Confronting Desire: Psychoanalysis and International Development

By applying psychoanalytic perspectives to key themes, concepts, and practices underlying the development enterprise, Confronting Desire offers a new way of analyzing the problems, challenges, and potentialities of international development. Ilan Kapoor makes a compelling case for examining development's unconscious desires and in the process inaugurates a new field of study: psychoanalytic development studies.

Drawing from the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, as well as from psychoanalytic postcolonial and feminist scholarship, Kapoor analyzes how development's unconscious desires "speak out," most often in excessive and unpredictable ways that contradict the outwardly rational declarations of its practitioners. He investigates development's many irrationalities―from obsessions about growth and poverty to the perverse seductions of racism and over-consumption. By deploying key psychoanalytic concepts―enjoyment, fantasy, antagonism, fetishism, envy, drive, perversion, and hysteria―Confronting Desire critically analyzes important issues in development―growth, poverty, inequality, participation, consumption, corruption, gender, "race," LGBTQ politics, universality, and revolution.

Confronting Desire offers prescriptions for applying psychoanalysis to development theory and practice and demonstrates how psychoanalysis can provide fertile ground for radical politics and the transformation of international development.

Ilan Kapoor is Professor of Critical Development Studies at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, Toronto, and the author of The Postcolonial Politics of Development and Celebrity Humanitarianism. Follow him on X @ilankapoor.