et les rapports sociaux de production sous la direction de la bourgeoisie comme classe dominante, les formes du loisir contemporain vont apparaître comme lieu de la consommation de la richesse réalisée par le développement prodigieux des forces productives. Ce loisir contemporain, dans un premier temps, sera un privilège de la bourgeoisie comme classe dominante et une manifestation de sa domination. Dans un deuxième temps, il deviendra accessible à des couches sociales de plus en plus larges, au sein des sociétés libérales, dans le cadre de la société « dite » de consommation, pour autant que cette consommation devienne un instrument essentiel pour le développement des intérêts de la classe bourgeoise et un rouage nécessaire à la reproduction des rapports sociaux existants.The purpose of this article is to explore a macrohistorical hypothesis concerning the depiction of leisure as opposed to the reality of leisure, a hypothesis which, briefly, may be stated as follows: throughout the countless centuries during which humanity possessed only pre-industrial or pre-technological tools, there persisted a fairly stable depiction or notion of leisure; the existence of leisure was justified as a privileged way of life enjoyed by the dominant classes of society, in perfect dichotomy with work, which was associated exclusively with the dominated classes. From the moment when the industrial revolution, under the direction of the bourgeoisie as dominant class, began to transform the means of production and the social relations arising from production, contemporary forms of leisure began to make their appearance as a visible means of consuming the wealth made possible by the prodigious development of the forces of production. Initially, this contemporary leisure was revealed as a privilege of the bourgeoisie in its role as the dominant class and served to point up its position. Subsequently, in liberal societies, leisure activities became accessible to an ever-wider social group within the framework of the so-called "consumer society", in proportion with the degree to which consumerism had become an instrument necessary for the development of the interests of the bourgeois class and an essential cog wheel in the continuation of existing social relations. (shrink)

The burden on intellectuals to define and account for their social role as well as their philosophical and historical position has never been so painfully borne as in the modern age. From the First World War to the advent of the Second, Europe saw its writers, artists and academics struggle to integrate their work, specifically the critique of a capitalist social order and its positivist ideology, and their own personal involvement in that society. The inter-war decades were ones of experimentation (...) and disappointment, the result of a quest for many gods, all inevitably destined to fail. In discussing one intellectual's journey to God, a search which pervaded every aspect of Simone Weil's work and life, we gain insight into the intellectual trap of absolutism to which this generation was particularly prone. (shrink)

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 3-20, February 2022. As graduate labour market conditions have become increasingly challenging, higher education institutions have intensified their focus on ‘employability’ via strategies such as work placements. Focusing on work placements in the media and creative industries, this article identifies and analyses three key discourses that animate the pedagogical literature in these sectors: work placements as facilitating a ‘smooth transition’ to the labour market; work placements as a place in (...) which inequalities in the labour market are produced; and work placements as a space for fostering resilience and adaptation to labour market precarity. The article argues that critiques of inequalities based on race, class or gender are marked by a transformative impulse that is largely absent in critiques of those based on worker precarity. This highlights a need to adopt pedagogies that similarly unnaturalise the economic conditions of neoliberal capitalism to discursively construct work in new, more socially just, ways. (shrink)

"The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory," wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, instigating one of the most daring intellectual adventures of the last half-century. Together, the well-known philosopher and the activist-psychiatrist were updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and "constructivist" vision of capitalism: "Capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies because it has no exterior limit itself. It works well as long as it keeps breaking down."Few people at (...) the time believed, as they wrote in the often-quoted opening sentence of Rhizome, that "the two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together." They added, "Since each of us was several, that became quite a crowd." These notes, addressed to Deleuze by Guattari in preparation for Anti-Oedipus, and annotated by Deleuze, substantiate their claim, finally bringing out the factory behind the theatre. They reveal Guattari as an inventive, highly analytical, mathematically-minded "conceptor," arguably one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in philosophy and sociopolitical theory today. The Anti-Oedipus Papers are supplemented by substantial journal entries in which Guattari describes his turbulent relationship with his analyst and teacher Jacques Lacan, his apprehensions about the publication of Anti-Oedipus and accounts of his personal and professional life as a private analyst and codirector with Jean Oury of the experimental clinic Laborde. (shrink)

Although the testimony of mental health experts in custody cases is supposed to be scientific and objective, the experts' testimony in the Mary Beth Whitehead case was imbued with prevailing middle-class biases about good mothers and good parenting. Close review of the experts' reports fails to substantiate many of their assessments and recommendations and demonstrates instead a consistent bias in favor of the Sterns and against Mary Beth Whitehead.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Externalist Psychiatry, Mindshaping, and Embodied InjusticeMichelle Maiese, PhD (bio)Ongaro maintains that although enactivist approaches to psychiatry help to account for the integration of biological, psychological, and social factors, they gloss over an important distinction between patient-centered (bio and psycho) approaches and externalist (social) approaches to mental illness. The central problem is that they lack the means to account for the social causes of illness and do not specify how (...) social determinants can be addressed in the clinic. Since much of an organism’s interaction with the external world is social in kind, the implementation of externalist psychiatry could make the enactivist model truly biopsychosocial and usher in novel forms of treatment.According to Ongaro, this externalist orientation gives rise to an important question about ontology: what are the social causes of psychiatric illness made of, and how can these be conveyed in the clinic to facilitate treatment? A “shared social etiology” would allow for a “rich explanatory framework” that accounts for the social causes of mental disorder. For example, by pointing to spirit affliction as the social cause of mental illness, the Akha transform amorphous pains (which are difficult to capture naturalistically) into meaningful and familiar experiences. Such an approach involves combining a realist understanding of biopsychosocial integration with an anti-realist, social constructivist outlook on social etiology. For them, an illness that is explained as a rupture of a human-spirit relationship is experienced as a ‘problem in living’ that affects the person in an immediate and meaningful way, and can be treated via ritual action.Ongaro then considers social causation in a more familiar context, one where social determinants of mental illness include factors such as employment. Losing one’s job is a significant life event because it signals a change in social status and prompts feelings of uselessness. Ongaro characterizes these feelings of low subjective status as “socially constructed experiences that depend on collectively ingrained ideas about status, value, and self-realization that a person accepts—one could say ‘believes in’—by virtue of living in a particular society.” Because social worlds differ and what counts as social defeat is culturally specific, [End Page 333] social determinants of illness such as unemployment are either negligible or non-applicable in Ahka (non-capitalist) society.To acknowledge the impact of these social constructions, Ongaro maintains, clinical psychiatry should abandon its commitment to naturalism and embrace methodological constructivism instead. Methodological naturalism treats social causes as ‘real’ and holds that the social causes of disorder should be investigated using the scientific method; research focuses on social determinants, social stressors, and social capital. However, despite acknowledging that declining mental health correlates significantly with political and economic factors, Ongaro maintains that methodological naturalism when it comes to social causes will be insufficient to bring about meaningful changes in clinical practice. For one thing, individual psychiatrists lack the political power and economic resources to bring about the sorts of societal changes that are needed to address social determinants of health. Second, social determinants are probabilistic factors rather than definitive causes of mental disorder; psychiatric illnesses often do not have a well-defined cause or a clear-cut social trigger. Third, an explanation that points to ‘lack of social capital’ does “not possess the immediacy, emotional charge, and embodied meaning that could make them therapeutically effective in the same way that Akha explanations for spirit afflictions are.”Philosophically, Ongaro’s embrace of ‘methodological constructivism’ when it comes to social etiology entails a commitment to antirealism about social causation and fictionalism more specifically. Wilkinson (2022) notes that the core tenet of psychiatric fictionalism is that “when we engage in psychiatric discourse... we are not attributing a robust, objective property, but are instead engaging with a useful, perhaps even an indispensable, fiction” (p. 91). For Ongaro, this fiction consists in a meaningful explanatory narrative about the social causes of illness. However, if we take the notion of integration seriously, and characterize this integration naturalistically (as Ongaro does), then questions arise as to how these fictional narratives about social causes can impact people both biologically and psychologically, and thereby have such a powerful impact.I argue that an enactivist approach to treatment will be... (shrink)

Modern capitalist societies are plagued by a series of oppositions, such as the subject/object, theory/practice, and the mind/body opposition. The problem with these oppositions is that they appear in an absolute opposition and hierarchical relation, making the negative pole (the object, practice, and the body) appear inferior to the positive pole (the subject, theory, and the mind). Furthermore, the “inferior” pole is often unconsciously linked to women, racial minorities, and working-class people, reinforcing injustices towards them. In this chapter, I (...) read Theodor W. Adorno with Jacques Lacan to explain how these oppositions are connected and different from one another, and what we can do to challenge them, and the injustices they engender. (shrink)

It is time for a paradigm shift in our study of world capitalism and the global ruling class. The statecentrism informing much theorization and analysis of world politics, political economy, and class structure is less and less congruent with 21st century world developments. Global capitalism represents a new stage in the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, characterized by the rise of transnational capital and a globally integrated production and financial system commanded by a transnational capitalist (...) class='Hi'>class, or TCC, that attempts to exercise its class power through transnational state apparatuses. The TCC, as the new global ruling class, has been attempting, albeit with limited success, to construct a global hegemonic bloc in which one group, the TCC, exercises leadership and imposes its project through the consent of those drawn into the bloc, while those from the majority who are not drawn into this hegemonic project, either through material rewards or ideological mechanisms, are contained or repressed. Global capitalism is in crisis. A popular revolt is spreading worldwide, thus posing many challenges. Transformative struggles must be informed by an accurate analysis of global capitalism and its ruling class. (shrink)

In this contribution, we look – both historically and in the present – at how children are objectified in data and how it is assumed that this objectivation is a way to dismiss ideology, or at least to separate the ideological from the scientific. We argue, however, that the separation of data from ideology is itself a highly ideological choice. As Freire points out: education never was and never can be objective. The objectivation of the child and, more generally, of (...) pedagogy means that the agenda that this serves remains veiled. A closer look at what data are put forward as the means to objectify education reveals that this agenda is deeply individualistic and fit to serve a competitive capitalist society. We argue that if this is the case, it ought to be the result of democratic debate and, therefore, we need more, not less, ideologies in pedagogy, because facts and data are always embedded in ideologies. And so they should be. (shrink)

The contribution of this study to existing scholarship is threefold. First, it extends heterology’s timeline beyond the late 1930s to encompass the final phase of Bataille’s career (1955–62) devoted to prehistory. It argues that heterology’s keyword – the wholly other – furnished an entry point into the prehistoric past marginalized by traditional historiography. Second, it demonstrates that the exemplar of prehistory’s otherness is silence. Along with Maurice Blanchot, Bataille forged a modernist aesthetics that promotes silence as an interruption of speech. (...) It therefore concludes that interruption – frequently dismissed as a sign of Bataille’s deficiencies or in contradiction with his goal of continuity – recaptures the continuum lost when archaic humans invented work, language, and a deferral to the future. With sections on religious experience, markings, eroticism, and the rupture between animals and humans, this study offers an introduction to prehistory in Bataille for specialists and general readers willing to plunge into what scholars now describe as deep history. (shrink)

Using data from the 1979 to 1998 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the author explores how gender, family, and class alter the impact of self-employment on earnings. Fixed-effect regression results show that while self-employment positively influences men’s earnings, not all women similarly benefit. Professionals receive the same self-employment earnings premium, regardless of gender. However, self-employment in nonprofessional occupations negatively affects women’s earnings, with wives and mothers incurring the greatest penalties. The high concentration of nonprofessional self-employed women (...) in child care accounts for much of these penalties. Results are robust despite inclusion of controls for human capital and labor supply, job characteristics, occupational and industrial gender segregation, and demographic characteristics. The compensating differentials argument, that women with greater family responsibilities trade earnings for the family-friendly aspects of self-employment, is discussed in light of these findings. While this argument may explain women’s returns to nonprofessional self-employment, it is less persuasive for interpreting women’s returns to professional self-employment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ego CredoMichel Serres (bio)Saint Paul combines in one singular person the three ancient formats, Jewish, Greek, and Latin, from which the Western World sprang. A devout Pharisee, he was born in Tarsus into a family of the Diaspora, and educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel; he observed Mosaic Law and constantly cited the Torah, both Psalms and Prophets, with erudition. It also seems likely that he knew Greek philosophy, at (...) least by way of Philo the Jew, since he wrote and spoke the Greek language and cited some of its authors, saying that he admired its wisdom, practiced its elegance, and dreaded its reason. As a Roman citizen, like his father, he took pride in this status; he must have known Roman Law, since after being sentenced by the imperial courts, he addressed an appeal to them.Saint Paul not only symbolizes the cultural melting pot among Mediterranean sailors, port-merchants, and occasional scholars during the Pax romana; he above all embodies the integral man built by the Law, the Logos, and the Administration, three formats forged in the fires of Hebraic monotheism, Hellenistic rational Wisdom, and Roman Law, themselves respectively shaped by ritual in the Temple, harmony in the Cosmos, and the City-State in the Empire. This triple belonging to an organized society, a systematic world, and an all-powerful god promotes excellent modes of conduct.Triply formatted in this way, Saint Paul, newly named, rose up out of the trinity of his belonging; he traveled the world over, and he invented the coming era. In so doing, he braved three disasters: the persecution of his fellows, the mockery of Greek philosophers on the Areopagus, and his trial and probable execution by Rome. In and through Paul, all the superior and lasting achievements of the Indo-European and Semitic traditions stem from this original bifurcation; the good news he proclaims is incarnated and grafted on him and through him; from him, the branch of a new creature springs forth.Although his ancient formats imply a belonging to three different communities, the new man identifies with none of them in order to create something entirely new. But what? [End Page 1]Belonging and IdentityIn a previous book, I wrote that my identity cannot be reduced to my belonging to certain groups. So do not call me "old man," a male, or a writer, but put me, if you must, in whichever subcategory designates the corresponding age, sex, or profession. Apart from these characteristics, who am I? Me. All the rest, including what the government bureaucracy obliges me to write on my so-called "identity" card, merely indicates some of the subcategories to which I belong.If you confuse belonging and identity, you make a logical error that is certainly serious, but, in the end, relatively benign. Moreover, you set yourself up to make a deadly mistake, that of racism, which consists precisely in reducing a person to one of his groups. We owe this distinction (which is so important that I like to repeat it) to Saint Paul. We owe it to him both in theory, because he elaborates it, and in terms of his life, because the Good News that he brings breaks with the three ancient formats, all three of which were associated with groups."There is neither Jew nor Greek," says Paul, "there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female" (Gal. 3:28). All he mentions here are classes, sexes, languages, or nations—in short, all categories or groups. What he means is that there is no longer any belonging in the earlier sense, leaving only the identity I = I: "But by the grace of God I am what I am" (1 Cor. 15:10).For Paul, the only thing left is this "new creature": I, the adoptive Son of God, through faith in Jesus Christ; I, full of faith and without works, without pride; I, empty, poor, and nothing: universal.Who am I? I am I, and that is all. If we put aside the subcategorical definition of belonging (x å A), the principle of identity becomes evident, not in a formal way, as in the Aristotelian sense of a... (shrink)

In December 1984 Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, two founding members of Feminist Review, published an article assessing contemporary British feminism and its relationship to the left and to class struggle. They suggested that the women's movement in general, and socialist-feminism in particular, had lost its former political sharpness. The academic focus of socialist-feminism has proved more interested in theorizing the ideological basis of sexual difference than the economic contradictions of capitalism. Meanwhile the conditions of working-class and black (...) women have been deteriorating. In this situation, they argue, feminists can only serve the general interests of women through alliance with working-class movements and class struggle. Weir and Wilson represent a minority position within the British Communist Party (the CP), which argues that ‘feminism’ is now being used by sections of the left, in particular the dominant ‘Eurocommunist’ left in the CP, to justify their moves to the right, with an accompanying attack on traditional forms of trade union militancy. Beatrix Campbell, who is aligned to the dominant position within the CP, has been one target of Weir and Wilson's criticisms. In several articles from 1978 onwards, and in her book Wigan Pier Revisited, Beatrix Campbell has presented a very different analysis of women and the labour movement. She has criticized the trade union movement as a ‘men's movement’, in the sense that it has always represented the interests of men at the expense of women. And she has described the current split within the CP as one extending throughout the left between the politics of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’: traditional labour movement politics as against the politics of those who have rethought their socialism to take into account the analysis and importance of popular social movements – in particular feminism, the peace and anti-racist movements. In reply to this debate, Anne Phillips has argued that while women's position today must be analysed in the context of the capitalist crisis, it is not reducible to the dichotomy ‘class politics’ versus ‘popular alliance’. Michèle Barrett, in another reply to Weir and Wilson, has argued that they have presented a reductionist and economistic approach to women's oppression, which caricatures rather than clarifies much of the work in which socialist-feminists have been engaged. To air these differences between socialist-feminists over the question of feminism and class politics, and to see their implications for the women's movement and the left, Feminist Review has decided to bring together the main protagonists of this debate for a fuller, more open discussion. For this discussion Feminist Review drew up a number of questions which were put to the participants by Clara Connolly and Lynne Segal. (Michèle Barrett was present in a personal capacity.) They cover the recent background to socialist-feminist politics, the relationship of feminism to Marxism, the role of feminists in le ft political parties and the labour movement, the issue of racism and the prospects for the immediate future. The discussion was lengthy and what follows is an edited version of the transcript. (shrink)

How do we conceive of class and class struggle? Orthodox Marxism has often been represented as understanding class as a relationship to production, a conceptualization reinforcing a sense of class struggle where the accent is placed on the conflictual relations within the workplace. Overt capitallabour conflict at the point of production does indeed constitute class struggle, but neither class nor class struggle can be reduced in Marxist terms to strikes, lockouts, and the like. (...) Rather, as Marx’s writings suggest, the origins of class formation lie in dispossession, and it is as the dispossessed that workers, waged and wageless, have routinely resisted both the exploitation and the oppression that is fundamental to capitalism’s project. This project, in which accumulation through dispossession is driven by periodic crises, necessarily involves destruction and creates not only vast wealth but vast destitution. The working class is made as a productive force, divorced from ownership of the means of production, but it is also made amidst persistent crises, which lead to unemployment, the precariousness of labour, and the existence of reserve armies of labour. A comprehension of the origins of class in dispossession thus widens our understanding of class struggles, which take place at the point of production but which also develop in all manner of other ways, including struggles around space, against the state, and in the reproductive realm. (shrink)

Claims to sisterhood are premised on women’s experiences with gender oppression, and many have argued that such claims ignore differences among women. Many have therefore dismissed sisterhood as a legitimate claim to solidarity, failing to examine the ways that sisterhood continues to be utilized by feminist activists. This article examines qualitative data from a study of a white, middle-class, feminist, antiracist organization that uses the language of sisterhood in its work on behalf of incarcerated women, who are predominantly of (...) color and poor. The author finds not only that sisterhood is simultaneously rooted in women’s experiences with oppression and pride and pleasure but that such language serves complex functions in feminist organizations that seek to work across difference. Beyond its use in creating and sustaining solidarity, sisterhood is utilized to bridge differences in race, class, and life experiences between women and to generate feelings of legitimacy amongst white, middle-class activists. (shrink)

Do political concerns belong in psychodynamic treatment? How do class and politics shape the unconscious? The effects of an increasingly polarized, insecure and threatening world mean that the ideologically enforced split between the political order and personal life is becoming difficult to sustain. This book explores the impact of the social and political domains at the individual level. The contributions included in this volume describe how issues of class and politics, and the intense emotions they engender, emerge (...) in the clinical setting and how psychotherapists can respectfully address them rather than deny their significance. They demonstrate how clinicians need to take into account the complex convergences between psychic and social reality in the clinical setting in order to help their patients understand the anxiety, fear, insecurity and anger caused by the complex relations of class and power. This examination of the psychodynamics of terror and aggression and the unconscious defences employed to deny reality offers powerful insights into the microscopic unconscious ways that ideology is enacted and lived. _Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics_ will be of interest to all mental health professionals interested in improving their understanding of the ideological factors that impede or facilitate critical and engaged citizenship. It has a valuable contribution to make to the psychoanalytic enterprise, as well as to related scholarly and professional disciplines. (shrink)

This article documents a moment in history when poor and working-class white boys and men are struggling in their schools, communities, and workplaces against the “Other” as a means of framing identities. Drawing on two independent qualitative studies, the authors investigate distinct locations where poor and working-class boys and men invent, relate to, and distance from marginalized groups in an effort to create self. First the authors look at an ethnography of “the Freeway boys,” a community of urban (...) white working-class high school boys who must deal with the economic ravagement of their neighborhood and their insecure place in a world different than that of their fathers. Next, the authors draw from a large-scale survey of young adults to hear how a combined sample of urban poor and working-class white men narrate identities that are carved explicitly out of territory bordered by white women and African American men. Across sites, the authors theorize how high schools and workplaces both, in part, create white masculinities and interrupt them, at a time when white working-class boys and men feel under siege. (shrink)

Unquenched desire, the dividing up of the drives, repetition, and symptom are the keywords for the effects that the unconscious, as deciphered by Freud, has on the body. Harmony is not on the agenda, but rather the discordance, unlinking, and arrogance of cynical jouissances. It seems that the discourse of capitalism is today increasing their deleterious consequences - with all of these demonstrative suicides, but also suicides as diverse as those of terrorists, Tibetan monks, those beleaguered by the capitalist (...) enterprise, and all the hopeless of our time. Hence the question that Lacan posed concerning the possible "humanisation" of this denatured animal, about whom Freud did not hesitate to say that he is a wolf to man, even though he has always made community. What will the psychoanalyst say about possible solutions, he whose act excludes the call to norms of any kind? Humanisation? is the 2013-2014 volume of the annual seminar held by the author at the Clinical College of the Lacanian Field in Paris. (shrink)

Analyses of Kafka’s The Trial often read the text as an existentialist work, arguing that the novel metaphorizes the absurdity of a modern world where God no longer exists. However, I agree with Slavoj Žižek, who posits that such a modernist reading ignores what is most vital in Kafka’s text—that the absence of God is “always already filled by an inert, obscene, revolting presence”. I argue that this “revolting presence” for Josef K is the presence of the Court; The Trial (...) describes the subject within a society organized by the symbolic order, the big Other, the symbolic network of rules regulating our lives and structuring our reality. For this reason, I read The Trial as pointing the way toward critical postmodernism. But a strictly postmodernist reading of The Trial cannot work without the Lacanian intervention of the split subject. Readings of The Trial based solely on the framework of Foucault’s power/knowledge theory, without a consideration of Lacanian subject formation, are incomplete. Foucault posits that individuals only become subjects via discourse, becoming subjects either through interpellation or via relationship to power. This begs the question, how does an individual become the desiring subject? How does a defendant such as Josef K. come to accept the power of the Court? I answer these questions by applying a necessary psychoanalytic intervention to Foucauldian readings of The Trial, interpreting the text as the narration of Josef K.’s unconscious experience as a split subject in relation to the big Other. (shrink)

New, “smart,” automated technologies for the home are playing a growing role in the construction and refurbishment of many new middle and upper class homes and assisted living facilities in the developed world, promising the improved performance of domestic tasks, as well as enhanced safety, convenience, and efficiency. Expanding the growing automatization of many activities in daily life, automated technologies in the home are interactive, ubiquitous, and often invisible. Their installation, in what is understood to be the locus of (...) personal autonomy and identity, promotes a rethinking on the notion of the self as it is shaped and reshaped within the home. Because these technologies are user-centric, they bring to mind questions as to how their users are envisioned. The current study will focus on human physicality and on the materiality of the body as it is envisaged in the technologies themselves through the study of three automated domestic systems. It will ask if and how our understanding of being a body—or, perhaps, of having one—is redefined as these new technologies assume a growing role in the living of everyday domestic life. (shrink)

Marxian class theory has been unable to account for the most significant historical developments of the 20th century. The rise of fascism not only belied the hopes put in the revolutionary proletariat, it also brought into the center of the political stage those social strata which the class theory had relegated to, at best, secondary supporting roles. The triumph of the Bolshevik, revolution and the institutionalization and expansion of Soviet socialism has not only failed to issue into the (...) anticipated free, classless society, but has led to the creation of a new system of stratification and domination which is simply unthinkable within the classical Marxian framework. Late or advanced capitalism continues advancing in spite of all its crises and contradictions. (shrink)

This book examines the social and political character of love. Like everything else, love must be seen at multiple levels: human society (in its relation to nature and in relation to the materiality of human life itself); specific forms of class society such as capitalism.

_The paper reviews some ways that the social and psychic have been understood in psychoanalysis and argues that a model for understanding the relation between the psychic and the social must account both for the ways that we internalize oppressive norms as well as the ways we resist them. The author proposes that we build our identities in relation to other identities circulating in our culture and that cultural hierarchies of sexism, racism, classism push us to split off part of (...) what it means to be human, thereby creating painful individual and relational repetition compulsions. These "normative unconscious processes" replicate the unjust social norms that cause psychic pain in the first place. The paper concludes with thoughts about contemporary US culture, in which the government has abdicated responsibility toward its most vulnerable citizens and has thus rendered vulnerability and dependence shameful states._. (shrink)

In 1966 Michel Foucault pointed out that the generation of thinkers who had taken as their model Sartre or Merleau-Ponty had suddenly become part of the intellectual museum. A new generation of thinkers had appeared whose passion was not for “meaning”, “man” and “commitment”, but for the “concept and the system”.One could say that the break with the past generation began the day that Levi-Strauss with regard to societies and Lacan with regard to the unconscious showed us that (...) “meaning” was probably nothing but a sort of surface effect, a scum, and that that which affected us most profoundly, that which preceded us, that which maintains us.in space and time was the system.“Our task, Foucault went on, is to free ourselves from humanism and in that sense our work is political.” For some time Foucault and those who thought like him were classed as ‘academics”, that is as people whose thinking had little or no implications for the ongoing state of the society. Then came the May movement of 1968 and in February of 1969 a major gathering was held and the main speakers were Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault. (shrink)

A transnational capitalist class has emerged as that segment of the world bourgeoisie that represents transnational capital, the owners of the leading worldwide means of production as embodied in the transnational corporations and private financial institutions. The spread of TNCs, the sharp increase in foreign direct investment, the proliferation of mergers and acquisitions across national borders, the rise of a global financial system, and the increased interlocking of positions within the global corporate structure, are some empirical indicators of the (...) transnational integration of capitalists. The TCC manages global rather than national circuits of accumulation. This gives it an objective class existence and identity spatially and politically in the global system above any local territories and polities. The TCC became politicized from the 1970s into the 1990s and has pursued a class project of capitalist globalization institutionalized in an emergent transnational state apparatus and in a "Third Way" political program. The emergent global capitalist historic bloc is divided over strategic issues of class rule and how to achieve regulatory order in the global economy. Contradictions within the ruling bloc open up new opportunities for emancipatory projects from global labor. (shrink)

For over thirty years, Lynne Layton has heeded the call for a social psychoanalysis and produced a body of work that examines unconscious process as it operates both in the social world and in the clinic. In this volume of Layton's most important papers, she expands on earlier theorists' ideas of social character by exploring how dominant ideologies and culturally mandated, hierarchical identity prescriptions are lived in individual and relational conflict. Through clinical and cultural examples, Layton describes how enactments (...) of what she calls 'normative unconscious processes' reinforce cultural inequalities of race, sex, gender, and class both inside and outside the clinic, and at individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels. Clinicians, academics, and activists alike will find here a deeper understanding of the power of unconscious process, and are called on to envision and enact a progressive future in which vulnerability and interdependency are honored and systemic inequalities dismantled. (shrink)

Providing interpretations and drawing critically from classical and modern social theory, post-structuralism, and psychoanalytic theory, this original study offers an alternative way of thinking about the social and the individual. It offers critical analyses of, among others, Marx, Giddens, Bourdieu, Derrida, Laclau and Mouffe, Castoriadis, Freud and modern psychoanalytic theorists, and considers their roles in advancing our present-day conceptualization of the social and the self. In theorizing that behaviour is both socially determined and autonomous, it avoids the impasses of either (...) individualist or structuralist approaches. (shrink)

Intersectional feminist scholars emphasize how overlapping systems of oppression structure gender inequality, but in focusing on the gendered, classed, and racialized bases of stratification, many often overlook disability as an important social category in determining economic outcomes. This is a significant omission given that disability severely limits opportunities and contributes to cumulative disadvantage. We draw from feminist disability and intersectional theories to account for how disability intersects with gender, race, and education to produce economic insecurity. The findings from our analyses (...) of 2015 American Community Survey data provide strong empirical support for hierarchies of disadvantage, where women and racial minority groups with disabilities and less education experience the highest poverty levels, report the lowest total income, and have a greater reliance on sources outside the labor market for economic security. By taking disability into account, our study demonstrates how these multiple characteristics lead to overlapping oppressions that become embedded and reproduced within the larger social structure. (shrink)