Entitlement, aspiration, and the spatial politics of exemption

This article argues that entitlement has become a defining affect of contemporary capitalism. While neoliberal capitalism relied on competition, merit, and aspirational envy to legitimate inequality, today's increasingly rentier and monopolistic order is organized around exemption: the presumption, among elites, of a right to enjoy wealth, security, mobility, and environmental protection without reciprocity or justification. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, the article conceptualizes entitlement as a libidinal relation that disavows shared loss and vulnerability, and shows how this fantasy is materially and spatially sustained through urban form, infrastructure, property relations, and environmental governance. The article makes three contributions to economic geography. First, it reframes rent, monopoly, and uneven development as affectively stabilized through entitlement, extending political–economic analyses of accumulation into the terrain of desire, fantasy, and enjoyment. Second, it advances a psychoanalytic geography of aspiration by showing how, particularly in the Global South, envy is increasingly oriented not toward equality but toward identification with elite exemption. Third, it intervenes in contemporary debates on neofeudalism by arguing that feudalized forms of domination are not replacing capitalism but are increasingly internal to its reproduction. The article concludes that entitlement helps explain both the durability of extreme inequality and the depoliticization of environmental crisis, while insisting that any libidinal transformation must be tied to a reconfiguration of political economy itself.