Decolonization and Psychoanalysis: The Underside of Signification

Decolonization and Psychoanalysis challenges conventional psychoanalytic assumptions by revisiting Lacan’s conceptualization of the materiality of speech through a decolonial lens.

Ahmad Fuad Rahmat explores how Lacan’s ideas about the symbolic order and its historical development are intertwined with decolonial assumptions, and proposes that critically considering these assumptions can pave the way for a decolonial psychoanalysis. The book begins with how Lacan uses Freud’s Jewishness as a marginalized perspective that reveals the excluded dimensions of signification within the symbolic order, and examines James Joyce’s anti-colonial politics and its significance for Lacan’s conception of the sinthome. The book includes a critique of Slavoj Žižek’s Eurocentric reading of Malcolm X as a foil with which colonized speech could be conceived as “symbolic dispossession”. Finally, it reframes the notion of “the gap” by understanding global capitalism as a mode of exchange to advocate for a decolonial psychoanalysis that focuses on the non-spaces of transmission as opposed to a like-for-like export of the clinic from the center to the periphery.

Decolonization and Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and to scholars of psychoanalytic studies, critical theory, and cultural studies.

Ahmad Fuad Rahmat is assistant professor of Media and Digital Cultures at Nottingham University in Malaysia. His work has been published in a wide variety of journals.