Description
Book SynopsisMax Weber famously argued that the rise of capitalism in early modern Europe was premised on the emergence of a distinctive set of attitudes - including the pursuit of profit for its own sake - which he called the spirit of capitalism .
Trade Review"Capitalism has lost its spirit, not to mention its mind: destroying the desire it claims to channel, incapable of establishing any value beyond narrow calculation, it now needs saving from itself. Revisiting (and revising) Freud and Marcuse, proposing a ‘libidinal ecology’ to help us avoid the disaster ahead, Stiegler might just be the man for the job."
Martin Crowley, Queens’ College, University of Cambridge
"Stiegler asks not how hyperindustrial capital can be reissted today but whether capitalism can be saved from itself and the Pandora's box of dead-end futures that it now generates, from zombie cultures of mass consumerism to the devastation of the biosphere. His bold response is to call for and lay out a new 'libidinal ecology', a project that will become a key reference point for anyone concerned with the central transformative questions of our time."
Tom Cohen, State University of New York at AlbanyTable of ContentsIntroduction
I. Sociopathology of 1968
1. The paradox of the super-ego in the transformations of capitalism
2. The question of spirit is that of the we
3. Knowledge and the super-ego: towards a new spirit of capitalism
4. Technicity, hostility to civilization, and the intermittency of noetic action
5. The crisis of capitalism as ‘ideological disarray’ and as crisis of spirit after May 1968
6. ‘Artistic critique’ and ‘social critique’, or the jargon of authenticity
7. The recuperation of the ‘ideas of ’68’ by French capitalism and the establishment of control society
8. Digression on the meteorological predictions of the Alaskan Eskimo
9. False problems concerning action
10. Authenticity and singularity: fantasy and the forgetting of what does not exist
11. Supports and relations of production
II. The automatization of the super-ego and the passage of desire as original diversion of libidinal energy
12. The historicity of psychoanalytic categories and the illusion of desire as a natural state
13. From psychopathology to sociopathology
14. Contradictions between Marcuse’s Marxism and his Freudianism in relation to struggle (eris) against the risk of decomposition. Moving beyond guilt
15. Technics, super-ego and desublimation
16. Processes of adoption and diversions of libido: Marcuse and the tendency of libidinal energy to fall
17. ‘Liberation of instincts’, technesis and the passage of desire Ð the thrust of the knife
18. The murder of the father, the opening of time and guilt, and ‘the instant of my death henceforth always pending’
19. Diversions and decompositions
20. The automatization of the super-ego
21. The opposition of Narcissus and Prometheus
22. Ontology and the reality principle
23. Libidinal ecology
Conclusion
24. Intoxications, prohibitions, cares
25. The struggle for the life of the spirit
26. Consistence of the health and authority of public power: the freedom of the spirit
