Description

This special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly examines the recent theoretical convergence of psychoanalysis and Marxism by posing anew the question of the relationship between these two master discourses in the era of late capitalism. Beginning with Zizek's "Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism," which both dramatizes and analyzes the discursive antinomies of psycho-Marxism, this volume comes full circle with Robert Miklitsch's "Going through the Fantasy," which seeks the "traumatic kernel" at the core of Zizekian theory. In other essays, psycho-Marxism is submitted to Foucault's analytics of power/knowledge, Derrida's spectral letter, the postcolonial theory of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, and the performative politics/poetics of Jean Genet. The theoretical perspectives of Laura Mulvey and Gayle Rubin are crosscut and spliced to take women out of commodity traffic and put feminist automobility up on the big screen. Imperialism, Nazi psychoanalytic techno-fetishism, and the strange alliance between (anti)queer Marxism and gay conservatism provide other useful lenses through which the Marxist/psychoanalytic bond is viewed.

Contributors. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Teresa Brennan, Rosaria Champagne, Stathis Gourgouris, Catherine Liu, Kathleen McHugh, Robert Miklitsch, Abdul-Karim Mustapha, Laurence A. Rickels, Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, Slavoj Zizek