Anselm Jappe’s The Self-Devouring Society: Capitalism, Narcissism, and Self-Destruction

A conversation with Eric-John Russell, Jamie Keesling, and Andy Battle

The capitalist machine is making us all narcissists. 

The Self-Devouring Society is a work that unites the critique of political economy and the psychoanalytic tradition. In it, 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.

Please join Eric-John Russell (who translated the book), Jamie Keesling, and Andy Battle for a conversation that envelopes Marx as well as Freud, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Christopher Lasch, and Jappe to probe 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.

“An absolutely remarkable essay on the links between narcissism and ultra-capitalism. It should be read with a solid reserve of coffee and silence at your disposal: its analysis is as fascinating as it is sharp.”—Maïa Mazaurette, GQ France

Eric-John Russell is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut für Philosophie, Universität Potsdam. He is the author of Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord: Why Everything Is as it Seems and an editor of Cured Quail. He lives in Berlin.

Jamie Keesling is a New York-based writer and educator. Her writings, lectures, and research range on topics including art criticism; gender and sexuality; emancipatory politics, especially exemplified by mid-twentieth century Frankfurt School theory; as well as the history of psychoanalysis and politics. Her writings have been published in The Art Newspaper, Caesura, Hyperallergic, The Platypus Review, and Sublation Magazine. 

Andy Battle is a writer, editor, and teacher living in New York.