Contributors to this book investigate issues as diverse as: the century-old divorce between psychological and economic explanations of human behaviour and current efforts to repair it; the gender-politics, ethics and psychology of economists' attempts to explain today's rolling crisis in money markets; psychoanalytic theories of financial investment, risk and the 'jouissance' of devastating loss; the rise and cataclysmic fall of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme; the squandering of fortunes on rubbishy art in times of financial crisis; the attraction of Deleuzian speculation versus Freudian investment; the nexus between political economy and libidinal economy; the mystifying effects of treating 'the market' as a subject capable of 'speaking', 'reacting' and 'punishing'; and the fate of desire in postmodern, hyper-commoditised culture.

David Bennett is Principal Research Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. His books include Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (1998 and 2002); and the forthcoming The Currency of Desire: Essays in Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution (2013).