ABSTRACT
Education and culture tell us that knowledge is good and that shared knowledge is even better. This assumption should not pass unquestioned. A psychoanalytic approach to knowledge offers a different view, which is that knowledge exchange is one of the things that sustains ‘the good’ as a zone of work, intersubjective communication and deferred desire. What is now called the ‘knowledge economy’ is but another name for a form of dependency in which we are all potential knowledge specialists, and therefore perpetually in debt to someone else's knowledge. Rather than establishing a commonality of understanding, this situation consolidates the rule of the individual knowledge ego, from the car mechanic to the nuclear scientist. Under this rule, any criticism of the ‘knowledge is good’ thesis can only appear uncalled-for, frivolous, even antisocial. Yet it is our contention in this book that psychoanalysis offers a rational, systematic and thorough means of questioning the good of knowledge, as well as the value of knowledge goods.
