Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies

Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She is the author of Žižek’s Politics, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy, and Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace.

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Post-Politics and Left Victory 11. Technology: The Promises of Communicative Capitalism 192. Free Trade: The Neoliberal Fantasy 493. Democracy: A Knot of Hope and Despair 754. Resolve: Speaking of Evil 955. Ethics: Left Responsiveness and Retreat 1236. Certainty: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories and Psychosis 145Notes 177Bibliography 195Index 203

“Jodi Dean provides an incredibly lucid explanation of what neoliberalism has been both in policy terms and collective fantasies of the relation of markets to freedom. But the really threatening Big Other in this book is not neoliberal ideology, but the failed and flawed leftist will that concedes too much power and unity to neoliberalism. This is a frank polemic that will stimulate many arguments about the past and future of critical theory and democratic politics in the United States.”-Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship “Jodi Dean’s new book provides what we have all been waiting for: the authentic theoretical analysis of how ideology functions in today’s global capitalism. Her diagnosis of ‘communicative capitalism’ discloses how our ‘really-existing democracies’ curtail prospects of radical emancipatory politics. Dean demonstrates this status of democracy as a political fantasy not through cheap pseudo-Marxist denunciations, but through a detailed examination of social, symbolic, and libidinal mechanisms and practices. To anyone who continues to dwell in illusions about liberal democracy, one should simply say: ‘Hey, didn’t you read Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies?’”-Slavoj Zizek, Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia “In Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Jodi Dean pulls few punches in her critique of the American Left, for both its complacency and its limited capacity to (or even lack of awareness of the need to) offer a stand of political resistance to power. . . . Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies is not, however, merely a critique of the US Left; it is also a powerful demolition of its claims for a collective existence.” - David Chandler (Radical Philosophy) ‘[A] provocative examination of contemporary Left politics. . . . The complex ideas of poststructuralist thinkers such as Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek figure prominently in her analysis. As in her earlier work, however, Dean is able to relate the value of such thinkers in understanding contemporary events with unique lucidity and clarity. . . . [A]n important, worthwhile, and entertaining contribution to discussions of radical alternatives to current political realities. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students, and above.” - R. W. Glover (Choice) “Dean’s [text] is stimulating in its ability to offer an alternative view of how neoliberalism achieved apparent invincibility. The work offers a challenge to leftists to produce not only some new, radical ideas but to unite and be heard once more.” - Lucy Welsh (Feminist Legal Studies)