Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders Re-Unified Germany After 1989 [Paperback]

This book, situated at the?intersections of psychosocial and cultural studies, political science and anthropology,?contributes original and important ideas to the discussion of how psychoanalytic theories might be applied to questions of remembrance, commemoration and nostalgia and helps to elucidate how a liberal capitalist nation-state manages crises and disruptions.Ben Gook shows in his theoretically sophisticated and quietly passionate study that the complacent tale of successful German unification not only forgets the erasure of eastern Germans' experiences and expectations when the wall came down and the future seemed open but also reproduces the inner-German division it sought to heal. Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders is an auspicious debut.This immensely knowledgeable and elegantly argued study focusses on the fraught process of making sense of German re-unification. By psychoanalytically exploring East and West German fantasies and projectionsi.e. the conceptualisation of subjectivity, memorialisation, and nostalgic or fetishist object investmentsGook offers provocative and most intriguing new insights into the affective workings (or impasses) of a post-Wende society.An excellent study of the interrelation between the physical, social and the affective geographies that marked the re-unification of Germany, this book offers a subtle analysis of the subjectivities created through that process. Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders shows how analytically productive  one can even say necessary  a subtle deployment of social theory is when dealing with such complex social processes, and highlights the continuing importance of psychoanalytic theory in making sense of realities characterised by a deep entanglement of memory, affect, fantasies, capitalism and geopolitics.?This book is a timely intervention in the remembrance of recent German history, or what Ben Gook aptly calls the enigmatic, unfinished business of the Berlin Walls breaching and subsequelóä