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.
