Author Description

"The theory of law and economics that dominates American jurisprudence today views the market as rational and individuals as driven by the desire to increase their wealth. This view is riddled with misconceptions, as Jeanne Lorraine Schroeder demonostrates in her challenging new book, which looks at contemporary debates in legal theory through the lens of psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. Through metaphors drawn from classical mythology and interpreted via Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy, Schroeder exposes the hidden erotics of the market. Her work shows that the predominant economic analysis of the market and the standard romantic critique of the market are in fact mirror images; both are based on the misconception that reason and passion are inalterably opposed.". "Central to Schroeder's case is the conviction that reason and passion are two sides of the same coin. Rationality represents the human potential actualized only through desire, she argues; and passion functions only insofar as it preserves the rationality that makes desire possible. Far from being anti-erotic, market relations are, in this analysis, the most basic form of eroticism. Disclosing a fundamental similarity between erotic and economic behavior, The Triumph of Venus reveals that, while the former cannot be reduced to the latter, the latter can only be explained in terms of the former. Venus triumphs over the market."--BOOK JACKET.