Enjoyment and Submission in Modern Fantasy [Hardcover]

This book reveals the workings of the bourgeois passion for submission in a variety of contemporary contexts. By (re)introducing the concept bourgeois as an analytical term and describing this contemporary subject as a psychic economy rather than just as a social class, Panu shows the intractability of contemporary forms of enjoyment and neoliberalisms periodic outbursts of aggressiveness to be connected by a recurrent circuit of trauma and anxiety originating in the bourgeois subjects difficult relationship with symbolic authority.

So far, most anticapitalist and decolonial struggles in the West have been hesitant when engaging with the issue of bourgeois enjoyment as the main source of capitalisms resilience. This exciting new work draws on an extensive range of theorists such as Butler, Copjec, }i~ek and Zupancic to emphasise the importance of psychological mechanisms irreducible to rationality or knowledge such as desire, enjoyment, and the obscure nature of selfhood in the reiteration of the current capitalist reality. 

Builds on the work of an extensive range of theorists to further the debate on the role of bourgeois enjoyment 

Highlights the often forgotten significance of desire as an important force which goes against traditional understandings of capitalism

(Re)introduces bourgeois as an important analytic term within the field of psychology