Liberals smirk at Trump’s narcissism, but, as renowned theorist Anselm Jappe explains, contemporary capitalism has turned everyone into a narcissist.
The Greek myth of Erysichthon describes the fate of a king whose hunger drove him to eat until the only thing left to devour was himself. This image—of a society spiraling inexorably in a self-destructive dynamic—forms the starting point of Anselm Jappe’s investigation into the relationship between contemporary capitalism and subjectivity, or our personal experience of the world.
In a work that unites the critique of political economy and the psychoanalytic tradition, Jappe explores the dynamics of contemporary capitalism and explains how internalizing them creates a specific kind of person—a narcissist, someone who can only interact with the world by consuming it and who cannot conceive of limits to this consumption. In conversation with Marx as well as Freud, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Christopher Lasch, Jappe probes the ways in which the churning of the capitalist machine, ceaseless and yet devoid of real purpose, creates an endless hunger that increasingly ends in spectacular violence.
Everyone can feel that the world is getting angrier. The Self-Devouring Society provides an original and rigorous explanation of why.
Table of Content
Prologue: The King Who Devoured Himself
1. The Fetish that Rules the World
What the Critique of Value Can Teach Us
Bad Subjects
It’s Decartes’s Fault
Excursus: Descartes as Musicologist and the Acceleration of History
Kant, Philosopher of Liberty?
The Marquis de Sade and the Moral Law
Enough with Philosophy—Deeds
Narcissism as Consolation for Helplessness
2. Narcissism and Capitalism
What Is Narcissism?
Narcissism and the Fear of Separation
Psychoanalysis and Revolution: Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse
Christopher Lasch: Narcissism as a Critical Category
A Little History of Narcissism
The Narcissist-Fetishist Paradigm
Returning to Nature, Defeating Nature—or Defeating Capitalist Regression?
3. Contemporary Thought in the Face of Fetishism
The Loss of Boundaries?
Invoking Authority to Escape the Market?
From Idealism to Materialism
New Forms, Old Misfortunes?
New Discussions on the Misery of Our Times
A Mutation Older than the Digital
4. The Crisis of the Subject-Form
The Death-Wish of Capitalism
Amok and Jihad
Understanding Amok
No Reason Anywhere
Capitalism and Violence
Epilogue: What To Do with the Bad Subject?
Appendix: Essentials of the Critique of Value
About the author
Eric-John Russell teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Université Paris 8. He is the author of Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord: Why Everything is as it Seems and an editor of Cured Quail. He lives in Berlin.
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