What “Drives” Capitalist Development?

This chapter highlights the importance of (unconscious) social passions in the socioeconomic system so central to development — capitalism. It focuses on the Lacanian notion of “drive,” a compulsion that stems from our ontological loss as linguistic beings, to suggest that capitalist development is propelled by an accumulation drive. Unlike desire, which capitalism manipulates at the level of consumption, drive involves the more fundamental compulsion to repeat endlessly, which manifests as the circular drive to accumulate for the sake of accumulation. In late capitalism, such a drive has resulted in a crisis of overaccumulation, which results in imperialism and “accumulation by dispossession,” especially in the global South. The capitalist development drive thus turns crisis into triumph, generating enjoyment, not from success, but from repeated failure. It is this libidinal kick (jouissance) which accompanies drive that helps explain capitalism's continued obstinacy and endurance. The chapter then reflects on the possibilities of disrupting capitalist development through drive.

Heidegger and the Verbal Accomplices of Violence

This chapter considers the philosophical custodian of National Socialist thought. It argues that one would be hard put to find any such thing; rather, it is still something in the making, spawned from the intellectual potential of a life that reveals the mass-produced article in all its organic forms. It has long been evident that the new German book trade has nothing worthwhile to offer, either in its sales pitch or in its window displays: nothing but “action” and “will,” “blood and soil”—every catchphrase a hand grenade, a direct hit by authors whose fixed stare is indistinguishable from that of their readers; the bleak optimism of a generation that has heard something about “having looked death in the eye” and hence feels a compulsion to repeat this while terrorising its fellow men. The chapter asserts that these are romanticised white-collar projects for wars of liberation designed to enslave others. And now people are trying their hand at converting German philosophy into an introductory course on the “Hitler Idea.”

On Womanly Nihilism

This essay borrows the term “womanly nihilism” from an antifeminist misreading of Simone de Beauvoir in order to better understand her politics and philosophy and rethink her legacy for contemporary feminism. Through a close reading of The Ethics of Ambiguity and key chapters from The Second Sex, I argue that Beauvoir shares a critique of nihilism, though she gives the term more analytic precision and political purchase than those who would use the term against her. For Beauvoir, womanly nihilism—or the feminine will to nothingness—is paradoxically expressed in the desire for everything, or “having it all.” Wanting it all, says Beauvoir, must be considered in connection with the conditions under which women are permitted too little. She shows how the desire for all is a nihilistic compulsion to repeat and re-create the conditions of one’s injury, exclusion, and oppression. As corporate feminist icons encourage women to lean in, as “having it all” becomes the popular slogan for the feminism of the professional class, Beauvoir’s portrait of womanly nihilism provides an occasion to take stock of her lasting significance for us.

Repetition and Poetic Process: Bishop’s Nagging Thoughts

This chapter raises important issues about Bishop’s aesthetic response to a double, but crucially different set of traumas during infancy (death of her father and ‘disappearance’ of her mother) and argues that repetition in Bishop’s writing signals specific anxieties about loss. The compulsion to repeat, Freud writes, takes ‘the place of the impulse to remember’. Christopher Bollas’ concept of the ‘unthought known’ is applied to consider Bishop’s negotiation with both what is known and yet cannot be spoken. Drawing closely on Bishop’s original drafts, this chapter offers a close analysis of the poem ‘Questions of Travel’ to think about its wider importance as the title of Bishop’s 1965 volume. In paying particular attention to the way in which the volume’s chronological development can be read in counterpoint to its final order on publication, I argue that in the volume Bishop finds an important aesthetic resolution to set against a biographical narrative.

In the shadow of Apartheid: intergenerational transmission of Black parental trauma as it emerges in the analytical space of inter-racial subjectivities

Using the construct of projective identification and integrating it with the body of literature on intergenerational transmission of unsymbolized parental trauma, I describe the case of an adult black South African woman called Sibulelo. It is suggested that Sibulelo has unconsciously identified with the disavowed parents and grandparents trauma that they suffered as a result of the system of Apartheid. Such trauma is expressed through her feelings of being dis-located in time and space, as if she is living outside of herself, unplugged from life, and living someone else’s life. The paper details the unfolding therapeutic process in relation to my whiteness in the context of her blackness. This brings into sharp focus an exploration of black-white racialized transference-counter-transference matrix in the context of intergenerational trauma. It is a reflective paper and opens up my own counter-transference, thus foregrounding the notion of therapeutic inter-subjectivity. A further contribution to psychoanalytic theory concerns the role of recognition and being seen as a powerful process in facilitating the symbolization of trauma. In addition, if there is no interruption of the cycles of intergenerational trauma, and therefore no symbolization, it becomes an unconscious familial compulsion to repeat. Moreover, this therapy case highlights the idea that as a traumatised family living within a bruised culture of intergenerational transmission of trauma, such repetition of trauma becomes a cultural compulsion to repeat what has not been spoken or named.