TY - CHAP

T1 - Anamorphosis of Capital

T2 - Black Holes, Gothic Monsters, and the Will of God

AU - Wilson, Japhy

PY - 2018/9/1

Y1 - 2018/9/1

N2 - In Representing Capital, Fredric Jameson notes the impossibility of directly representing the totality of global capitalism,“in which the informing power is everywhere and nowhere all at once, and at the same time in relentless expansion, by way of appropriation and subsumption alike”(2011, 7). Despite the unrepresentability of capital, however, Jameson insists that its representation must nonetheless be attempted if we are to have any hope of grasping and addressing the seemingly inexorable dynamics of creative destruction that are producing and transforming our collective reality. To do so, he argues, we can draw on the methodology of psychoanalysis. Jameson notes that in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud “presupposes that any full or satisfactory representation of the drive is impossible,” but points out that Freud nonetheless asserts “the possibility in the drive of some minimal expression”(2011, 7). Lacanian psychoanalysis similarly identifies the Real as a traumatic presence-absence that is excluded from the symbolic reality that it structures (Žižek 1989, 132–33), while simultaneously claiming that analysis has the capacity to bring elements of the Real into the Symbolic (Fink 1995, 25–26). Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek has identified Capital as Real, arguing that the symbolic universe of capital embodies “the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real:‘reality’is the social reality of the actual people involved in the production process, while the Real is the inexorable ‘abstract’spectral logic of Capital which determines what goes on in social reality”(1999, 331).

AB - In Representing Capital, Fredric Jameson notes the impossibility of directly representing the totality of global capitalism,“in which the informing power is everywhere and nowhere all at once, and at the same time in relentless expansion, by way of appropriation and subsumption alike”(2011, 7). Despite the unrepresentability of capital, however, Jameson insists that its representation must nonetheless be attempted if we are to have any hope of grasping and addressing the seemingly inexorable dynamics of creative destruction that are producing and transforming our collective reality. To do so, he argues, we can draw on the methodology of psychoanalysis. Jameson notes that in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud “presupposes that any full or satisfactory representation of the drive is impossible,” but points out that Freud nonetheless asserts “the possibility in the drive of some minimal expression”(2011, 7). Lacanian psychoanalysis similarly identifies the Real as a traumatic presence-absence that is excluded from the symbolic reality that it structures (Žižek 1989, 132–33), while simultaneously claiming that analysis has the capacity to bring elements of the Real into the Symbolic (Fink 1995, 25–26). Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek has identified Capital as Real, arguing that the symbolic universe of capital embodies “the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real:‘reality’is the social reality of the actual people involved in the production process, while the Real is the inexorable ‘abstract’spectral logic of Capital which determines what goes on in social reality”(1999, 331).

U2 - 10.2307/j.ctv47w9gt.14

DO - 10.2307/j.ctv47w9gt.14

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9781496207326

BT - Psychoanalysis and the GlObal

A2 - Kapoor, Ilan

PB - University of Nebraska Press

ER -