Book forum: global libidinal economy

ABSTRACT

This is a forum containing six short interventions on the 2023 co-authored book, Global Libidinal Economy. In the first intervention, the co-authors lay out their book’s key arguments. What follows are four critical commentaries on the book, focusing on the following question: ‘To what extent do you think unconscious excess and irrationality are integral to global political economy?’ Contributors comment from a variety of perspectives – Critical IR, Marxist value-theory, radicalism – taking up the book’s arguments by illustrating, refining, or disagreeing with them. The forum concludes with a response by the book’s co-authors to the questions and arguments raised by the four contributors.

KEYWORDS:

• Libidinal economy
• international political economy
• psychoanalysis
• the unconscious
• the political
• subaltern
• gender
• racism

Notes

1 ‘Irrationality’ here is to be understood in terms of (and in this case, in opposition to) mainstream IPE’s own standards of ‘rationality’, logic, and order. But while psychoanalysis/global libidinal economy investigates the unconscious contradictions of the capitalist market, this does not mean there is no logic to the unconscious: there is, but it’s a different logic — one of anxiety and excess, and one that, precisely because of such excess, can never be investigated directly or straightforwardly, but only symptomatically: through slips, cracks, gaps, disavowals, antagonisms, equivocations, etc.

2 CIR has a longer influence in IR dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. A theoretically robust and politically engaged feminism, for example, was far from marginal during this time (see Ashworth 2011).

3 This is clearly visible in Oliver Anthony’s 2023 chart-storming anthem of the US right, ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro

4 Although GLE certainly dedicates an entire chapter to the discussion of the ‘love of money’ in the financial sphere, it nevertheless overlooks the primordial monetized drive already at work in the social relationship of production, as I explain below.

5 In the debate on whether abstract labour is a physiological or social concept in Marx’s Capital (1990), I stay with Moishe Postone (1996), who reads it as the social function of labour that, by generalizing the qualitative specificities of itself and its products, allows the labourer to acquire the products of others (1996, 149). According to Postone, then, abstract labour is not a mental construction but a real social process distinguishable from the process that produces particular use values: ‘[a]s a socially mediating activity, labour is abstracted from the specificity of its product, hence, from the specificity of its own concrete form. In Marx’s analysis, the category of abstract labour expresses this real social process of abstraction; it is not simply based on a conceptual process of abstraction. As a practice that constitutes a social mediation, labour is labour in general’ (Postone 1996, 151–152).

6 While I agree with Vighi’s assertion of the structural primacy of the capital relation, I take issue with the route he chooses to reach this conclusion: namely, the claim that ‘the notion of abstract labor is […] only partially unraveled by Marx, arguably because his most pressing concern is to show how surplus-value results from its exploitation’ (Vighi 2022, 81). As Postone reminds us, however, Marx’s concern ‘is not only that labor is being exploited […] but, rather, that the exploitation of labor is effected by structures that labor itself constitutes’ (Blumberg and Nogales 2008, emphasis added).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ilan Kapoor

Ilan Kapoor is Professor of Critical Development Studies at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Toronto.

Gavin Fridell

Gavin Fridell is University Research Professor and Chair, Global Development Studies, at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada.

Maureen Sioh

Maureen Sioh is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at DePaul University, Chicago.

Pieter de Vries

Pieter de Vries is presently the International Development Research Liaison for Wageningen University (The Netherlands) and the Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia).

Hasmet Uluorta

Hasmet M. Uluorta is an Associate Professor of Political Studies and International Development Studies at Trent. His scholarly interests include globalization, theories of international relations, global political economy, employment/work strategies, American politics, and the socio-political impacts of new technologies.

Hannah Richter

Hannah Richter is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sussex, UK, where she researches and teaches contemporary critical political theory. Amongst others, her work has been published in International Political Sociology, Globalizations, the European Journal of Social Theory and the European Journal of Political Theory. She is the author of two monographs, The Politics of Orientation: Deleuze and Luhmann (SUNY Press, 2023) and Challenging Anthropocene Ontology: Modernity, Ecology, Indigenous Complexities (Bloomsbury, 2024; with E. Randazzo).

Christian Caiconte

Christian Caiconte is a sessional lecturer and Research Assistant in the Discipline of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Australia. His research interests are critical theory and the political economy of East Asian capitalism, with a particular focus on Korea. His just completed PhD thesis is titled, The Developmental Unconscious: Labour and Enjoyment in Korea’s Developmental Era, and draws on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory to analyze the social and cultural constitution of Korea’s developmental decades (1960s-1980s).

María Gómez

María M. Gómez is Associate Professor of Criminology, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada. Her work focuses on the relationship between prejudice, violence, and critical socio-legal theory from a feminist perspective.