Metaphors of Desire: Neoliberalism and Libidinal Economy

Abstract

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 under standing of sexual desire on a “scientific” footing for the first time, by elab orating an “economics of sex” (Posner; Baumeister and Vohs; Blanchflower and Oswald; Hakim), which explains sexual psychology as a personal cal culus 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 univer sal mentality of homo oeconomicus. This paper challenges the assumption that it was only in the late twenti eth 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 eco nomic explanations of desire, energy and vitality in its theories of “libidi nal 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.