Learn Lacan
Secondary literature 2014

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form

Anna Kornbluh

by Kornbluh, Anna (2014)

→ Concept index for this source

Synopsis

Anna Kornbluh's Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (2014) argues that the Victorian concept of "psychic economy"—the idea that the human mind operates according to principles of scarcity, equilibrium, and investment—emerged as an ideological response to the ontological instability of "fictitious capital," the constitutively figurative nature of financial instruments that can never be decisively grounded in material reality. Rather than reading Victorian novels as documentary records of economic life or as accomplices in finance's normalization, Kornbluh proposes a "financial formalism" that locates the truly economic element of realist literature in its narrative, rhetorical, and tropological structures—its ironies, parabases, analepses, and metaleptic figures—rather than in its referential content. The book's central claim is that the displacement of structural critique of fictitious capital by an inward-turning "psychologism" was itself the constitutive ideological move of Victorian financialization, a metaleptic substitution of psychological effects for structural causes. Through readings of Great Expectations, Middlemarch, The Way We Live Now, Marx's Capital, and Freud's metapsychology, Kornbluh demonstrates that realist fiction and its most searching inheritors critically defamiliarized—rather than naturalized—the disavowal on which financial capitalism depends. The book thus positions Victorian literary realism not as capitalism's ideological accomplice but as a site of what Marx and Freud, in their different registers, confirm: that there is no natural economy, only contingent arrangements that must be made, and that the figurative operations of capital are most lucidly disclosed not in economic science but in aesthetic form.

Distinctive contribution

Realizing Capital makes a contribution to the Lacanian-inflected Marxist corpus that is distinctive in its dual axis: it is simultaneously an intervention in Victorian studies and a theorization of the relationship between fictitious capital and psychic economy as fundamentally tropological rather than merely ideological in the discursive sense. Where most work in the intersection of psychoanalysis and political economy (Goux's Symbolic Economies, Lyotard's Libidinal Economy) treats the homology between monetary and psychic substitution as a structural given to be mapped, Kornbluh historicizes that homology as a Victorian invention—an ideological metalepsis—and reads it against the grain through the formal innovations of the novels themselves. She shows that the disavowal ("I know, but nevertheless…") that sustains fictitious capital is not a cognitive failure but the operative mechanism of financial capitalism, and that literary irony, not enlightened critique, is the form of thought adequate to this structure. This distinguishes the book from New Historicist accounts (Poovey, Baucom) that treat literature as a belief-production apparatus and from Foucauldian discourse analysis that cannot account for the inconsistency and self-undermining of ideology.

The book's second distinctive contribution is its rigorous demonstration that neither Marx's Capital nor Freud's metapsychology simply install "psychic economy" as a naturalized concept. Kornbluh reads Capital as a Victorian literary novel—deploying personification, metalepsis, and the trope of drive (Trieb) in ways that perform the very groundlessness they analyze—and Freud as an experimenter with economic metaphor rather than its founder, keeping "economy" figural, polyvalent, and open in ways that align him with Victorian novelists rather than with the psychologists and political economists who reified the concept. This double reading—of Marx as novelist and Freud as anti-reifier—is not duplicated elsewhere in the corpus, and it gives the book a rare capacity to hold literary formalism, Marxist political economy, and psychoanalytic metapsychology in genuinely productive tension rather than mere juxtaposition.

Main themes

  • Fictitious capital as constitutively figurative and ontologically unstable
  • Psychic economy as ideological metalepsis: the substitution of psychological effects for structural causes
  • Financial formalism: the truly financial element in Victorian realism is form, not content
  • Disavowal as the operative mechanism of financial capitalism, replacing 'belief'
  • Irony (parabasis, satire, analepsis) as the critical mode adequate to fictitious capital
  • Drive (Trieb) in Marx and Freud as the shared concept linking capital's limitless circulation and psychic economy
  • The Victorian novel as critique of, rather than accomplice to, the naturalization of capitalism
  • Tropology and personification as both the problem of capital and the means of its analysis
  • The historicity of 'psychic economy' as a metaphor that the Victorians invented and acted fatally upon
  • Realism's self-conscious artifice as the condition of possibility for thinking the paradoxes of financialization

Chapter outline

  • Introduction: 'A Case of Metaphysics': Realizing Capital
  • Chapter 1: Fictitious Capital/Real Psyche: Metalepsis, Psychologism, and the Grounds of Finance
  • Chapter 2: Investor Ironies in Great Expectations
  • Chapter 3: The Economic Problem of Sympathy: Parabasis and Interest in Middlemarch
  • Chapter 4: 'Money Expects Money': Satiric Credit in The Way We Live Now
  • Chapter 5: London, Nineteenth Century, Capital of Realism: On Marx's Victorian Novel
  • Chapter 6: Psychic Economy and Its Vicissitudes: Freud's Economic Hypothesis
  • Epilogue: The Psychic Life of Finance

Chapter summaries

Introduction: 'A Case of Metaphysics': Realizing Capital

The introduction establishes the book's central problematic through a multi-layered pun on 'realizing capital': to realize capital is to make real what is inherently fictitious (as in financial realization), to apprehend conceptually (as in 'I realized'), and to express in a particular formal shape (as in linguistic realization). Kornbluh argues that Victorian financialization generated a profound ontological crisis around the question of what is real and what is fictitious, and that this crisis found its most searching articulation not in financial journalism or economic science but in the formal structures of the realist novel. The key methodological wager is that 'the truly financial element in realism is the form' (echoing Lukacs's remark about the social element in literature), such that the criticism required is not historicist indexing of economic content but close, tropological reading.

The introduction intervenes polemically against two prevailing paradigms: New Historicist accounts (Poovey, Baucom, Sherman) that cast literary realism as a 'belief-producer' that normalized finance by familiarizing readers with economic facts and constructing fiction as a different-but-complementary representational regime; and Foucauldian discourse analyses that reduce literature to the dissemination of power-knowledge. Against both, Kornbluh argues that Victorian financial capitalism was institutionalized not through the production of belief but through disavowal—the psychoanalytic structure of knowing very well that credit is ungrounded while nevertheless acting as if it were sound. Literary realism's function, she contends, is to defamiliarize this disavowal rather than to naturalize it, making irony (rather than mimesis) the book's governing literary category.

The introduction also maps the book's key conceptual triad: fictitious capital (Marx's term for financial instruments whose value is decoupled from material production), psychic economy (the Victorian ideological construction of the mind as an economic system of scarce resources), and metalepsis (the rhetorical trope of substituting effect for cause, or one figurative level for another). The displacement of fictitious capital by psychic economy is the master narrative of Victorian financial ideology: as structural critique of finance became untenable, Victorian discourse invented psychological interiority as capital's natural ground. The introduction lays out how each subsequent chapter traces a dimension of this displacement—in journalism, in three major novels, in Marx, and in Freud.

Key concepts: Fictitious Capital, Psychic Economy, Metalepsis, Disavowal, Financial Formalism, Ideology Notable examples: Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street; Marx, Capital; Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy

Chapter 1: Fictitious Capital/Real Psyche: Metalepsis, Psychologism, and the Grounds of Finance

Chapter 1 constructs the historical and rhetorical ground for the book's argument by tracing the emergence of 'psychic economy' within Victorian financial journalism, psychology, and political economy. Kornbluh begins with Marx's concept of fictitious capital—not a marginal curiosity but a term widely circulated in leading Victorian publications like the Economist and Morning Chronicle—and shows how the structural instability it names (the impossibility of grounding financial value in material reality) generated a crisis of analysis. Financial journalists like David Morier Evans documented the traumatic psychological effects of successive crises in vivid, death-haunted language; over time, these psychological effects came to be perceived not as consequences of structural instability but as its causes—'animal spirits,' 'confidence,' 'panic as a species of neuralgia.'

This substitution of psychological effect for structural cause is what Kornbluh names 'metalepsis,' drawing on Quintilian, Genette, and Bloom: a trope in which one figure substitutes for another already figurative, effecting a transit between levels without stabilizing at any. Bagehot's Lombard Street is the crystallizing instance: where Marx emphasized the objective, self-positing logic of capital (effects become causes, the system reproduces its own conditions), Bagehot progressively replaced this structural analysis with psychological explanation, grounding the stability of the financial system in 'imitative belief' and 'instinctive confidence'—an account that Kornbluh reads as structurally equivalent to Althusserian ideology: not a set of false ideas but a set of practices organized around a necessary fiction.

The chapter also excavates the parallel developments in Victorian psychology and political economy that produced the 'desire theory of value' (the marginal utility revolution), showing how the metaleptic circuit was mutually reinforcing: psychology borrowed the language of political economy to scientize itself, while political economy borrowed psychology to naturalize abstract value in universal human desire. The 'empty letter' of fictitious financial instruments was inscribed as something when tethered to a universalized psychology. The chapter concludes by establishing that fictitious capital is irreducibly figurative—money's 'I promise to pay' is a performative that presents the future in the present, and labor itself (for Marx) is defined by imaginative projection—making literary analysis, rather than economic science, the appropriate mode of its critique.

Key concepts: Fictitious Capital, Metalepsis, Psychic Economy, Ideology, Disavowal, Fetishistic Disavowal Notable examples: Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street; David Morier Evans, Commercial Crisis of 1847-1848; Marx, Capital; Richard Jennings, Natural Elements in Political Economy

Chapter 2: Investor Ironies in Great Expectations

Chapter 2 reads Great Expectations as Dickens's critical ironization of the 'psychic economy' metaphor: the novel's first-person narration, its radically unreconciled temporal structure, and its persistent figural ironies collectively expose the instability of 'the person' as a legal, financial, and literary construct in an age of financialization. Kornbluh connects the novel's investment plot—Pip's anonymous benefactor, his secret investment in Herbert Pocket—to the Limited Liability Act of 1855 and the birth of the corporate person in 1856, arguing that the novel thinks through the uncanny resemblance between the private individual and the anonymous corporate entity, which Pip articulates himself: 'I felt like a bank of some sort, rather than a private individual.'

The chapter focuses particularly on the novel's narratological structure as 'total analepsis': a first-person narration that never returns to its own narrative present, leaving the question of when Pip tells his story permanently unresolved. This temporal irresolution subverts both the Bildungsroman's teleology of moral development and the financial logic of the futures contract (the investment that matures into a promised return). The narrating Pip's supposed wisdom proves tautological ('I know what I know'), and the irony forged around Joe Gargery—to whom Pip owes an irredeemable debt he can never repay—exposes the plot's lack of genuine reconciliation: the account is in the red. Kornbluh argues that what the novel ostensibly presents as Pip's sentimental education is radically undermined by his ongoing entanglement in the very logic of psychic economy (investing, speculating, projecting futures) that he was supposed to transcend.

The chapter's deepest claim is that Great Expectations does not merely thematize financial psychology but formally performs it: the novel's irony (narrative, temporal, situational, figural) is the aesthetic equivalent of the structural critique of fictitious capital that Victorian discourse was in the process of displacing. By making the 'first person' the site of maximum instability—the corporate person and the private individual, the narrator and the character, the investor and the beneficiary all collapsing into one another—Dickens realizes in the linguistic sense (performs, formalizes) the facades of personation countenanced by finance.

Key concepts: Psychic Economy, Fictitious Capital, Ideology, Repetition, Symptom, Unconscious Notable examples: Dickens, Great Expectations; Limited Liability Act of 1855; Corporate person, 1856

Chapter 3: The Economic Problem of Sympathy: Parabasis and Interest in Middlemarch

Chapter 3 examines Middlemarch's engagement with sympathy as an economy—the scarcity-governed model of affective distribution propounded by Victorian psychologists like Spencer and Lewes—arguing that Eliot's novel both reproduces and critically exceeds this model through its distinctive formal gesture of parabasis. Parabasis—moments at which the narrator 'stands beside' herself, interrupting the narrative to reflect on her own procedures—is read as the formal analogue of financial self-reflexivity: the narrator's anxious deliberation over the distribution of narrative 'interest' performs the same structure as money that begets money, interest that compounds interest. Set during the run-up to the Bank of England Charter Act's repeal of usury bans, Middlemarch thematizes interest as both affective and financial, and its formal self-consciousness enacts this double valence.

The chapter traces the tension between two models of sympathy in the novel: Dorothea's 'fanaticism of sympathy' (expansive, redistributive, indifferent to scarcity) and Will's 'radiating delight' (Smithian invisible-hand logic, in which individual enjoyment radiates outward without direct intention). Kornbluh argues that the novel's orchestration of the clash between these positions—and Dorothea's eventual marriage to Will—is not a narrative flaw but the novel's self-conscious emplotment of how financialization grounds itself on a streamlined psychic economy, trading the extensive redistribution of sympathy for the intensive interest of the market. The novel's own epigraph—'we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on them'—is thus a self-indictment as much as a diagnosis.

The chapter's key formal argument concerns how Middlemarch ultimately resolves the contradiction between the scarcity model of sympathy and the ethical imperative of unlimited extension. Through the trope of metaphor itself—'loobies for lords,' the exchange of one type for another rather than the metonymic drive toward the particular—the novel opens the economy of sympathy outward, borrowing the propulsive logic of fictitious capital (interest as ceaseless exchange rather than finite distribution) to reformulate its ethical promise. The novel's final 'incalculably diffusive' tribute to Dorothea consecrates this metaphoric economy, while the irony of the parabases throughout reminds the reader that the 'dangerous metaphor' on which the novel 'acts fatally' is never entirely redeemed.

Key concepts: Psychic Economy, Metaphor, Sublimation, Ideology, Fantasy, Symptom Notable examples: Eliot, George, Middlemarch; Bank of England Charter Act; Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments

Chapter 4: 'Money Expects Money': Satiric Credit in The Way We Live Now

Chapter 4 reads Trollope's The Way We Live Now—widely celebrated as the most vitriolic Victorian satire—through the lens of its peculiar formal self-destruction: the novel abandons its satire in its final quarter, switching to a conventionally realist focus on interiority and intimate romance. Kornbluh argues that this 'modal crisis' is not an artistic failure but the novel's most incisive critical gesture. Satire, as a mode of hyperbolic exaggeration and indirection, is formally collusive with fictitious capital, which also operates through the hyperbolic proliferation of figures; to satirize credit by means of satiric excess is logically self-undermining. When the novel registers this collusion—when it realizes that it cannot coherently critique the circulation of exaggerated tropes by means of exaggerated tropes—the satire implodes, and the novel turns to interiority as a hypothetically less figurative, more 'real' ground.

The chapter traces how the novel represents fictitious capital through the figure of Augustus Melmotte, whose wealth and identity are constituted entirely by rumor, passive constructions ('it was said,' 'it was generally supposed'), and competing accounts—he is the absent center of his own novel, just as credit is the absent ground of his fortune. Kornbluh shows how the novel's gossipy narrative voice—dizzyingly unattributed diegesis, chapters beginning 'it was known' and 'it was rumored'—formally enacts the speculative logic it depicts. The operative mechanism of the financial system is not belief but disavowal, and Melmotte does not persuade anyone; rather, everyone acts as if his credit were sound while knowing that it may not be.

The chapter's second argument concerns the modal conversion itself and its ironization. When the satire converts to realism, the novel turns to marriage plots as the psychological ground that is supposed to countervail financial unreality—love and commitment as more substantive than floating shares. But Trollope obsessively saturates his romantic resolutions in financial language ('giving credit,' 'sharing interest,' 'holding property as steward'), so that the very signifiers of affective life are shown to be colonized by economic metaphor. The 'nuptial bubble' of the novel's finale ironizes the grounding gesture: psychic economy is revealed not as the natural bedrock of financial life but as its over-extended figurative product.

Key concepts: Fictitious Capital, Ideology, Fetishistic Disavowal, Surplus-jouissance, Metalepsis, Repetition Notable examples: Trollope, The Way We Live Now; Augustus Melmotte; Financial crisis of 1873

Chapter 5: London, Nineteenth Century, Capital of Realism: On Marx's Victorian Novel

Chapter 5 makes the audacious argument that Marx's Capital is itself a Victorian realist novel—not merely a text that deploys literary techniques rhetorically, but one whose formal operations (personification, metalepsis, the trope of drive) constitute its theoretical insights rather than merely illustrating them. Kornbluh begins by establishing Marx's deep immersion in Victorian literary culture: he lived and wrote in London as a Victorian journalist, read and cited Victorian novelists, and composed an early humoristic novel (Scorpion and Felix, 1837) that already exhibits the strategy of performative contradiction—using an ironic novel form to arrive at historical-materialist insights—that will define Capital. The chapter frames Capital as a text that thinks through aesthetic form in the manner of Victorian fiction.

The chapter's central formal argument concerns personification and metalepsis in Capital. Marx's prefatory disclaimer—'individuals are dealt with here only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories'—is read not merely as a methodological note but as a meta-comment on the trope machine that Capital both analyzes and deploys. The animated commodities of the first chapter (Coat and Linen, brought into speech and self-consciousness) are shown to perform at the textual level what capital performs at the social level: the confounding of persons and things, the installation of personification as the master trope of capitalist ideology. And Marx's metaleptic narrative structure—the commodity appears 'at first sight' as trivial, then reveals itself as metaphysically abyssal, requiring 'flight into the misty realm of religion,' exiting with a Shakespearean allusion that substitutes one confusion for another—formally enacts capital's own groundless, self-positing dynamic.

The chapter's climax is the analysis of Trieb (drive) in Capital. Kornbluh demonstrates that Marx coins or deploys drive—'absolute,' 'blind,' 'immanent,' 'measureless'—as the essential concept for grasping capital's inner nature: the limitless, objectless circulation that is its own end. Half a century before Freud, Marx's Capital theorizes drive as the eerie consanguinity between the advanced capitalist and the primitive miser, the 'hoarding drive' (Trieb der Schatzbildung) that is boundless by nature. This drive cannot be presented in 'instantiative language'—it can be registered only figuratively, through the aesthetic form that Capital self-consciously deploys. The chapter thereby establishes that the psychoanalytic concept of drive does not originate with Freud but is anticipated in Marx's literary-formal analysis of capital.

Key concepts: Drive, Metalepsis, Fictitious Capital, Sublimation, Symptom, Personification Notable examples: Marx, Capital; Marx, Grundrisse; Marx, Scorpion and Felix; Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

Chapter 6: Psychic Economy and Its Vicissitudes: Freud's Economic Hypothesis

Chapter 6 completes the book's argument by revisiting the supposed origin of 'psychic economy' in Freud's metapsychology and arguing that Freud neither coins nor consecrates the term but rather experiments with the economic metaphor in a self-conscious, self-undermining way that aligns him with Victorian novelists rather than with Victorian psychologists. Kornbluh establishes that 'the economic' is Freud's third metapsychological hypothesis—alongside the topographic and the dynamic—and that it conditions the other two: psychic topography and psychic dynamism both derive from psychic equilibrium. The economic hypothesis is thus the meta-metapsychology. Yet even at this level of centrality, Freud consistently marks his economic language as figural, circumlocutory, and provisional: 'what we may call an economic' is a recurring hedge, and the German corpus preserves a more tentative relationship to the metaphor than Strachey's Standard Edition translations suggest.

The chapter traces multiple, irreducible connotations of 'economy' in Freud: the nomos of the oikos (the law of the household, of life's insuperable material exigencies); closed equilibrium (the constancy principle); the 'system of writing' (substitutive representation, where the unconscious expresses itself through graphically material figures rather than referentially); and the disequilibrium of drive. Through the case of the Rat Man—whose obsessional fantasies associate rats, currency, debt, and anal eroticism in a dense web of substitution—Kornbluh shows that Freud's 'economy' names not a natural object but a forum of constitutive substitution: the psyche insists on its own complete integrity and, where direct expression is blocked, seeks substitutive representations. This is economy as the prioritization of symbolization over any given content.

The chapter's final section analyzes Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a text whose recursive, circuitous narrative structure formally enacts the topology of the death drive: each incomplete example (traumatic neurosis, fort-da, negative therapy) gives way to another reiteration, performing the 'short circuit' and 'circuitous routes to substitutive satisfaction' that the text identifies in psychic life. Freud's discovery of the death drive is framed first as an economic mystery, and it is here—where drive emerges as the constitutive beyond of the pleasure principle—that Freud's metaleptic economic hypothesis achieves its greatest critical purchase on capitalist naturalization. The chapter concludes that psychoanalysis, properly read, does not sanction the psychologism that Victorian discourse installed: it demonstrates that there is no given economy, only contingent arrangements that must be made.

Key concepts: Psychic Economy, Drive, Death Drive, Pleasure Principle, Surplus-jouissance, Jouissance, Repetition, Unconscious Notable examples: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Freud, Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (Rat Man); Lacan, Seminar II

Epilogue: The Psychic Life of Finance

The brief epilogue draws together the book's argument by contrasting two inheritances from the Victorian period: the dominant inheritance of academic economics (represented by Ben Bernanke and Robert Shiller), which has perpetuated the Victorian psychologism that substitutes 'animal spirits' and 'consumer confidence' for structural analysis of fictitious capital; and the alternate inheritance of the Victorian novel and of Marx and Freud, which bequeaths a mode of critical aesthetics capable of realizing the constitutive fictitiousness of capital.

Kornbluh argues that the Victorian novel's insights into the figurative power of capital are not presented linearly and cannot be traced to its iteration of other discourses: they are the product of 'counterfactual vitality'—the novel's capacity as fiction (as the creation of excessive, aberrant, counterfactual realities) to think the conditions of fictitious capital in ways that economic science cannot. The epilogue identifies the post-2008 financial crisis as the contemporary stakes of the book's argument and positions the Victorian novel as a 'brightest future of our current crisis' that 'awaits us in the past'—a formulation that itself performs the metaleptic, retroactive temporality that the book has been theorizing throughout.

Key concepts: Fictitious Capital, Ideology, Psychic Economy, Real, Sublimation Notable examples: Federal Reserve (Bernanke); Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance; 2008 financial crisis

Main interlocutors

  • Karl Marx, Capital
  • Karl Marx, Grundrisse
  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
  • Sigmund Freud, Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar II
  • Jacques Lacan, Écrits
  • Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
  • Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy
  • Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
  • Georg Lukacs
  • Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology
  • Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight
  • Jacques Derrida, The Post Card
  • Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse
  • Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory
  • J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
  • Kojin Karatani, Transcritique
  • Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies
  • Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy
  • Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy
  • Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street
  • George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind
  • Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology
  • Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot

Position in the corpus

Realizing Capital occupies a distinctive niche at the intersection of Lacanian-Marxist cultural theory, Victorian literary studies, and the history of political economy. In the Lacanian corpus it is best situated alongside works that deploy psychoanalytic concepts—particularly disavowal, drive, and ideology—to analyze the structural logic of capitalism rather than the psychology of individual subjects: Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Metastases of Enjoyment are the most direct interlocutors, as Kornbluh shares Žižek's insistence that ideology operates through fantasy-structured practice rather than false belief. However, Kornbluh's contribution is more historically grounded and more formally literary-critical than Žižek's: she traces the genealogy of disavowal in Victorian financial discourse and reads it through the tropological structures of specific novels rather than through philosophical abstraction. Readers who have engaged Žižek on ideology and capital, or Goux's Symbolic Economies on the homology between psychic and monetary substitution, will find Kornbluh's work both a historical supplement and a methodological corrective—insisting that the homology itself must be historicized and that its critical purchase requires close reading rather than structural analogy. The book should be read alongside or after Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious and before more recent work in Marxist formalism, as it both extends and complicates the tradition of reading literary form as the site of ideological contradiction.\n\nWithin Victorian studies and the broader field of literature-and-economics, Realizing Capital defines itself against the New Historicist paradigm (Poovey, Baucom, Sherman) and is most productively read in conjunction with work on financial form and Victorian fiction by scholars like Ian Baucom (Specters of the Atlantic) or Marc Shell (Art and Money), though Kornbluh's formalism and her psychoanalytic-Marxist framework distinguish her approach sharply from theirs. For readers approaching from Lacanian film and cultural theory (the gaze, objet a, surplus-jouissance in capitalist consumption), Realizing Capital offers a historically specific and textually rigorous model for how psychoanalytic categories can be deployed in the analysis of nineteenth-century aesthetic and economic form without collapsing into either psychobiography or ahistorical structuralism. It should be read before tackling works that deploy Lacanian concepts in contemporary finance theory, as it provides the essential Victorian genealogy against which those deployments must be measured.

Canonical concepts deployed