Lacan and Capitalist Discourse

Jorge Alemán is Doctor Honoris Causa of the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Honorary Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, and the Universidad Nacional de Villa María Córdoba. He has published numerous essays on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and political thought.Daniel Runnels is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Central Missouri.

“Jorge Aleman brings together the best of psychoanalytic theory and the best of socio-economic analysis, and the mixture is explosive. He makes it clear that, in today’s capitalism, ideology is not a “superstructure” elevated above economy but an integral part of economic reproduction itself. His clearly written book should be an obligatory reading for all of us who want to orient ourselves in the mess we are in today. It’s as simple as that.” - Slavoj Zizek, Professor, European Graduate School; International Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London; senior researcher, Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia“Jorge Alemán is the most original proponent of what in Argentina today we might call the school of Lacano-Althusserianism to supplement and bring up to date the older paradigm of Freudo-Marxism. In this eminently readable book, he puts notions of fantasy, ideology, and subjectivity to the test of our time to locate the prospects for a renewal of the emancipatory Left.” - Bruno Bosteels, Professor and Chair, Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and Professor, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University“In Santiago de Chile, during Sebastián Piñera’s presidency, a taxi driver of Mapuche descent pointed to La Moneda and pridefully affirmed to me: “I’m an entrepreneur just like him!” In this book, Alemán, the most brilliant and influential Spanish-speaking Lacanian Left thinker, convincingly analyzes such a world-encompassing neoliberal production of “subjectivity” in the light of Lacan’s concept of “capitalist discourse” and intensely invites us to invent new emancipatory projects by thinking from the psychoanalytic ontology of the absolute difference structurally constitutive to any “subject,” that is, to each and every one of the speaking, sexuated and mortal beings.” - Jun Fujita Hirose, author, ¿Cómo imponer un límite absoluto al capitalismo? Filosofía política de Deleuze y Guattari (How to Put an Absolute Limit to Capitalism? The Political Philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari)

• AcknowledgementsSeries Preface by Ian ParkerIntroductionChapter 1 Pandemic and CapitalismChapter 2 No-politicsChapter 3 The UncannyChapter 4 EvilChapter 5 Fantasy: IdeologyChapter 6 Exploitation: OppressionChapter 7 Antagonism: ConflictChapter 8 Promoting HateChapter 9 Popular ResponsibilityChapter 10 Blueprints of the InappropriableChapter 11 Community, Society, StateChapter 12 Retroactivity: Continuity and DiscontinuityChapter 13 New ChallengesChapter 14 Note