Decolonization and Psychoanalysis: The Underside of Signification

Decolonization and Psychoanalysis challenges traditional psychoanalytic frameworks by revisiting Lacan’s conceptualization of the materiality of speech through a decolonial lens.

Ahmad Fuad Rahmat explores how Lacan’s ideas about the symbolic order and its historical development are intertwined with colonial assumptions, and proposes that rethinking these assumptions can pave the way for a decolonial psychoanalysis. The book explores how Lacan uses Freud’s Jewishness as a marginalized perspective that reveals the excluded dimensions of signification within the symbolic order, and examines James Joyce's anti-colonial politics and its significance for Lacan’s conception of the sinthome. The critique extends to Slavoj Žižek’s Eurocentric readings of Malcolm X as a foil with which colonized speech could be conceived as ‘symbolic dispossession.’ Finally, it reframes the gap by understanding global capitalism as a mode of exchange to advocate for a decolonial psychoanalysis that focuses on the gaps and non-spaces of transmission as opposed to a like for like export of the clinic from the center to the periphery.

Decolonization and Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and to academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, critical theory and cultural studies.