Online via Zoom
Analysing Capital: Marx, Freud, Lacan
Theoretical Explorations Module XX
Rohit Goel
12 June - 6 July 2024
Wednesdays and Saturdays
8 Sessions
INR 7,500 Participation
INR 10,000 Participation + Writing
6:30 PM IST - 8:30 PM IST
Worldwide Registration Open
Download Course Poster
About the Course
This course centres on the Lacanian-Freudian-Marxian philosopher Adrian Johnston’s just-released opus, INFINITE GREED: The INHUMAN SELFISHNESS of CAPITAL (Columbia University Press, 2024). The book's analysis is indispensable for scholars, journalists, activists, and artists keen on thinking, writing, and making patiently — to end the accelerating crises of capitalism: inequality, genocide, populism, patriarchy, ecocide… With equal clarity and sophistication, Johnston weaves together Marx’s three volumes of Capital and Freudo-Lacanian drive theory to overturn the arguments of both capitalism's neoliberal defenders (Milton Friedman, et al.) and liberal reformers (Thomas Piketty, et al.), in the service of establishing a truly just world. Each class session will entail a close reading and lecture/discussion of a chapter of Johnston’s book, including chapters from the original manuscript that were left out due to the book’s length.
About the book:
Selfishness is essential to capitalism—or so both advocates and opponents claim. In Infinite Greed, Adrian Johnston argues that this consensus is mistaken. Through a novel synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis, he reveals how the relentless pursuit of profits is not fundamentally animated by human acquisitiveness. Instead, capitalism’s strange “infinite greed” demands that individuals sacrifice their pleasures, their well-being, and even themselves to serve inhuman capital.
Johnston traces the mechanisms that compel capitalist subjects to obey the cold imperative to accumulate in perpetuity and without limits—and also without regard for the consequences for everyone and everything else. Facing crises such as spiraling wealth inequality and the profit-driven prospect of a looming ecological apocalypse, the rational self-interest of the majority would seem to dictate putting a stop to capitalist accumulation. By bringing together the Marxian critique of political economy with psychoanalytic metapsychology, Johnston shows why and how capitalism, rather than being responsive to people’s rationally selfish interests, disregards and overrides them instead.
About the Professor
Rohit Goel is Director/Professor of the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). He is the editor of Future Perfect: Catastrophe and Redemption in the Contemporary (Kaph 2023) and the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury 2019). Rohit has taught courses in critical theory, historiography, and politics at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Mumbai. He received the Fulbright IIE and Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowships to pursue years of Arabic language study in Syria and was awarded the Fulbright DDRA and Andrew C. Mellon Fellowship for PhD dissertation research in primary sources in Lebanon. He completed his BA from Harvard College and, as Harvard University’s Paul Williams Fellow to Emmanuel College, was granted an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge
Certificate
Students will receive a Certificate of Completion upon successful attendance of a course or a Certificate of Completion and Letter of Evaluation if they successfully attend and complete the final assignment. Those who complete three courses (attendance and writing) in the Theoretical Explorations track over two calendar years are eligible for a BICAR Diploma in Theoretical Explorations.
Refund Policy
We will refund your mode of payment — minus a 25% processing fee — if you choose not to take this course after the first session. Or, you can ‘roll over’ your balance to another or future BICAR course without a fee deduction.
Register
To register, we can facilitate two modes of payment — either a direct bank transfer to our Indian account or we also have a PayPal link: