Confronting Desire: Psychoanalysis and International Development

ISBN: 1501751727

Author: Kapoor, Ilan

Condition: New

ReviewThis provocatively structured book queers the pursuit of happiness as capitalist development by lodging it in the Lacanian unconscious as read by Slavoj ?i?ek. Movements for change must take this into account, acknowledging their own enjoyment of/in the undertaking. Required reading. -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University, author of A Critique of Postcolonial ReasonThis innovative and audacious account brings a psychoanalytic lens to critically analyze the unspoken urges that underlie international development. Ilan Kapoor's shimmeringly insightful and truly ground breaking book alerts us to the unconscious impulses and desires that continue to influence contemporary development thinking and practice, offering a progressive future radical politics. -- Uma Kothari, University of Manchester, author of A Radical History of Development StudiesIlan Kapoor offers a unique and valuable contribution to current research, providing a comprehensive overview of the application of psychoanalytic theory to understand international development and its vicissitudes. His analysis is clear, cogent, and compellingly argued. -- Robert Fletcher, Wageningen University, author of Romancing the WildConfronting Desire is a major contribution that will have a significant impact on development studies, and global studies more generally, appealing to those studying and 'doing' development. Kapoor's ideas are among the most important in development thinking today. -- Gavin Fridell, Saint Mary's University, author of CoffeeThis book is a sheer joy to read and offers major contributions. It will make waves in scholarly circles. It is unique in its field insofar as it mobilizes contemporary psychoanalytic theory to understand development both in terms of its empirical manifestations and theoretical debates. -- Paul Kingsbury, Simon Fraser University, co-author of Psychoanalytic GeographiesProduct DescriptionBy applying psychoanalytic perspectives to key themes, concepts, and practices underlying the development enterprise, Confronting Desire offers a new way of analyzing the problems, challenges, and potentialities of international development. Ilan Kapoor makes a compelling case for examining development's unconscious desires and in the process inaugurates a new field of study: psychoanalytic development studies.Drawing from the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj iek, as well as from psychoanalytic postcolonial and feminist scholarship, Kapoor analyzes how development's unconscious desires "speak out," most often in excessive and unpredictable ways that contradict the outwardly rational declarations of its practitioners. He investigates development's many irrationalities-from obsessions about growth and poverty to the perverse seductions of racism and over-consumption. By deploying key psychoanalytic concepts-enjoyment, fantasy, antagonism, fetishism, envy, drive, perversion, and hysteria-Confronting Desire critically analyzes important issues in development-growth, poverty, inequality, participation, consumption, corruption, gender, "race," LGBTQ politics, universality, and revolution.Confronting Desire offers prescriptions for applying psychoanalysis to development theory and practice and demonstrates how psychoanalysis can provide fertile ground for radical politics and the transformation of international development.ReviewThis book is a sheer joy to read and offers major contributions. It will make waves in scholarly circles. It is unique in its field insofar as it mobilizes contemporary psychoanalytic theory to understand development both in terms of its empirical manifestations and theoretical debates. -- Paul Kingsbury, Simon Fraser University, co-author of Psychoanalytic GeographiesAbout the AuthorIlan Kapoor is Professor of Critical Development Studies at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, Toronto, and the author of The Postcolonial Politics of Development and Celebrity Huma