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Published online: 13 September 2024
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024
This excellent and timely book argues for the necessity of a psychoanalytically inflected approach to the study of international political economy (IPE) - an approach that the authors call global libidinal economy (GLE). The readers of this journal could be forgiven for never having heard of IPE, a subdivision of international relations that explores economic power in a globalised world, and that typically lags a decade or two behind other disciplines in its engagement with the latest developments in critical theory. It has therefore taken four scholars from other disciplines - all with long experience of deploying the psychoanalytic critique of ideology in their own fields - to finally take pity on IPE and expose it to the kind of ruthless Lacanian critique for which it has long been unconsciously begging.
Global Libidinal Economy approaches this task in a systematic manner, patiently demonstrating the pertinence of a psychoanalytic perspective for several central themes of IPE enquiry: production, consumption, informality, trade, financialisation, ecology and the state - each of which provides the focus of a chapter of the book. The authors suggest that “conventional IPE”, which is the central target of their critique, is comprised of neoclassical approaches on one hand and Marxist approaches on the other. Neoclassical IPE rests on the assumed human nature of homo economicus, the utility maximising individual of neoliberal ideology. GLE replaces this mythical hyperrational figure with the divided and decidedly irrational subject of Lacanian theory, enslaved by our repeatedly frustrated desire for the phantasmatic lost object, and driven by our endless fruitless quest for a fuller jouissance.
Like Marxist IPE - and in marked contrast to neoclassical IPE - GLE insists on the irrationality of global capitalism as the central force that is blindly driving the intern