So says a reviewer on Goodreads of Anselm Jappe’s THE SELF-DEVOURING SOCIETY: Capitalism, Narcissism, and Self-Destruction.
The book’s cover is of a monster eating its own limbs, a metaphor for capitalism.
Jappe is a French social theorist and professor who believes capitalism forms mutants who can only interact with the world by consuming it in an out-of-control way. We are narcissists who live by and for consuming, feel that we are totally entitled to consuming whatever we want, and can only interact with others in consumer/seller relationships.
This, in Jappe’s telling, results in anger, rage, depression, exhaustion, and endless competition. It also ends in global warming, climate change, resource depletion, racism, sexism, and endless frustration.
We’re never satisfied. We always want more.
To reach this conclusion, Jappe draws upon . . . everybody.
Marx. Freud. Lasch, Adorno. Fromm. Horkheimer. Marcuse. Debord. Marxists. Socialists. Even some middle-of-the-roaders.
Until the end, the book is a typical, if especially eyeball-grinding, screed from the elite French tenured classes who struggle mightily to secure enough grants and taxpayer funding to shore up what’s left of the Frankfurt School of Marxist social critics since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It’s a tough life.
And by the way, as with Christopher Lasch’s works on narcissism, Jappe’s use of Freud as a theoretical boat anchor is like using worn-out snow tires for your foundation. Soft, squishy, offensive.
Jappe narcissistically draws attention to himself with the last couple of chapters, where he blames school shootings on capitalism. If you don’t get enough stuff to get enough attention you randomly shoot people in order to get Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame.
And, so, we need a revolution. To prevent violence.
We need to make capitalism illegal.
To do this will necessarily require vast amounts of systemic upheaval and, well, violence. On a massive scale. To prevent future Columbines.
And to prevent climate change, a climate change that is our new best hope for faculty lounges running a planet where we all have tenure while eating bugs and earth.
As someone else said, Jappe is either a genius. Or else he’s unhinged.
Dreams of utopia usually are the latter.
