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In this collection of new and previously
published essays, political theorist Isaac D. Balbus deepens
and extends the feminist neo-Kleinian account of sexual, political,
and technological domination he developed in his earlier works.
The first half of Mourning and Modernity responds to
Marxist, nonpsychoanalytic, feminist, and post-structuralist
criticisms of that psychoanalytic account. The second half
applies Kleinian theory to a number of salient topics, including:
the issue of reparations for slavery and racism, the fantasies
of omnipotence fostered by computer-mediated communication,
and the way in which deep ecology and 12-step recovery programs
contest omnipotence in the realms of production and consumption.
Balbus conceptualizes modernity as a manic
cultural defense against mourning the very losses it mandates
and as a source of reparative movements of mourning that challenge
its contemporary configuration. This argument allows Balbus
to transcend the tired debate between those scholars for whom
modernity is an unambiguous emancipation and those for whom
modernity is entirely bereft of emancipatory possibilities.
Mourning and Modernity thus renews the tradition of
critical cultural psychoanalysis that includes the works of
Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Christopher
Lasch, and Dorothy Dinnerstein, and will be particularly provocative
to readers who are familiar with that tradition as well as
anyone who is interested in the intersection of psychoanalysis
and social or political theory.
Isaac D. Balbus teaches social and
political theory at the University of Illinois at Chicago
and is the author of The Dialectics of Legal Repression,
Marxism and Domination, and Emotional Rescue: The Theory
and Practice of a Feminist Father.
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