Download ebook The Currency of Desire : Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution

The Currency of Desire : Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution.cDavid Bennett

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Author: David Bennett
Number of Pages: 256 pages
Published Date: 12 Sep 2016
Publisher: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd
Publication Country: London, United Kingdom
Language: none
ISBN: 9781907103575
Download Link: the currency of desire libidinal economy, psychoanalysis and sexual revolution
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The language of money has informed medical, psychological and political theories of sexual desire for at least 300 years. Desire, figured as libidinal energy, represented potential work-power and spending-power and hence a form of personal 'capital', an economic resource for both the individual and the collectivity. This book explores how this view of desire - formalised by Freud as 'the economics of the libido' - has historically shaped understandings of a sex-money nexus across disciplines and across genres. The Currency of Desire investigates how changing psychological, commercial and political prescriptions for the 'saving', 'investing' or 'spending' of desire have related to developments in economic theory proper. It examines, among other things, the tensions between classical political economy's 'producer ethic' and the 'consumer ethic', Keynesianism's doctrine of economic health through spending rather than saving, communism's replacement of a market economy with a command economy, and neoliberalism's faith in the deregulated market as the paradigm of a free society. The book argues that any understanding of 'the libidinal economy' must take account of history.It shows that the business of eroticising the economy has a historical reach with thinkers as disparate as Mandeville, Tissot, Fourier, Parent-Duchatelet, Marx, Freud, Gandhi, Reich, Marcuse and Dichter making contributions; it explores the way discourses of desire have shaped understandings of the sex-money nexus during three centuries of medical, psychological, political and erotic writing on topics ranging from onanism to advertising, psychoanalysis to shopping, prostitution to revolutionary politics. This is a fundamentally interdisciplinary study, not just in the sense that it draws variously on psychology, economics, literary criticism, philosophy and social theory for its analyses, but also in the sense that it presents an 'archaeology' of the interaction of those fields.The Currency of Desire traces the history of promiscuous exchanges/intercourse between the languages of money and sex, or political economy and sexual psychology, since the early eighteenth century, demonstrating how both 'scientific' and popular theories of sexual psychology have relied, since the beginnings of consumer culture, on a shifting complex of economic models and metaphors to explain the nature of desire and its 'value' to both the self and society.

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