The Self-Devouring Society: Capitalism, Narcissism, and Self-Destruction

by Anselm Jappe, Translated by Eric-John Russell Common Notions 10/31/2023, paperback SKU: 9781942173793   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 conversat