© Columbia University Press
Democracy and the Political Unconscious
March, 2008
Cloth, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13880-2
$45.00
/ £26.50
"This book's cross- and interdisciplinary
features raise the bar for democracy and make it a hell of a read. I'm on comfortable ground one
moment and then find myself in comparatively unfamiliar territory the next. Noelle McAfee unpacks
our collective lives as we live them and charts a more hopeful way forward." —
Alison Kadlec, Public Agenda Foundation
"Drawing on the
theoretical frameworks of psychoanalysis, semiotics, and critical theory, Noelle McAfee
illuminates some of the most pressing and difficult questions confronting democratic societies
today. In a realistic yet hopeful manner, her book shows how these resources can be deployed to
reconstruct public spheres." — Vincent Colapietro, Liberal Arts Research Professor
of Philosophy, Penn State University
"In her forcefully
written book, Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noelle
McAfee raises the stakes of political theory—not only bodies and resources, but the
very souls or psyches of people hang in the balance. Always informed by concrete events, McAfee's
provocative thesis that public discourse can become a form of 'talking cure' explodes
psychoanalysis onto the scene of democratic theory in startling and promising ways."
— Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt
University