Information about you:
Carla is an associate lecturer in the Department for Politics & International Relations, where she finished her PhD in 2021. Her research interests emerge from a critical engagement with contemporary discourses of neoliberalism, with a particular focus on the subjectivising, psychic and embodied effects of these discourses. Her work is interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from psychoanalysis (particularly the work of Jacques Lacan and his interlocutors), cultural studies, critical theory and the emergent field of psycho-social studies.
Carla is a member of the PERC Network and an editorial coordinator of the PERC Blog
Thesis:
Her thesis was an examination of contemporary discourses of neoliberalism, focusing on the psychic undercurrents and subterranean desires of purportedly economistic texts. This excavation is done via the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and the work of contemporary social theorists who draw on Lacan’s concepts. Through a series of critical readings of key neoliberal texts – the economic theories of Milton Friedman, Gary Becker and Friedrich Hayek, but also autobiographical writing by entrepreneurs and social critics – she argues that what is at stake in the neoliberal project is not just a reformation of social and economic forms but a violent rearticulation of the subject and the self.
Academic qualifications:
- PhD in Politics - Goldsmiths, University of London (2013-2021)
- MA in Social and Political Thought – University of Sussex, 2011
- BA in History – Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010
Research Interests:
Critical neoliberal studies, psychoanalysis and politics (Lacan, Freud, Kristeva), poststructuralism, cultural studies, political philosophy and economic history
Teaching:
Carla teaches on the following Undergraduate Modules:
- Colonialism, Race and Power
- Global Governance and World Order
- Modern Political Thought
Publications:
Ibled, Carla. 2021. The Last Neoliberal: Macron and the Origins of France’s Political Crisis by Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini, Antipode. URL: https://antipodeonline.org/2021/06/29/the-last-neoliberal/
Ibled, Carla. 2019. “Macron and the imaginary of a ‘start-up nation’”, PERCBlog (Political Economy Research Centre). URL: http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/macron-and-the-imaginary-of-a-start-up-nation/
Ibled, Carla. 2018. “The ‘Fear Index.’”, in: UCL Urban Laboratory, Counterspeculations, Episode 7. URL: https://soundcloud.com/uclurbanlab/counterspeculations-7-carla-ibled.
Ibled, Carla. 2018. “The ‘Fear Index’ - The autonomization of the social imaginary of finance”, Public Seminar. URL: http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/06/the-fear-index/
Conference papers:
“‘Founder as Victim, Founder as God’: the two bodies of the iconic entrepreneur” – ‘Psychosocial Bodies’, Association for Psychosocial Studies annual conference, 2021
"Addicted mothers as abject outsiders: the reconstitution of a neoliberal ethic of the self in Darren McGarvey's Poverty Safari (2017) and J.D. Vance Hillbilly Elegy (2016)" – ‘Outsiders’, Goldsmiths Literature Seminar Annual Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Conference, 2019
“‘Founder as Victim, Founder as God’ (Peter Thiel): a psychoanalytical perspective on the neoliberal imaginary of entrepreneurship” - Goldsmiths Politics & International Relations PhD conference, 2018
“The 'fear index': the autonomisation of the social imaginary of finance” - Navigating Finance and the Imagination: Walking with Castoriadis in the City of London, UCL Urban Lab/ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) Lakehead University, 2018
