León Rozitchner’s Mass Psychology

Argentinean philosopher León Rozitchner theorized the political potential of the Peronist movement through a unique analytical matrix drawing upon Marxism, psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This essay will explore how Rozitchner’s interpretation of Freud’s theory of group psychology in Freud y los límites del individualismo burgués (Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism, 1972) approaches the figure of the mass in ethical, political and historical terms. I argue that Rozitchner articulates these three dimensions of the mass by viewing its libidinal constitution through a unique historical-materialist lens. Freud y los límites… thus asks us to consider the question of the drive’s sublimation at stake in Freud’s theory as a technique of social reproduction and, simultaneously, as a directly productive form of labour. In this sense, the organization of libidinal investment that constitutes the mass also holds the key to its potential social emancipation. Furthermore, while Rozitchner’s view of subjectivity often appears as transhistorical in scope, his approach to the productive activity of the drive in Freud y los límites… asks us to consider the ethical stakes of sublimation in relation to a specific historical moment of capitalist exploitation. Read through this tension, Freud y los límites… thus ultimately underlines the historical conditions of the ethical transformation it demands.     

Emplacing Current Trends in Feminist Historical Geography

In this article, the authors assess some of the major trends within anglophonic feminist historical geography appearing in the decade since Rose & Ogborn called for the development of an explicitly feminist approach to the subfield. In examining the 'geography' of feminist historical geographies, three main categories of scholarship are evident: a 'new' historical geography of North America, portions of which are informed by feminist theories and methods; a British school of feminist historical geography with a focus on the discipline of geography, geographical knowledges and colonialism/imperialism; and feminist historical geography interventions in cultural politics of space and place. A diversity of feminist methods and epistemologies appears across the literature. In an attempt to avoid a reading of these trends as better or worse approximations of historical 'progress', the authors conceptualize them as emplaced within a number of specific social and spatial contexts. Most recent work is concerned with the production of gender differences as they are worked through economic, political, cultural and sexual differences in the creation of past geographies. The continued need simply to write women into historical narratives and geographies, however, is also evident. The work of feminist historical geography questions and challenges geography's masculinist historical record.