Professor Derek Hook
Mid-Career Fellow 2014
Post-apartheid libidinal economy
Motivated by concerns of increased social division in South Africa, this project investigates the identifications and affective network of belonging of the country’s most privileged sector - white English-speaking South Africans. While sociological and discourse analytic studies have explored the prevailing self-representations of this group, what remains still to be developed is a ‘libidinal economy of the mass’ able to investigate the particular psychical investments of this group, and to link subjective identifications with a network of belonging.
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Hook, D., & Vanheule, S. (2016).
Revisiting the master-signifier, or, Mandela and repression. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 2028.
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Biography
Derek Hook is a scholar and a practitioner of psychoanalysis with expertise in the areas of Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory (the work of Frantz Fanon in particular), the psychology of racism and critical social psychology.
Lacanian psychoanalysis - in both its clinical and socio-political applications - is the predominant focus of much of his teaching, research and clinical supervision. Derek has taught classes on Lacanian clinical and social theory in a variety of global and organizational from South Africa (University of the Witwatersrand, University of Pretoria) to the UK (Birkbeck College at the University of London, London School of Economics) and the US (Duquesne University) over the last 20 years.
In addition to co-editing the successful Palgrave Lacan Series with Calum Neill (which has published 16 titles in the past five years) he is one of three editors (along with Stijn Vanheule and Calum Neill) of the landmark 3-volume series Reading Lacan's Écrits (Routledge). His most recent book is Six Moments in Lacan (2017). His edited collection, Lie on Your Wounds: The Prison Correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was published in 2019 (Wits University/New York University Press).
Lacanian psychoanalysis - in both its clinical and socio-political applications - is the predominant focus of much of his teaching, research and clinical supervision. Derek has taught classes on Lacanian clinical and social theory in a variety of global and organizational from South Africa (University of the Witwatersrand, University of Pretoria) to the UK (Birkbeck College at the University of London, London School of Economics) and the US (Duquesne University) over the last 20 years.
In addition to co-editing the successful Palgrave Lacan Series with Calum Neill (which has published 16 titles in the past five years) he is one of three editors (along with Stijn Vanheule and Calum Neill) of the landmark 3-volume series Reading Lacan's Écrits (Routledge). His most recent book is Six Moments in Lacan (2017). His edited collection, Lie on Your Wounds: The Prison Correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was published in 2019 (Wits University/New York University Press).
Biographical details correct as of 25.03.26