PULSION

Frédéric Lordon et Sandra Lucbert

La Découverte, 608 pages, 2025

Why you should look at it:

√ A leading economist-philosopher and a brilliant contemporary novelist team up to revisit Freud and Lacan in light of Spinoza.

√ The first major return to the ideas of Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard, rethinking how modern capitalism and fascism weaponize human desire

√A book with multiple distinct voices translating complex theory into a series of sharp, urgent insights.

                                       ***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE HERE***

A mainstay of intellectual debate up to the 1970s, psychoanalysis has gradually been sidelined, in no small part due to what many have perceived as its hermetic, dogmatic, and at times reactionary tendencies. Indeed, while psychoanalysis aimed to be a universal science, it ultimately only explained the psychology of a specific place and time. Its claim to universality was heavily biased toward the patriarchal West. Yet with the marginalization of psychoanalysis, pulsion vanished from discourse. In reality, it has never stopped permeating social formations and their relationships. Between rampant capitalism and the return of fascism, here it is once again, saturating the political landscape - and certainly not for the better.

Recently, however, a renewed interest seems to be emerging.  In this revitalized context, Frédéric Lordon and Sandra Lucbert daringly seek to reclaim the entire conceptual apparatus, of psychoanalysis,  offering an innovative reinterpretation of the unconscious. To overcome the discipline’s undeserved discredit and restore meaning to concepts that have been stripped of their substance, the authors draw on the deep affinities between psychoanalysis and Spinozism (such as the critique of free will and the study of the movements of the soul).

Not least, narrative plays a key role in Pulsion.  With a unique freedom of tone and approach, the book chronicles the adventures of a generic human named Modus, from the trauma of birth to the discovery of otherness, then of assigned sexes and genders.

As the authors note: ”We are not proposing to restore psychoanalysis to its magical mountain form, where the international bourgeoisie, gathered in a sanatorium with “excellent deckchairs,” dissects its soul while the march to war is being organized. Quite to the contrary: psychoanalysis, in so far as it is concerned with a materialist understanding of political forces,  is indispensable for illuminating the paths of impending catastrophes — and for guarding against them." 

Frédéric Lordon is a French economist and philosopher, CNRS Director of Research at the Centre européen de sociologie et science politique. One of his books, Imperium:: Structures and Affects of Political Bodies was published by Verso Books in 2022.

Sandra Lucbert is an author of fiction and essays, including  Personne ne sort les fusils (Seuil, 2020) and Défaire voir. Littérature et politique, (Amsterdam, 2024). She was recently appointed head of the “Catabase” literary imprint at Éditions La Découverte.