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Biographical note
Anselm Jappe is Professor of Philosophy and teacher of aesthetics at the Fine Arts Academy, Italy. He is a key theorist of the critique of value-dissociation and also a leading researcher on the Situationist International. He is the author of numerous works of anti-capitalist critical theory such as Guy Debord (1993), L’avant-garde inacceptable (2005) and The Writing on the Wall: On The Decomposition of Capitalism and its Critics (2017).Anselm Jappe is one of the most gifted thinkers of the “value theory” current, which wants to understand the capitalist system, based on abstract labor and money, a blind and impersonal system that reduces everything to a commodity. This essay is more than ever relevant today, when the logic of infinite value accumulation is leading to an ecological catastrophe.
Michael Löwy, Emeritus Research Director, French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), France
<i>The Adventures of the Commodity</i> provides a necessary introduction to the critique of value for the anglophone world, a correct assessment of the complex dynamics of capitalist society at its most fundamental level. The logical approach offers a reliable means of diagnosing current tendencies in a society constrained by certain logical perimeters imposed by the capitalist mode of production.
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
The Adventures of the Commodity explores conceptions of a capitalist society that is ordered entirely around the exigencies of the commodity, money and labour.
A distinctive introduction to critiques of capitalism and commodity society, this book illuminates the difficult concept of 'abstract' labour. Merging this with the social critique known as the “critique of value”, first developed by Robert Kurz and the German journal, Krisis, in the 1990s, Anselm Jappe highlights in particular a central, and often contested, aspect of this critique: the claim that, for several decades now, capitalism has entered into a crisis that is not cyclical, but terminal. If a society that is founded upon the fetishism of the commodity, on the value created by the abstract side of labour and represented in money, this is the result of the fact that its primary internal contradiction has reached a point of no return: the replacement of living labour, the only source of ‘value’, by ever-more sophisticated technologies.
Introduction: Is the World a Commodity?
1. This Stranger the Commodity
2. Critique of Labour
3. The Crisis of Market Society
4. The History and Metaphysics of the Commodity
5. Fetishism and Anthropology
Conclusion: Some ‘False-Friends’
References
Index
In a time marked by crises and the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism, Critical Theory and the Critique of Society intends to renew the critical theory of capitalist society exemplified by the Frankfurt School and critical Marxism’s critiques of social domination, authoritarianism, and social regression by expounding the development of such a notion of critical theory, from its founding thinkers, through its subterranean and parallel strands of development, to its contemporary formulations.
Editorial Board:
Amy De’ath, Contemporary Literature and Culture, King’s College London
Bev Best, Sociology, Concordia University
Cat Moir, Germanic Studies, University of Sydney
Charlotte Baumann, Philosophy, Sussex/TU Berlin
Christian Lotz, Philosophy, Michigan State University
Claudia Leeb, Political Science, Washington State University
Dimitra Kotouza, Education, University of Lincoln
Dirk Braunstein, Institute of Social Research, Frankfurt
Duy Lap Nguyen, Modern and Classical Languages, University of Houston
Edith Gonzalez, Humanities, Universidad Intercultural del Estado de Puebla, México
Elena Louisa Lange, Japanese Studies/Philology and Philosophy, University of Zurich
John Abromeit, History, SUNY, Buffalo State, USA
Jordi Maiso, Philosophy, Complutense University of Madrid
José Antonio Zamora Zaragoza, Philosophy, Spain
Kirstin Munro, Political Science, University of Texas, Rio Grande
Marcel Stoetzler, Sociology, University of Bangor
Marina Vishmidt, Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University
Mathias Nilges, Literature, St Xavier University
Matthias Rothe, German, University of Minnesota
Moishe Postone†, History, University of Chicago
Patrick Murray, Philosophy, Creighton University
Rochelle Duford, Philosophy, University of Hartford
Sami Khatib, Art, Leuphana University
Samir Gandesha, Humanities, Simon Fraser University
Verena Erlenbusch, Philosophy, University of Memphis