Erotic Economics

Since their inception, capitalist markets have been associated with a wide variety of psychological disorders. Freud argued that many of these neuroses were the result of repressing Eros , or the pleasure principle, in the interest of building a broader society or ‘civilization’. Drawing on the work of the Italian autonomist Franco Berardi and the psychology of Carl Jung, I argue that Eros , defined more broadly as relatedness, is an integral part of capitalist markets that has been consistently devalued and repressed both in economic discourse and economic policy. Identified with the ‘feminine’ behaviours of hysteria, emotion and irrationality, this aspect of capitalist markets was moralized throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the market was re-conceived as masculine. As both Berardi and Keynes have noted, however, we have paid a price for this absorption of Eros by the Logos of the market. By recuperating the erotic aspects of capitalism, we can build a more embodied, relational concept of the market.