World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital

This book brings together Marxian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that the hegemonic form of global capital is founded on the foreclosure of class and 'world of the third,' where ‘world of the third’ is the “inappropriate(d) outside” of hegemonic forms of capitalist development in the global South. The authors counterpose ‘the world of the third’ to the mainstream notion of the “third world,” seen as a "lacking other" in desperate need of aid or humanitarianism. Thus, for them, the hegemonic form of global capital is engendered through the foregrounding of the 'poor,' 'victim' third world and the foreclosure of the non-capitalist ‘world of the third.’ Building on what they characterize as an “ab-original” reading of Marxian historical materialism and the Lacanian real, the authors seek to conceptualize a counter-hegemonic revolutionary subject as a basis for postcapitalist alternatives to the hegemonic form of global capital.