The Psychopathology of American Capitalism

ISBN-13: 9783319857022 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 296 str.

Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Spis treści

Introduction

The Relevance of Marxism

Marxist Limitations

The Relevance of Psychoanalysis

Displacement and Condensation

The Rhetoric of Repetition

Cognitive Repression

Kettle Logic

National Daydreams

Fetishizing

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1: Marx, Freud, and Capital

Chapter 2: Immanent Injustice: Race and Gender

Reproduction Rights: A New Manifesto

Chapter 3: Misrepresentations: Deleuze and Guattari

Chapter 4: Žižek’s Hysterical Commodities

Commodity

Symptom

Hysteria

Chapter 5: Marketed Fetishism

Chapter 6: Language, Thought, and Economy

Chapter 7: Coldwar Cognition

The Beginnings of Ethno-Political Americanism

The Anti-Father Father: Ronald Reagan

Chapter 8: Anticommunism and Academia

Chapter 9: Anglocentrism

Martial Culture and the Modern Language Association of America

Chapter 10: From Economy to Identity: How Many Ends Does It Take to Make a Middle?

Conclusion

The Politics of Entertainment

Afterword: Sanders, Clinton, and Trump

References

O autorze

Thomas Paul Bonfiglio is Gaines Professor of Literature and Linguistics at the University of Richmond, USA. His publications include Why Is English Literature? Language and Letters for the Twenty-First Century (2013); Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker (2010); and Race and the Rise of Standard American (2002).

Blurb

This book synthesizes psychoanalytic and Marxist techniques in order to illuminate the resistance to a socialization of the American economy, the protectionist discourses of anomalous American capitalism, and the suppression of the capitalist welfare state. After the Second World War, Democrats and Republicans effectively eliminated the communist and socialist parties from the American political spectrum and suppressed their allied labor movements. The right-wing shift of both parties fabricated a false opposition of left and right that does not correspond to political oppositions in the industrialized democracies. Marxist perspectives can account for the massive inequality of the political economy, but they are insufficient for illuminating its preservation. Psychoanalysis is necessary in order to explain why Americans continue to vote within a two-party system that neglects the lower classes, and why the working class tends to vote against its own interests. The psychoanalytic techniques employed include doubling, repetition, displacement, condensation, inversion, denial, fetishizing, and cognitive repression. In examining the fixation upon the proxy binary of Democrat vs. Republican, which suppresses the true opposition of left vs. right and neutralizes alternatives, the work analyses numerous contemporary political issues through applications of Marxist psychoanalytic theory.