Loaded Subjects: Psychoanalysis, Money and the Global Financial Crisis

Contributors to this book investigate issues as diverse as: the century-old divorce between psychological and economic explanations of human behaviour and current efforts to repair it; the gender-politics, ethics and psychology of economists' attempts to explain today's rolling crisis in money markets; psychoanalytic theories of financial investment, risk and the 'jouissance' of devastating loss; the rise and cataclysmic fall of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme; the squandering of fortunes on rubbishy art in times of financial crisis; the attraction of Deleuzian speculation versus Freudian investment; the nexus between political economy and libidinal economy; the mystifying effects of treating 'the market' as a subject capable of 'speaking', 'reacting' and 'punishing'; and the fate of desire in postmodern, hyper-commoditised culture.

Contents: Part I. Psychoanalysis and Financial crisis 1. David Bennett Homo Oeconomicus vs Homo Psychologicus: A Critique of Pure Reason in Economics and Psychoanalysis 2. Karl Figlio The Financial Crisis: A Psychoanalytic View of Illusion, Greed and Reparation in Masculine Phantasy 3. Bruce Fink Analysand and Analyst in the Global Economy, or Why Anyone in their Right Mind Would Pay for an Analysis 4. Manya Steinkoler Customer Satisfaction Guaranteed: A Lacanian Reading of the Bernie Madoff Scandal 5. Claire Colebrook Beyond (Good) Investment and (Evil) Speculation 6. Paul Crosthwaite What a Waste of Money: Expenditure, the Death Drive, and the Contemporary Art Market Part II Psychoanalysis, Money and the Economy 7. Campbell Jones What Kind of Subject is the Market? 8. Viktor Mazin The Meaning of Money: Russia, the Ruble, the Dollar and Psychoanalysis 9. Tan Waelchli Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Nature of Money: Authority, Regulation of Standards, and the Law of the Father 10. Jean-Joseph Goux Pleasure and Pain: At the Crossroad of Psychoanalysis and Political Economy 11. Geoff Boucher Financial Crisis, Social Pathologies and 'Generalised and Matt Sharpe Perversion': Questioning A iA ek's Diagnosis of the Times 12. Stephen Frosh Psychoanalysis, Antisemitism and the Miser 13. Bernard Stiegler Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-Based Capitalism and Libidinal Dis-economy