Lacan and Capitalist Discourse ∙ Neoliberalism and Ideology

Jorge Alemán, Routledge Focus, 2024 ∙ Translated from Spanish by Daniel Runnels

“Jorge Alemán brings together the best of psychoanalytic theory and the best of

socio-economic analysis, and the mixture is explosive. He makes it clear that, in

today’s capitalism, ideology is not a ‘superstructure’ elevated above economy but

an integral part of economic reproduction itself. His clearly written book should be

an obligatory reading for all of us who want to orient ourselves in the mess we are

in today. It’s as simple as that.”

Slavoj Zizek, Professor, European Graduate School;

International Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities,

Birkbeck College, University of London; senior researcher,

Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

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“Jorge Alemán is the most original proponent of what in Argentina today we might

call the school of Lacano-Althusserianism to supplement and bring up to date

the older paradigm of Freudo-Marxism. In this eminently readable book, he puts

notions of fantasy, ideology, and subjectivity to the test of our time to locate the

prospects for a renewal of the emancipatory Left.”

Bruno Bosteels, Professor and Chair, Department

of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and Professor,

Institute for Comparative Literature and Society,

Columbia University

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“In Santiago de Chile, during Sebastián Piñera’s presidency, a taxi driver of Mapuche

descent pointed to La Moneda and pridefully affirmed to me: ‘I’m an entrepreneur

just like him!’ In this book, Alemán, the most brilliant and influential Spanishspeaking Lacanian Left thinker, convincingly analyzes such a world-encompassing

neoliberal production of ‘subjectivity’ in the light of Lacan’s concept of ‘capitalist

discourse’ and intensely invites us to invent new emancipatory projects by thinking

from the psychoanalytic ontology of the absolute difference structurally constitutive

to any ‘subject,’ that is, to each and every one of the speaking, sexuated and mortal

beings.”

Jun Fujita Hirose, author, ¿Cómo imponer un límite

absoluto al capitalismo? Filosofía política de Deleuze y Guattari

(How to Put an Absolute Limit to Capitalism? The Political

Philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari)