Desire's Politics: Félix Guattari and the Renewal of the Psychoanalytic Left

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Herzog

The work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is experiencing a considerable revival in the early twenty-first century, among queer, disability, economic justice, and environmental activists, but also among psychoanalysts across a global geographical range. This essay revisits the key coauthored text of Anti-Oedipus (1972) – with its innovative mix of ideas taken from the work of Wilhelm Reich, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, and Frantz Fanon – as well as an array of Guattari's subsequent writings in order to make an argument for Guattari as not just a critic of stultifying existing forms of psychoanalysis but also as a highly creative revitalizer of the psychoanalytic project. This project was, under the impact not least of the sexual revolution, feminism, and gay rights as well as New Left, anticolonial, and antiwar activism, undergoing substantial transformation as the locus of intensive productivity was shifting from the US to Western Europe and Latin America.

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-300
Author(s):  
Michael De Groot

This article contends that Western Europe played a crucial and overlooked role in the collapse of Bretton Woods. Most scholars highlight the role of the United States, focusing on the impact of US balance of payments deficits, Washington’s inability to manage inflation, the weakness of the US dollar, and American domestic politics. Drawing on archival research in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, this article argues that Western European decisions to float their currencies at various points from 1969 to 1973 undermined the fixed exchange rate system. The British, Dutch, and West Germans opted to float their currencies as a means of protecting against imported inflation or protecting their reserve assets, but each float reinforced speculators’ expectations that governments would break from their fixed parities. The acceleration of financial globalization and the expansion of the Euromarkets in the 1960s made Bretton Woods increasingly difficult to defend.


Author(s):  
Dennis C. Spies

In the final step of analysis, the insights from the previous chapters are conflated into one analysis of the effect(s) of immigration on welfare spending in Western Europe. The general finding is that the impact of immigration is highly conditional and is moderated by the insurance area, the program-specific level of middle-class involvement, the government coalition, or a combination of these variables. If the conditions resemble those of the US, immigration does decrease welfare spending. However, for most of Western Europe, these conflict-laden conditions are not fulfilled and, in many cases, immigration does not lead to budget cuts. The only exception to this general rule is unemployment insurance (and probably, social assistance) where immigration does indeed depress spending. With regard to political effects, the models show that Extreme Right Parties (ERPs) are especially unreliable partners in coalitions inclined to welfare state retrenchment.


1996 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
J Farquharson

The object of this article is to examine the impact of the Marshall Plan (ERP) on the strategy of reparations from Germany that was pursued by the British government in the postwar era. In order to put this into some kind of context it will first be necessary to provide a brief survey of the mechanism of reparations and then of the rationale behind the system of financial assistance afforded by the USA to Western Europe known as Marshall Aid (its title derived from the US Secretary of State, George Marshall, who pioneered the scheme). The idea of extracting some form of compensation from Germany, to be apportioned among the victors, came to be debated in Whitehall during hostilities, but little attempt was made to coordinate plans among the Allies until the conference at Yalta in February 1945. No consensus could be attained there among the participants (the UK, the USA and the USSR). Stalin lodged a claim for $10 billion of reparations in ten years, which entailed that the Soviet Union would be allocated half of all payments from Germany. The lack of assent from the Western powers led to a new body, the Allied Reparations Commission (ARC), being convened in Moscow, which also failed to reach a conclusion. Reparations were then settled at the Potsdam Conference between the same three powers in July–August 1945.


1997 ◽  
pp. 133-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elina Haavio-Mannila ◽  
Anna Rotkirch

This article is to our knowledge the first empirical comparison of sexual behavior in Eastern and Western Europe. The timing of some sexual life events, sexual behavior patterns, and sexual satisfaction will be compared on the basis of survey data and sexual autobiographies from urban Finland and St. Petersburg (former Leningrad) in Russia. We were interested in the impact of the so-called sexual revolution taking place in public life in different decades - in Western Europe and Finland in the 1960s. in Russia in the late 1980s. We assumed that this difference would appear as country differences in "traditional” vs. “liberated” sexual behavior, and especially in the sexual satisfaction of women. This hypothesis proved generally to be true, but with several important modifications. The sexual behavior and attitudes in St. Petersburg are shown to have liberalized about 15 years later than in Finnish towns. While the sexual behavior of men and women has become almost similar in Finland, the trend towards equalization of sexual life is not as clear in Russia. Divorce and parallel relationships are more common in Russia, while the number of sexual partners and overall sexual satisfaction is higher in Finland. Country, gender, and generation are the main independent variables of the statistical elaborations. The biographical material is used for exemplifying and interpretative purposes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1173-1187
Author(s):  
John Brown

This article argues that multipronged de-democratization processes over the course of neoliberal projects fostered unstable democratic equilibria in Western and Latin American democracies, opening space for populist leaders and parties to emerge. To comprehend the variation in the nature of populists that gained support, the form of neoliberalization process in each region and the consequent impacts on traditional party systems is accounted for. Moreover, the impact of region-specific factors on populist forms such as economic crises, immigration levels, and the existence of progressive social movements are accounted for. The conflux of neoliberal de-democratization, austerity, and immigration fostered a conservative nativist-populism in Western cases. In Latin America, neoliberal de-democratization and austerity, in the presence of powerful popular movements, witnessed the emergence of a more progressive populism.


2015 ◽  
pp. 30-53
Author(s):  
V. Popov

This paper examines the trajectory of growth in the Global South. Before the 1500s all countries were roughly at the same level of development, but from the 1500s Western countries started to grow faster than the rest of the world and PPP GDP per capita by 1950 in the US, the richest Western nation, was nearly 5 times higher than the world average and 2 times higher than in Western Europe. Since 1950 this ratio stabilized - not only Western Europe and Japan improved their relative standing in per capita income versus the US, but also East Asia, South Asia and some developing countries in other regions started to bridge the gap with the West. After nearly half of the millennium of growing economic divergence, the world seems to have entered the era of convergence. The factors behind these trends are analyzed; implications for the future and possible scenarios are considered.


2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carina Van Rooyen ◽  
Ruth Stewart ◽  
Thea De Wet

Big international development donors such as the UK’s Department for International Development and USAID have recently started using systematic review as a methodology to assess the effectiveness of various development interventions to help them decide what is the ‘best’ intervention to spend money on. Such an approach to evidence-based decision-making has long been practiced in the health sector in the US, UK, and elsewhere but it is relatively new in the development field. In this article we use the case of a systematic review of the impact of microfinance on the poor in sub-Saharan African to indicate how systematic review as a methodology can be used to assess the impact of specific development interventions.


1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-217
Author(s):  
Mir Annice Mahmood

Foreign aid has been the subject of much examination and research ever since it entered the economic armamentarium approximately 45 years ago. This was the time when the Second World War had successfully ended for the Allies in the defeat of Germany and Japan. However, a new enemy, the Soviet Union, had materialized at the end of the conflict. To counter the threat from the East, the United States undertook the implementation of the Marshal Plan, which was extremely successful in rebuilding and revitalizing a shattered Western Europe. Aid had made its impact. The book under review is by three well-known economists and is the outcome of a study sponsored by the Department of State and the United States Agency for International Development. The major objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of assistance, i.e., aid, on economic development. This evaluation however, was to be based on the existing literature on the subject. The book has five major parts: Part One deals with development thought and development assistance; Part Two looks at the relationship between donors and recipients; Part Three evaluates the use of aid by sector; Part Four presents country case-studies; and Part Five synthesizes the lessons from development assistance. Part One of the book is very informative in that it summarises very concisely the theoretical underpinnings of the aid process. In the beginning, aid was thought to be the answer to underdevelopment which could be achieved by a transfer of capital from the rich to the poor. This approach, however, did not succeed as it was simplistic. Capital transfers were not sufficient in themselves to bring about development, as research in this area came to reveal. The development process is a complicated one, with inputs from all sectors of the economy. Thus, it came to be recognized that factors such as low literacy rates, poor health facilities, and lack of social infrastructure are also responsible for economic backwardness. Part One of the book, therefore, sums up appropriately the various trends in development thought. This is important because the book deals primarily with the issue of the effectiveness of aid as a catalyst to further economic development.


Author(s):  
Aref Emamian

This study examines the impact of monetary and fiscal policies on the stock market in the United States (US), were used. By employing the method of Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) developed by Pesaran et al. (2001). Annual data from the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, from 1986 to 2017 pertaining to the American economy, the results show that both policies play a significant role in the stock market. We find a significant positive effect of real Gross Domestic Product and the interest rate on the US stock market in the long run and significant negative relationship effect of Consumer Price Index (CPI) and broad money on the US stock market both in the short run and long run. On the other hand, this study only could support the significant positive impact of tax revenue and significant negative impact of real effective exchange rate on the US stock market in the short run while in the long run are insignificant. Keywords: ARDL, monetary policy, fiscal policy, stock market, United States


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