The Logic of Disavowal in the Production of Subjectivities in the Contemporary World

Abstract

Drawing together Freud, Marx and a critique of contemporary capitalism, here specifically in the form of neoliberalism, Izabel Szpacenkopf explores the fetishism, cynicism and self-objectification evident in today’s consumer culture. If neoliberalism has won legitimacy under the concept of freedom, it is a freedom that refers to capital not to people. Using both critical theory and psychoanalysis Szpacenkjopf suggests that self-reification and competitiveness, which belie a prior self-acceptance, give rise to a sense of the self as object, as commodity. In this neoliberal era, in which performance is fetishized and individual differences are disavowed, self-reification can be seen as “a subjective attempt to seek jouissance as the object of the Other, guaranteed through performance”. Narcissistic suffering is thereby exacerbated, the subjective consequences of which can be heard in the psychoanalytic clinic.