The Self-Devouring Society

Capitalism, Narcissism, and Self-Destruction

Anselm Jappe, Eric-John Russell

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781629634494
• eBook ISBN: 9781945335006
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

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 contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue: A King Who Devoured Himself
• Chapter 1: On the Fetishism That Rules This World
• Chapter 2: Narcissism and Capitalism
• Chapter 3: Contemporary Thought in the Face of Fetishism
• Chapter 4: The Crisis of the Subject-Form
• Epilogue: What Is to Be Done with This Bad Subject?
• Appendix: Some Essential Points of the Critique of Value
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• About the Author