Affective neuroscience, emotional regulation, and international relations

International relations (IR) has witnessed an emerging interest in neuroscience, particularly for its relevance to a now widespread scholarship on emotions. Contributing to this scholarship, this article draws on the subfields of affective neuroscience and neuropsychology, which remain largely unexplored in IR. Firstly, the article draws on affective neuroscience in illuminating affect's defining role in consciousness and omnipresence in social behavior, challenging the continuing elision of emotions in mainstream approaches. Secondly, it applies theories of depth neuropsychology, which suggest a neural predisposition originating in the brain's higher cortical regions to attenuate emotional arousal and limit affective consciousness. This predisposition works to preserve individuals' self-coherence, countering implicit assumptions about rationality and motivation within IR theory. Thirdly, it outlines three key implications for IR theory. It argues that affective neuroscience and neuropsychology offer a route towards deep theorizing of ontologies and motivations. It also leads to a reassessment of the social regulation of emotions, particularly as observed in institutions, including the state. It also suggests a productive engagement with constructivist and poststructuralist approaches by addressing the agency of the body in social relations. The article concludes by sketching the potential for a therapeutically-attuned approach to IR

Narcissistic rage and neoliberal reproduction

Combining political economy and depth psychology, this article seeks to elucidate the socio-psychical underpinnings of neoliberalism’s resilience following the global financial crisis. In explicating neoliberalism’s reproduction, the analysis employs self psychologist Heinz Kohut’s theorisation of narcissistic development. Kohut conceives narcissism as a normal condition driving self-formation, but claims that obstructions in its development result in impaired self-esteem and self-confidence, a lack of empathy and aggression against others and the self. The article argues that neoliberalism fosters and is reinforced by narcissistic configurations that impede the attainment of a more stable sense of self. The inability to attain narcissistic fulfilment through neoliberal sociality contributes to defensive and compensatory reactions that entrench neoliberalism’s logic and, through economic performativity, manifest in what Kohut termed narcissistic rage. As an exemplar of this phenomenon, the article examines the emergence of popular neoliberalism in the form of the Tea Party

Aesthetic international political economy

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Clickbait Capitalism: A Panel Discussion

The Centre for Capitalism Studies is pleased to welcome panellists Carolyn Biltoft (Graduate Institute Geneva), Earl Gammon (Sussex), Emily Rosamond (Goldsmiths) and Amin Samman (City). Chaired by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (CCS Director)

Clickbait capitalism: Economies of desire in the twenty-first century

Panel for 14th Annual Critical Finance Studies Conference Organiser • Amin Samman, City, University of London Chair • Elke Schwarz, Queen Mary University of London Panellists • Amin Samman, City, University of London • Earl Gammon, University of Sussex • Sandy Hager, City, University of London • Emily Rosamond, Goldsmiths, University of London Panel abstract The notion of ‘clickbait’ speaks to the intersection of money, technology, and desire, suggesting a cunning ruse to profit from unsavoury inclinations of one kind or another. This panel pursues the idea that the entire contemporary economy is just such a ruse; an elaborate exercise in psychological capture and release. Pushing beyond rationalist accounts of economic life, the papers presented here put psychoanalysis and political economy into conversation with the cutting edges of capitalist development. Perennial questions of death, sex, aggression, enjoyment, despair, hope, and revenge are followed onto the terrain of the contemporary, with discussion devoted to social media, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs. The result will be a unique and compelling portrait of the latest institutions to stage, channel, or reconfigure the psychic energies of political and economic life

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The psycho- and sociogenesis of neoliberalism

This analysis examines the psycho-social pressures that gave rise to neoliberal subjectivity in the 1970s, drawing insights from the work of Norbert Elias, Sigmund Freud and Georges Bataille. Specifically, it looks to new codes of shame regarding feelings of superiority that were developing with the civil and women’s rights movements as pivotal in neoliberalism’s ascendancy. These codes of shame heightened psychical tensions for the normalized Fordist subject by making taboo entrenched registers of social hierarchy. The transition to neoliberal subjectivity, with its emphasis on hyper-individualism and the increasing mediation of social relations by impersonal market forces, reflected a compensatory strategy for organizing selfhood. The neoliberal subject, while nominally adhering to notions of political equality, sublimated aggression through a form of economic sociality that reinforced historical inequalities. As the article concludes, neoliberalism is akin to a narcissistic neurosis, obstructing identification with others, and manifests itself in a dispassionate social destructiveness

Nature as adversary: the rise of modern economic conceptions of nature

This article problematizes the reliance of ecological economics on neo-classical economic analysis by revealing an adversarial conception of nature in modern economic ontology. It traces the rise in post-classical economics of this adversarial conception, which superseded the idea of a natural moral economy in classical political economy. The origins of this transformation in the conception of nature are located in the breakdown of the long-standing project of natural theology in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century, precipitated by the geological controversies of the 1820s and 1830s

Lineages of political economic subjectivity : Christian moral economy, technology and liberal narcissism in 19th century British social thought

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