Duhovi kapitalizma i mjere štednje
SPIRITS OF CAPITALISM AND AUSTERITY

Summary/Abstract: Austerity has in recent years become established as the European response to crisis. The necessity of fiscal consolidation is often expressed with a vocabulary evocative of guilt and imagined pleasure. It should therefore not surprise us that austerity recently became subject to Lacanian psychoanalysis, building on Todd McGowan’s thesis on the transition from the society of prohibition to the society of commanded enjoyment. The current literature recognizes the dichotomy of spirits of capitalism: the first, ascetic and thrifty spirit demanding private sacrifice and the second, consumer spirit demanding specifically private enjoyment in the name of social duty. These spirits of capitalism are strategies for dealing with the loss of jouissance necessitated by the acceptance of symbolic order through socialization. The Phallic fantasy of full, uncastrated enjoyment is channelled through the strategy of deferral, aiming for full enjoyment in undetermined future (first spirit) or the repetitive attempt of immediate fulfilment (second spirit). Author supplements the existing argument in two crucial ways. Firstly, he traces the ways in which spirits of capitalism are mirrored in the changing positions of the political-economic mainstream. Secondly, using Arrighi’s analysis of systemic cycles of accumulation, the author offers an additional structural component to the spirits of capitalism pendulum.

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