Mourning and Modernity

Here Balbus (social and political theory, U. of Illinois at Chicago) builds on his earlier work in neo-Kleinian, feminist psychoanalytic assessments of sexual, political and technological domination, beginning by responding to his Marxist, nonpsychoanalytical feminist and post-structuralist critics in such topics as feminist mothering theory without Klein, patriarchial production in Marx, and gender identity after Butler. He then builds his cases in the contexts of a number of issues, including an essay on Walter Benjamin and the work of (counter) cultural mourning, the acts of mourning the movements of the 1960s, the psychodynamics of racial reparations, the approach of cyberspace, time-space compression and the "grandiose self," and finally a repudiation of the compulsive production and compulsive consumption of modern psycho-cultural life. Annotation 2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)