Monstrosity and the Psychoanalytic Dimensions of the Uncanny

‘Monsters and other figures of the inhuman have become an ethical and political task that this book tackles with excellence and originality. Drawing on the strangeness that inhabits us and the very specific type of anguish it causes, Rodrigo Gonsalves paints a portrait of the monstrosities of our time, showing how every monster is always a re-edition of a previously forgotten monster, that returns to remind us that the past has not passed yet, even when they present themselves as a future to come.’ Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker, University of São Paulo ‘Rodrigo Gonsalves’ book is a landmark in the politics of negativity. In our subjective economy, negativity has to be read through the lenses of the Freudian notion of the uncanny – in this way, a new perspective opens up to investigate recent figures of monstrosity and to further our understanding of angst, fears and desires in the face of the ideological predicaments of nowadays. Gonsalves’ monstrosity suggests another look at Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis, one pertinent for today's dimension of subjective suffering which derives from our capitalist global structure. An essential book for anyone interested in where we stand today!’ Slavoj Žižek, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London ‘As an author who more than three decades ago happens to have written one of the seminal texts on the uncanny, I now rejoice at this new book which takes the multifarious clue of the uncanny much further and wider, using it systematically as a red thread leading from Freud’s initial insights through Lacan’s complex ramifications to Marx’s logic of commodity universe, the horror in popular culture and to the monstrous logic of the present-day capitalism – finally proposing the prospect of a monstrous materialism that could be a match for the monstrosity of late capitalism. A very necessary reading.’ Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana