Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism

Benjamin Fong

Published by Columbia University Press 2016

Death and Mastery

Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism

Benjamin Fong

Volume 61 in the series New Directions in Critical Theory

https://doi.org/10.7312/fong17668

Overview
Contents

About this book

Fong reconstructs the psychoanalytic “foundation stone” of critical theory in an effort to once again think together the possibility of psychic and social transformation. Fong complicates the famous antagonism between Eros and the death drive in reference to a third term: the woefully undertheorized drive to mastery.

Author / Editor information

Benjamin Y. Fong is an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the Honors College of Arizona State University. His work has been published in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion), The Stone (New York Times), and the Philosophical Salon (Los Angeles Review of Books).

Reviews

Adam Phillips, author of Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst:
To the vexed question of the relationship of psychoanalysis to social theory Benjamin Fong brings a distinctive sensibility and tact. Avoiding the portentousness and unduly ambitious abstraction of this now overspecialized field, Fong has made the whole subject both newly intriguing, and wholly engaging.

Eric Santner, University of Chicago:
In this masterful and enlivening study of the ways in which the concepts of death and mastery have been elaborated in Freudian and post-Freudian social theory, Ben Fong has given us the means to think about human nature and human community now, under conditions of advanced capitalism, without succumbing to the scientism of the new neurobiology or to the social constructivism of recent historicist social and cultural theory. The argument turns on the ambiguity embedded in the notion of mastery: on the one hand, the capacity to engage creatively with the world, to master the tasks of living a historical form of life; on the other, the temptation to enslave, to compel others to exercise this competence in one's place. Fong is able to analyze with remarkable lucidity a complex array of individual and social phenomena by fleshing out the imbrications of these twinned responses to what Freud called the drives' demand for work. Fong makes abundantly clear that drive theory and social theory are strongest when thought together.

Mari Ruti, University of Toronto:
At various moments in Death and Mastery, the writing is so down to earth as to make the reader smile: it is wonderful to see academic ideas expressed so matter-of-factly, without the usual rhetorical acrobatics.

Noëlle McAfee, Emory University:
Benjamin Fong offers the most cogent and compelling case I've encountered in defense of the death drive, showing that it should not be equated with violence and destruction but, to the contrary, seen as a means for individuation and life.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction: In Defense of Drive Theory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I: Dream
1. Death, Mastery, and the Origins of Life Sigmund Freud’s Strange Proposal Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
Part II: Interpretation
2. Between Need and Dread Hans Loewald and the Primordial Density Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
3. Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis (Reprised) Jacques Lacan and the Genesis of Omnipotence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
Part III: Working Through
4. The Psyche in Late Capitalism I Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and the Crisis of Internalization Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
5. The Psyche in Late Capitalism II Herbert Marcuse and the Technological Lure Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	109
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	126
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 240

eBook

Published: November 8, 2016
ISBN: 9780231542616