Global Libidinal Economy

This is the first book to examine global political economy from a psychoanalytic perspective. It claims that the libidinal—the site of unconscious desire—plays not a supplementary or trivial, but a constitutive role in global political economy. Consumption, for example, is not simply a way of satisfying a material or biological need but a doomed attempt at soothing our deeply held sense of loss; and capital is not just a means to material growth and prosperity but is invested with "drive" that seduces, beguiles, and manipulates in the service of unending accumulation. Thus, in contrast to political economy, which assumes a rational subject, libidinal economy is founded on the notion of a desiring subject, who obeys a logic not of good sense or self-interest but profligacy and irrationality. By applying a psychoanalytic lens, Global Libidinal Economy thereby seeks to uncover the unconscious excesses and antagonisms emergent in such key political economy categories as "production," "trade," and "ecology," while also bringing out significant contemporary themes relating to "gender" and "race."

Is regarded as the most important response to the philosophies of desire, as expounded by thinkers such as de Sade, Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari. It is a major work not only of philosophy, but of sexual politics, semiotics and literary theory, that signals the passage to postmodern philosophy.

This book focuses on the role of translation in a globalising world. It presents a series of case studies that explore the ways in which translation is subject to ideology and power play across diverging domains and genres. Broadly based on a discussion of 'translation and the economies of power', the chapters examine an array of contextual and textual factors, ranging from global, regional and institutional power relations to the linguistic, stylistic and rhetorical implications of translation decisions. The book maps the multiple ways in which power relations and ideological positions affect cross-cultural communication, with special reference to repressive practices in history, translation policies, media power and commercial hegemonies. It concludes that future translation research will benefit from a more sustained emphasis on the power of technology and economic capital.

This edited volume brings together leading scholars to debate the promises of poststructural politics within the study of the International Political Economy (IPE). The volume offers a sustained theoretical dialogue on the meaning of discourse, identity, and representation for practices of political economy.

This volume considers the ways in which educational research is being shaped by policy across the globe. Policy effects on research are increasingly influential, as policies in and beyond education drive the formation of a knowledge-based economy by supporting increased international competitiveness through more effective, evidence-based interventions in schooling, education and training systems. What consequences does this increased steering have for research in education? How do transnational agencies make their influence felt on educational research? How do national systems and traditions of educational research - and relations with policy - respond to these new pressures? What effects does it have on the quality of research and on the freedom of researchers to pursue their own agendas? The 2006 volume of the World Yearbook of Education explores these issues, focusing on three key themes: globalising policy and research in education steering education research in national contexts global-local politics of education research. The 2006 volume has a truly global reach, incorporating transnational policy perspectives from the OECD and the European Commission, alongside national cases from across the world in contrasting contexts that include North and South America, Canada, France, Singapore, China, Russia and New Zealand. The range of contributions reflect how pervasive these developments are, how much is new in this situation and to what extent evidence-based policy pressures on research in education build on past relationships between education and policy. This book considers the impact of the steering processes on the work and identities of individual researchers and considers how research can be organised to play a more active role in the politics of the knowledge economy and learning society.

This study of postsocialist China explores the development of a Chinese consumer culture in the 1990s with a special focus on advertising and shifting ideals on female beauty. On an analytical level it is an investigation into Chinese nationalism that demonstrates how the desire for recognition as a powerful nation is linked to anxieties about Chinese femininity. The book is also, on a theoretical level, about the libidinal economy of an imaginary “China.” In other words it attempts to unravel the sexuality of geopolitics by describing the association between femininity and China in popular culture and nationalist discourse. In addition to advertisements, political writings, plays, and films, the archive for this inquiry consists of fieldwork observations and interviews. The Libidinal Economy of China engages a range of post-colonial and psychoanalytically informed thinkers in a truly cross disciplinary study. Lacanian theories on hysteria, femininity, and narcissism are applied in the international domain of geopolitics to formulate a general theory on China’s relationship to the West. David Eng and Homi Bhabha are employed for discussing racial fetishism in contemporary China, while Slavoj Žižek’s ideas on violence and the Other are engaged in explaining the emotional dimension of national identification. The study concludes that China and the New Chinese Nationalism is firmly under the gaze of a Western Other analogous to a male gaze. That Other rules the libidinal economy of consumer culture, which explains China’s recurring history of wanting to emulate and catch up with the West while simultaneously reacting to such an attained intimacy with castration anxiety and aggressive hysteria.

This is a philosophical development of the Freudian concept of libidinal economy and one of Lyotard's most important works. In part a response to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (English translation Athlone, 1984), it can also be seen as culminating a line of modern thought ranging from de Sade, Nietzsche and Bataille, to Deleuze, Klossowski, Irigaray and Cixous. It is thus important in the context of modern French philosophy, and also in its relevance to contemporary thinking on a broad range of questions, including sexual politics, semiotics and literary studies.

Global Political Economy (GPE) is a broad and varied field of study and draws insight from a great number of fields and approaches. One of the serious problems confronting academics and students is the sheer mass of theories and debates in the field. This textbook provides up-to-date summaries of the debates and approaches that are currently at the forefront of both European and American GPE. This new revised and expanded second edition contains updated versions of most of the original chapters. In addition, there is a new section entitled ‘Emerging issues in contemporary Global Political Economy (GPE)’ and six new chapters. The second edition is structured around three themes: Part I focuses on the six central concepts of GPE: state, firm, power, labour, finance and globalization. Each one of them has been increasingly subjected to a rigorous and critical evaluation in recent scholarship. Part II covers a select number of theories and debates currently at the forefront of GPE: game theory; behavioural economics; neo-, sociological and evolutionary institutionalism; neo-Marxism; development and post-development; libidinal economies; and economic constructivism. Part III, which is new to this edition, is entitled ‘Emerging issues in contemporary Global Political Economy (GPE)’ and focuses on war, state and International Political Economy (IPE); race, gender and culture; environmental politics; and the rise of China. This is essential reading for all serious scholars and advanced students of IPE.