Capitalism and the Limits of Desire

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Addressing Spinozas perennial question: why do the masses fight for their servitude as if it was salvation, Capitalism and the Limits of Desire examines the ways in which self-love as the care of the self has become intertwined with self-love as the pursuit of pleasure. With ongoing austerity and misery for so many, why does capitalism seem to be so insurmountable, so impossible to move beyond John Roberts offers a compelling response: it is because we love the love of self that capitalism enables, even though it brings anxiety and self-scrutiny. Capitalism in the form of commodities, and, more importantly, the online platforms through which we express ourselves, has become so much of who we are, of how we define self-love as self-pleasure that it is difficult to imagine ourselves outside of it. Roberts contends that disentangling ourselves from this collapsing of self into capitalism is possible and that understanding the insidious nature of capitalist thinking even when it comes to our deepest pleasures is the starting point. Using early and late Marx, Lacans distinction between pleasure and desire and the recent debate on perfectionism (Hurka) as his guides, Roberts lays out a way for individuals to move forward and forge a link between self and desire outside the oppressive demands of platform capitalism.

Reviews

Why is challenging or overcoming capitalism such a difficult project when its economic, social, and environmental failures are abundantly clear John Roberts proposes a unique answer, it is because capital has become part of our very conception of ourselves, our self-love. * Jason Read, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine, USA *
John Roberts's Capitalism and the Limits of Desire intervenes at the very core of contemporary debates on the libidinal economy, insisting that we need to work through the complex nexus of economic logic and the production of enjoyment, if we want to effectively organise our resistance against the catastrophic tendencies of capitalism. Roberts also provides us with a much-needed orientation in the multiplicity of classical and contemporary takes on the function of enjoyment and affects in the reproduction of capitalism. * Samo Tomic, Research Associate in Philosophy, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany *

Author Bio

John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. He is author of The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (2007), The Necessity of Errors (2010), Photography and Its Violations (2014), Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (2015), Thoughts on an Index Not Freely Given (2016) and His The Reasoning of Unreason (Bloomsbury 2018) and co-editor of Boris Arvatov, Art and Production (2017)