Decolonization and Psychoanalysis

Decolonization and Psychoanalysis challenges traditional psychoanalytic frameworks by revisiting Lacan's conceptualization of the materiality of speech through a decolonial lens.

Decolonization and Psychoanalysis challenges conventional psychoanalytic assumptions by revisiting Lacan's conceptualization of the materiality of speech through a decolonial lens.

Ahmad Fuad Rahmat explores how Lacan's ideas about the symbolic order and its historical development are intertwined with decolonial assumptions, and proposes that critically considering these assumptions can pave the way for a decolonial psychoanalysis. The book begins with how Lacan uses Freud's Jewishness as a marginalized perspective that reveals the excluded dimensions of signification within the symbolic order, and examines James Joyce's anti-colonial politics and its significance for Lacan's conception of the sinthome. The book includes a critique of Slavoj Zizek's Eurocentric reading of Malcolm X as a foil with which colonized speech could be conceived as "symbolic dispossession". Finally, it reframes the notion of "the gap" by understanding global capitalism as a mode of exchange to advocate for a decolonial psychoanalysis that focuses on the non-spaces of transmission as opposed to a like-for-like export of the clinic from the center to the periphery.

Decolonization and Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and to scholars of psychoanalytic studies, critical theory, and cultural studies.

Autorentext

Ahmad Fuad Rahmat is assistant professor of Media and Digital Cultures at Nottingham University in Malaysia. His work has been published in a wide variety of journals.

Klappentext

Decolonization and Psychoanalysis challenges traditional psychoanalytic frameworks by revisiting Lacan's conceptualization of the materiality of speech through a decolonial lens.

Inhalt

Series editor preface

Introduction: The materiality of language and the politics of the untranslatable

Chapter 1: The unconscious is structured like the unlanguaged: The colonized and the traces of signification

Chapter 2: Transmission or defamiliarization? Savoir-faire and the two impossibilities in Lacan's decolonial unconscious

Chapter 3: 'Turn to Allah, Pray to the East:' Malcolm X and symbolic dispossession

Chapter 4: Where do gaps come from? Psychoanalysis in non-spaces

Conclusion.