Pure Excess

Reviews / Votes

Written from a psychoanalytic, largely Lacanian, perspective, [Pure Excess] provides an insightful account of how and why most individuals in the West live the way they do as they reproduce unawares the condition of their existence, which is not of their own making. Recommended. * Choice * For years McGowan has worked to understand the core mechanism of the libidinal economy that sustains capitalism. With Pure Excess, we finally have the definitive formulation. He condenses deep paradoxes: capitalism produces pure excess even when most people cannot satisfy their basic needs. This book is obligatory reading for everyone who wants to understand the global crisis we are in. -- Slavoj Zizek In his latest groundbreaking work, Todd McGowan provides a thrilling examination of the nature of excess in capitalism. Much more than a critical analysis of capitalism, this book also reveals the anticapitalist potential of art and the aesthetic form. -- Alenka Zupancic, author of <i>What IS Sex?</i> This crystalline study perfects the psychoanalytic critique of contemporary omnicrisis. As Todd McGowan builds a new analysis of the place of aesthetic form in a culture of excess, he shows how art's constraints model an excess attained through rather than despite lack, and thus educate anticapitalist desire. -- Anna Kornbluh, author of <i>Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism</i>