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 conversation with Marx as well as Freud, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Christopher Lasch, Jappe probes 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.

Everyone can feel that the world is getting angrier. The Self-Devouring Society provides an original and rigorous explanation of why.

Prologue: The King Who Devoured Himself

1. The Fetish that Rules the World

What the Critique of Value Can Teach Us

Bad Subjects

It’s Decartes’s Fault

Excursus: Descartes as Musicologist and the Acceleration of History

Kant, Philosopher of Liberty?

The Marquis de Sade and the Moral Law

Enough with Philosophy—Deeds

Narcissism as Consolation for Helplessness

2. Narcissism and Capitalism

What Is Narcissism?

Narcissism and the Fear of Separation

Psychoanalysis and Revolution: Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse

Christopher Lasch: Narcissism as a Critical Category

A Little History of Narcissism

The Narcissist-Fetishist Paradigm

Returning to Nature, Defeating Nature—or Defeating Capitalist Regression?

3. Contemporary Thought in the Face of Fetishism

The Loss of Boundaries?

Invoking Authority to Escape the Market?

From Idealism to Materialism

New Forms, Old Misfortunes?

New Discussions on the Misery of Our Times

A Mutation Older than the Digital

4. The Crisis of the Subject-Form

The Death-Wish of Capitalism

Amok and Jihad

Understanding Amok

No Reason Anywhere

Capitalism and Violence

Epilogue: What To Do with the Bad Subject?

Appendix: Essentials of the Critique of Value