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David Bennett

University of Melbourne, School of Culture and Communication, Honorary Professorial Fellow

University of Essex, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, Fellow

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David Bennett is Principal Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, where he was the founding Director of Cultural Studies and Reader and Associate Professor in English. Currently based in London and S.W. France, he is the author and editor of more than 90 articles and books in literary and cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory and musicology. His specialist teaching and research fields have been modernist and postmodernist culture and philosophy, and the intersections of psychoanalytic and economic theory. He is an editorial board member of the leading journal of cultural theory, New Formations, for which he produced special issues on postmodernist music and the psychology of the 2008-10 global financial crisis.. He has been Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Durban (2005), the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck University of London (2008-2011), the London Consortium (incl. Tate, ICA, Science Museum, Architectural Association and London University: 2008-2011) and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex (2012-2015). His latest book, The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution, is published by Lawrence & Wishart. He is currently (2022) coediting a special issue of New Formations on climate catastrophe, entitled 'Living with Extinction', to include his translation of Bruno Latour's commentary on the intersection of the Ukraine and climate wars, and interviews with Claire Colebrook and Kate Soper.

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Books by David Bennett

Editorial Introduction to Living with Extinction 2022

New Formations, 2022

The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution

The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution (London: Lawrence... more

Readers' responses to The Currency of Desire

Loaded Subjects: Psychoanalysis, Money and the Global Financial Crisis

Published by Lawrence & Wishart, London, 2012

SOUNDING POSTMODERNISM Sampling Australian Composers, Sound Artists and Music Critics

Postmodernism, Music and Cultural Theory

Guest-edited special issue of New Formations, no. 66 (Spring 2009)

Cultural Studies: Pluralism and Theory

Papers by David Bennett

Postmodernism, Postcolonialism and 'the Rushdie Affair'

Cogito, 1995

Analysis of the 'Rushdie affair' from political, ethical, aesthetic and inter-cultural perspectiv... more Analysis of the 'Rushdie affair' from political, ethical, aesthetic and inter-cultural perspectives. Explains Khomeini's fatwa against the author and publishers of The Satanic Verses and addresses the question: is there a contradiction between Rushdie's 'deconstructive' or anti-representational practices as a postmodernist writer and his claims to represent- and be represented by - governments, nations and cultures in his campaign to overcome the fatwa and rehabilitate himself in civil society.

Metaphors of Desire: Neoliberalism and Libidinal Economy

The Journal of English Language and Literature, 2017

While neoliberalism has been penetrating the most intimate aspects of our lives with the logic of... more While neoliberalism has been penetrating the most intimate aspects of our lives with the logic of the `bottom line,` its cost-benefit analyses of human motivation have increasingly assumed `scientific` status, not least in the sphere of sexual psychology. Since the 1990s, a spate of studies by economists, sociologists and legal theorists has claimed to set our understanding of sexual desire on a “scientific” footing for the first time, by elaborating an “economics of sex” (Posner; Baumeister and Vohs; Blanchflower and Oswald; Hakim), which explains sexual psychology as a personal calculus of profit and loss, investment and return. Such studies invariably cite as their inspiration the economic theory of Gary Becker and his Chicago School colleagues, who launched hardcore neoliberal economics on the world in the 1960s with their concept of “human capital” and the universal mentality of homo oeconomicus. This paper challenges the assumption that it was only in the late twentieth century that economic models of mind and desire claimed scientific credibility. It examines how monetary metaphors and models have been deployed in theories of physiology and psychology since the Enlightenment, when vitalist medicine promulgated the idea of the “animal economy” or “vital economy,” and how the psychoanalytic tradition consolidated economic explanations of desire, energy and vitality in its theories of “libidinal economy.” The paper illustrates how powerful social and political movements have been based on monetary models of the mind-body since the eighteenth century, and it asks how neoliberalism`s dissemination of such models as “scientific” in our own era might be challenged.

Burghers, Burglars, and Masturbators: The Sovereign Spender in the Age of Consumerism

New Literary History, 1999

If we follow the dictates of reason we try to acquire all kinds of goods, we work in order to inc... more If we follow the dictates of reason we try to acquire all kinds of goods, we work in order to increase the sum of our possessions . . . use all means to get richer and to possess more. Our status in the social order is based on this sort of behaviour. But when the fever of sex seizes us we behave in the opposite way. We recklessly draw on our strength and sometimes in the violence of passion we squander considerable resources to no real purpose. . . . [W]e always want to be sure of the uselessness or ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can.1

The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis, and Sexual Revolution, by David Bennett

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2017

The Sonorous, the Haptic and the Intensive

New Formations, 2009

In a recent discussion of his work, the Australian composer David Chesworth described his Melbour... more In a recent discussion of his work, the Australian composer David Chesworth described his Melbourne-based sound installation 'Proximities' as an example of 'disturbed space'. (1) Conceived by Chesworth and his collaborator Sonia Leber as 'a sonic corridor of human voices', 'Proximities' is a soundscape built up from the artists' recordings of the singing voices of people from fifty-three Commonwealth nations now living in Australia. The work is situated on the William Barak Bridge (a broad pedestrian bridge near the centre of Melbourne, named after a leading nineteenth-century Aboriginal painter and activist) and allows its visitors to hear the sounds of the city alongside those of the installation. The sounds of the installation, moreover, are evenly distributed throughout space, via computer-fed speakers along both sides of the bridge, in a manner directly opposed to that of the concert tradition, where the listener is seated before a performing group. Does this 'disturbed space' constitute the disruption of a natural condition--the postmodern composer's typically transgressive attempt to work against the natural orientations of the human body? This would certainly seem to be the case according to one particularly dominant strain of postmodern theory, which insists that we perceive the world through always already ordered systems and that there can be no experience or event outside these systems. (2) This particular strain of postmodern theory, which we may broadly characterise as the deconstructive approach, would present a distanced, critical and oppositional perspective with respect to its object of study (in this case, music). Theory, in this acceptation, would thus constitute a continuation of the transcendentally ideal turn of Kantianism: (3) we cannot know things as they are in themselves, it would argue, for we always experience the given world as other than, or in relation to, ourselves. There is no unmediated reality or event; the world is always lived and experienced as this or that determination of being, in relation to our own point of view. The 'sense' of Chesworth and Leber's soundscape would thus appear to lie in a reaction against the history of art itself: in its refusal, for example, both of the staging of the musical work of art and of the recorded piece that may be repeated through time. (4) This position may be productively contrasted, however, with another, equally postmodern sense of theory: that to be found in the vitalist, expressivist and intuition-oriented philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Resolutely refusing a pre-established world of relations, systems and points of view, this theoretical enterprise aims instead to experience the differential power of life in its very potential to constitute relations. According to this perspective, music would not constitute a referential system: we would read or hear music not as it relates to a system of signs always already given in advance but, rather, according to its capacity to transform bodies, organs and territories. This 'sense' (5) of Chesworth and Leber's soundscape would thus enable a distinctly positive understanding of the postmodern, in which the transformation of the system (the preestablished organisation of sound) would disturb the form of content, enabling bodies to be affected in ever new ways. (6) There would be not so much 'a' musical work, which may be heard from various distances or points of view, as a distribution of sound that is each time different depending on the situation of the visitor, with every position generating its own discrete network of sound relations. (7) This essay aims to explore and defend the sense of this second postmodern theoretical approach to music. Only if we think beyond the first sense of theory as a critical relation to life and experience, we argue, will we able to encounter the force of music. Music is not one system among others (akin to the formal systems of language in the narrow sense); rather, it is only because there is musicality--which Deleuze and Guattari variously refer to as the 'refrain' or as 'rhythm' (8)--that more narrowly formal linguistic systems are themselves possible. …

Mass culture and the production of the capitalist subject in post-communist Russia

Continuum, 2012

Russian economic and political reforms of the last two decades have been closely scrutinized in t... more Russian economic and political reforms of the last two decades have been closely scrutinized in the West for their successes and failures, but much less attention has been paid to the psycho-cultural dimension of these reforms. It seemed taken for granted by most Westerners that inside every docile Soviet body was a free-enterprise spirit just waiting for the state apparatus

Metaphors of Desire: Neoliberalism and Libidinal Economy

Rountable talk for ELLAK conference on 'The Interface of Literature and Economy'

'Money is Laughing gas to Me' (Freud): A Critique of Pure Reason in Economics and Psychoanalysis

Economic theory, since the time of Smith and Hume, has been operating with a model of homo oecono... more Economic theory, since the time of Smith and Hume, has been operating with a model of homo oeconomicus as an autonomous, rational, self-interested calculator of cost-for-benefit. This presumed rationality of 'economic man' supposedly guarantees, in turn, the fundamental rationality of the 'self-regulating', 'efficient' market. Classical political economy, neoclassical economics and neoliberalism have all operated with this model. But the recent 'global financial crisis' was yet another reminder-if one were needed-that the psychology of markets and financial dealers can seem far from rational. Even Alan Greenspan had to admit of the 2008-9 financial crash: 'Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief '. Or, as the economist Ian McDonald has put it: 'Homo oeconomicus, that cool calculator of self-interest, couldn't possibly have been so incautious in protecting her or his wealth'. From its inception, psychoanalysis has viewed the psychology of money as profoundly irrational-as a realm of illusion, neurosis, phantasy and psychopathology, both individual and collective. Freud, Ferenczi, Jones and Abraham were just the earliest psychoanalytic theorists to decode monetary transactions and relationships into their presumed unconscious motives. And yet, psychoanalysis itself has been notoriously reluctant to speak frankly of its own economics as a profession and business-of how 'filthy lucre' is the indispensable stuff of its own transactions. This essay stages a confrontation between two discourses, psychoanalysis and economics, which for much of their history have been mutually indifferent and mutually opaque. By confronting the implied subjects of these discourses with each other's models of reason or sanity in money matters, rather than of irrationality or psychopathology, it questions the equation of economic rationality with individuated self-interest while seeking to deconstruct the century-old dichotomy between homo oeconomicus and homo psychologicus.

Sexual Revolutions: Towards a brief history, from the Fall of Man to the present

Published in Gottfried Heuer (ed), Sexual Revolutions: Psychoanalysis, History and the Father (Lo... more

Plaques de cheminée, the French Revolution, and the Politics of Iconoclasm

Book chapter in: Fiona Robertson and Peter N. Lindfield (eds), Semy-de-Lys: Speaking of Arms, 140... more

Checking the Post: Music, Postmodernism and Cultural Theory

Opening essay of 'Postmodernism, Music and Cultural Theory', special issue of New Formations, no.... more

D. Bennett, 'Music', The Lyotard Dictionary, ed. Stuart Sim (Edinburgh U.P., 2011), pp. 147-49.pdf

On Lyotard's theories of avant-garde and postmodernist music and sound as 'event'.

Editorial Introduction to Living with Extinction 2022

New Formations, 2022

The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution

The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution (London: Lawrence... more

Readers' responses to The Currency of Desire

Loaded Subjects: Psychoanalysis, Money and the Global Financial Crisis

Published by Lawrence & Wishart, London, 2012

SOUNDING POSTMODERNISM Sampling Australian Composers, Sound Artists and Music Critics

Postmodernism, Music and Cultural Theory

Guest-edited special issue of New Formations, no. 66 (Spring 2009)

Cultural Studies: Pluralism and Theory

Postmodernism, Postcolonialism and 'the Rushdie Affair'

Cogito, 1995

Analysis of the 'Rushdie affair' from political, ethical, aesthetic and inter-cultural perspectiv... more Analysis of the 'Rushdie affair' from political, ethical, aesthetic and inter-cultural perspectives. Explains Khomeini's fatwa against the author and publishers of The Satanic Verses and addresses the question: is there a contradiction between Rushdie's 'deconstructive' or anti-representational practices as a postmodernist writer and his claims to represent- and be represented by - governments, nations and cultures in his campaign to overcome the fatwa and rehabilitate himself in civil society.

Metaphors of Desire: Neoliberalism and Libidinal Economy

The Journal of English Language and Literature, 2017

While neoliberalism has been penetrating the most intimate aspects of our lives with the logic of... more While neoliberalism has been penetrating the most intimate aspects of our lives with the logic of the `bottom line,` its cost-benefit analyses of human motivation have increasingly assumed `scientific` status, not least in the sphere of sexual psychology. Since the 1990s, a spate of studies by economists, sociologists and legal theorists has claimed to set our understanding of sexual desire on a “scientific” footing for the first time, by elaborating an “economics of sex” (Posner; Baumeister and Vohs; Blanchflower and Oswald; Hakim), which explains sexual psychology as a personal calculus of profit and loss, investment and return. Such studies invariably cite as their inspiration the economic theory of Gary Becker and his Chicago School colleagues, who launched hardcore neoliberal economics on the world in the 1960s with their concept of “human capital” and the universal mentality of homo oeconomicus. This paper challenges the assumption that it was only in the late twentieth century that economic models of mind and desire claimed scientific credibility. It examines how monetary metaphors and models have been deployed in theories of physiology and psychology since the Enlightenment, when vitalist medicine promulgated the idea of the “animal economy” or “vital economy,” and how the psychoanalytic tradition consolidated economic explanations of desire, energy and vitality in its theories of “libidinal economy.” The paper illustrates how powerful social and political movements have been based on monetary models of the mind-body since the eighteenth century, and it asks how neoliberalism`s dissemination of such models as “scientific” in our own era might be challenged.

Burghers, Burglars, and Masturbators: The Sovereign Spender in the Age of Consumerism

New Literary History, 1999

If we follow the dictates of reason we try to acquire all kinds of goods, we work in order to inc... more If we follow the dictates of reason we try to acquire all kinds of goods, we work in order to increase the sum of our possessions . . . use all means to get richer and to possess more. Our status in the social order is based on this sort of behaviour. But when the fever of sex seizes us we behave in the opposite way. We recklessly draw on our strength and sometimes in the violence of passion we squander considerable resources to no real purpose. . . . [W]e always want to be sure of the uselessness or ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can.1

The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis, and Sexual Revolution, by David Bennett

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2017

The Sonorous, the Haptic and the Intensive

New Formations, 2009

In a recent discussion of his work, the Australian composer David Chesworth described his Melbour... more In a recent discussion of his work, the Australian composer David Chesworth described his Melbourne-based sound installation 'Proximities' as an example of 'disturbed space'. (1) Conceived by Chesworth and his collaborator Sonia Leber as 'a sonic corridor of human voices', 'Proximities' is a soundscape built up from the artists' recordings of the singing voices of people from fifty-three Commonwealth nations now living in Australia. The work is situated on the William Barak Bridge (a broad pedestrian bridge near the centre of Melbourne, named after a leading nineteenth-century Aboriginal painter and activist) and allows its visitors to hear the sounds of the city alongside those of the installation. The sounds of the installation, moreover, are evenly distributed throughout space, via computer-fed speakers along both sides of the bridge, in a manner directly opposed to that of the concert tradition, where the listener is seated before a performing group. Does this 'disturbed space' constitute the disruption of a natural condition--the postmodern composer's typically transgressive attempt to work against the natural orientations of the human body? This would certainly seem to be the case according to one particularly dominant strain of postmodern theory, which insists that we perceive the world through always already ordered systems and that there can be no experience or event outside these systems. (2) This particular strain of postmodern theory, which we may broadly characterise as the deconstructive approach, would present a distanced, critical and oppositional perspective with respect to its object of study (in this case, music). Theory, in this acceptation, would thus constitute a continuation of the transcendentally ideal turn of Kantianism: (3) we cannot know things as they are in themselves, it would argue, for we always experience the given world as other than, or in relation to, ourselves. There is no unmediated reality or event; the world is always lived and experienced as this or that determination of being, in relation to our own point of view. The 'sense' of Chesworth and Leber's soundscape would thus appear to lie in a reaction against the history of art itself: in its refusal, for example, both of the staging of the musical work of art and of the recorded piece that may be repeated through time. (4) This position may be productively contrasted, however, with another, equally postmodern sense of theory: that to be found in the vitalist, expressivist and intuition-oriented philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Resolutely refusing a pre-established world of relations, systems and points of view, this theoretical enterprise aims instead to experience the differential power of life in its very potential to constitute relations. According to this perspective, music would not constitute a referential system: we would read or hear music not as it relates to a system of signs always already given in advance but, rather, according to its capacity to transform bodies, organs and territories. This 'sense' (5) of Chesworth and Leber's soundscape would thus enable a distinctly positive understanding of the postmodern, in which the transformation of the system (the preestablished organisation of sound) would disturb the form of content, enabling bodies to be affected in ever new ways. (6) There would be not so much 'a' musical work, which may be heard from various distances or points of view, as a distribution of sound that is each time different depending on the situation of the visitor, with every position generating its own discrete network of sound relations. (7) This essay aims to explore and defend the sense of this second postmodern theoretical approach to music. Only if we think beyond the first sense of theory as a critical relation to life and experience, we argue, will we able to encounter the force of music. Music is not one system among others (akin to the formal systems of language in the narrow sense); rather, it is only because there is musicality--which Deleuze and Guattari variously refer to as the 'refrain' or as 'rhythm' (8)--that more narrowly formal linguistic systems are themselves possible. …

Mass culture and the production of the capitalist subject in post-communist Russia

Continuum, 2012

Russian economic and political reforms of the last two decades have been closely scrutinized in t... more Russian economic and political reforms of the last two decades have been closely scrutinized in the West for their successes and failures, but much less attention has been paid to the psycho-cultural dimension of these reforms. It seemed taken for granted by most Westerners that inside every docile Soviet body was a free-enterprise spirit just waiting for the state apparatus

Metaphors of Desire: Neoliberalism and Libidinal Economy

Rountable talk for ELLAK conference on 'The Interface of Literature and Economy'

'Money is Laughing gas to Me' (Freud): A Critique of Pure Reason in Economics and Psychoanalysis

Economic theory, since the time of Smith and Hume, has been operating with a model of homo oecono... more Economic theory, since the time of Smith and Hume, has been operating with a model of homo oeconomicus as an autonomous, rational, self-interested calculator of cost-for-benefit. This presumed rationality of 'economic man' supposedly guarantees, in turn, the fundamental rationality of the 'self-regulating', 'efficient' market. Classical political economy, neoclassical economics and neoliberalism have all operated with this model. But the recent 'global financial crisis' was yet another reminder-if one were needed-that the psychology of markets and financial dealers can seem far from rational. Even Alan Greenspan had to admit of the 2008-9 financial crash: 'Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief '. Or, as the economist Ian McDonald has put it: 'Homo oeconomicus, that cool calculator of self-interest, couldn't possibly have been so incautious in protecting her or his wealth'. From its inception, psychoanalysis has viewed the psychology of money as profoundly irrational-as a realm of illusion, neurosis, phantasy and psychopathology, both individual and collective. Freud, Ferenczi, Jones and Abraham were just the earliest psychoanalytic theorists to decode monetary transactions and relationships into their presumed unconscious motives. And yet, psychoanalysis itself has been notoriously reluctant to speak frankly of its own economics as a profession and business-of how 'filthy lucre' is the indispensable stuff of its own transactions. This essay stages a confrontation between two discourses, psychoanalysis and economics, which for much of their history have been mutually indifferent and mutually opaque. By confronting the implied subjects of these discourses with each other's models of reason or sanity in money matters, rather than of irrationality or psychopathology, it questions the equation of economic rationality with individuated self-interest while seeking to deconstruct the century-old dichotomy between homo oeconomicus and homo psychologicus.

Sexual Revolutions: Towards a brief history, from the Fall of Man to the present

Published in Gottfried Heuer (ed), Sexual Revolutions: Psychoanalysis, History and the Father (Lo... more

Plaques de cheminée, the French Revolution, and the Politics of Iconoclasm

Book chapter in: Fiona Robertson and Peter N. Lindfield (eds), Semy-de-Lys: Speaking of Arms, 140... more

Checking the Post: Music, Postmodernism and Cultural Theory

Opening essay of 'Postmodernism, Music and Cultural Theory', special issue of New Formations, no.... more

D. Bennett, 'Music', The Lyotard Dictionary, ed. Stuart Sim (Edinburgh U.P., 2011), pp. 147-49.pdf

On Lyotard's theories of avant-garde and postmodernist music and sound as 'event'.

D. Bennett, 'May '68, Évènements', The Lyotard Dictionary, ed. S. Sim (Edinburgh U.P., 2011), pp. 138-41.pdf

On Lyotard's theory of the 'event' and his political and philosophical relationship with the May ... more

'Music and Postmodernity' by Jean-François Lyotard

This is the first authorised translation of Lyotard's essay 'Musique et postmodernité', which app... more This is the first authorised translation of Lyotard's essay 'Musique et postmodernité', which appeared in the Canadian electronic journal Surfaces, VI, 203 (1996): 4-16. Permission for this translation was kindly granted by Lyotard's literary executrix, Mme Dolorès Lyotard. The translation is published in New Formations, no. 66 (Spring 2009), pp. 37-43

Lyotard, Post-Politics and Riotous Music

The Sonorous, the Haptic and the Intensive

Published in New Formations, no. 66 (Spring 2009), pp. 68-80.

Mass culture and the production of the capitalist subject in post-communist Russia

by David Bennett and julia vassilieva

Continuum, 2012

Russian economic and political reforms of the last two decades have been closely scrutinized in t... more Russian economic and political reforms of the last two decades have been closely scrutinized in the West for their successes and failures, but much less attention has been paid to the psycho-cultural dimension of these reforms. It seemed taken for granted by most Westerners that inside every docile Soviet body was a free-enterprise spirit just waiting for the state apparatus to founder in order to escape and express itself. This paper takes a different view, arguing that the transformation of Soviet citizens into the self-regulating, entrepreneurial subjects of liberal democracy and the market economy was no less impressive a feat of social engineering than the transition from state-owned to private property and unfettered business competition. Maintaining that mass entertainment was one of the critical means employed by the new post-Soviet business elite for preparing Russians to embrace an unregulated model of capitalism and a consumerist culture, we offer a multi-faceted analysis of one of the ideological apparatuses of the post-communist condition – the Russian adaptation of the television game show, Wheel of Fortune – which were mobilized to dismantle and reshape a complexly overdetermined system of values, beliefs, and attitudes in the process of what we call the production of the capitalist subject.