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David Bennett, The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 2016, 314pp+vii; £20 paperback

'What happens when we start to decode sex-talk as metaphoric money-talk?' (p2) This is the organising question running through David Bennett's finely-argued, wide-ranging and lively study The Currency of Desire, a history of 'libidinal economy', its thinkers and discontents, from the Enlightenment to the present day. Bennett's reading is capacious, taking in everything from Lawrence to Lyotard, Viennese Actionism to Christina Aguilera, and his pursuit of his subject energetic and expansive, travelling from the 'complex marriages' of the Oneida Community in nineteenth-century North America to the new money - crime - psychoanalysis circuit of Yeltsin's Russia from our own recent past. If the vastness and stretch of Bennett's interests give his text a sometimes baggy formlessness, each chapter comes studded with insights and asides enough to reward any reader's patience. Erudite, engaging, and sometimes drily funny, The Currency of Desire combines political seriousness with an admirably scrupulous regard for what sometimes seems, to us now, the absurdities and delusions of the past. Bennett's aim 'is to denaturalise […] the language of libidinal economy and reopen it to critique by historicising, rather than parodying, it' (p38).

Contemporary consumer society, from the relationships column in the Guardian to dating apps Tinder and Grindr, is awash with money metaphors floating in the discourses of sexuality and sex talk swimming through the language of money. We 'invest' in relationships, see our erotic or cultural 'capital' rise and fall as we work over our personal 'brand' and online identity, our private lives all the while being commodified, measured and monetised by Facebook as our financial lives are subject to strictures for stimulus or austerity. Economic concepts, in Bennett's account, 'have permeated the vocabularies of both popular and scientific discourses on sexual anatomy, psychology, morality and politics for several centuries' (p7) and The Currency of Desire sets itself the task of carrying out 'the resurrection of dead metaphors, or the resuscitation of unconscious ones' (p36) in order that we might estrange and see afresh the libidinal economic terms informing our consumerist lives.

Sex and money have, after all, been talked about together for a very long time. They even share clichés, from money making the world go round to the various insinuations about the 'oldest profession'. All sorts of pimps and pamphleteers have seen the financial appeal of desire, while a century's worth [End Page 272] of Freudian analysis has searched the money-world for evidence of libidinal drives and dynamics. As the cynical author of The Wandering Whore Continued (1660) put it, 'Mony and cunny are good commodities'.1 Eschewing the twin temptations of 'biologising' money (the orthodox Freudian approach) or 'eroticising' capital (the project of both psychoanalytic dissidents such as Wilhelm Reich as well as neoliberal advertising and marketing gurus), Bennett insists instead that 'neither discourse can ultimately claim to "demystify" the other, or explain the other historically' (p80). At a certain historical moment 'the discourses of money and sex became inseparable', and it is this interconnectedness, and its consequences, which The Currency of Desire traces. Bennett 'traces the history of the exchange or intercourse between the languages of money and sex, economic and libidinal economy' (pp3-4), not in order for one to 'establish itself as the literal, rather than the metaphoric, voice of history' (p80), but rather so readers can trace how these two mutually-reinforcing discourses have shaped our accounts of selfhood and society together. Bennett's work is thus both psychoanalytic history and a history of psychoanalysis, a work of a discourse analysis and an analysis of discourse mutating and shifting through history. 'Just as the entities traded in the money economy have become progressively rarefied, abstracted and psychologised,' he observes, 'so there has been a progressive dematerialising, rarefying and psychologising of the presumed currency of the animal economy since the seventeenth century' (p11).

The Currency of Desire pursues this history by way of two linked approaches. The first, and most successful, is an exercise in intellectual history, tracing the birth of...

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