Addressing Spinoza's 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, Lacan's 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.

Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

A call to arms for creative freedom and critical thought, Art in Consumer Culture: Mis-Design asks the contemporary art world to be honest about the pervasive effects of commodification and the difficulty of staging critique. The book examines the collusion of art and design in the work of Murakami, Zittel, Kalkin, and Acconci, in order to find avenues of critique in a commercially driven cultural landscape.

A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a playful and emphatically practical elaboration of the major collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze's entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text within current debates on postmodern culture and politics.Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of "state-happy" Marxism and "school-building" strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Capitalism is a system that places the law of the market at the center, and it exists anywhere there is a free market. It has no specific relationship to the psyche of those invested in it, but it does affect how they function. #2 Capitalism transcends culture and offers its subjects psychic rewards that are radically different from those provided by cultures. The capitalist subject never has enough, and it constantly seeks more. But this project of endless accumulation is built on the idea of its end. #3 There is a radical difference between the image capitalism presents to its subjects and the real satisfaction they find in it. The capitalist system requires that subjects invest themselves in the idea of accumulation and the promise of an ultimate satisfaction that accompanies the idea. #4 Capitalism is not the result of human nature, and its appeal is inextricable from the break from nature that occurs when we begin to speak. We are not capitalists because we are animalistic but because we are fundamentally removed from our animality.

What does it mean to 'think differently'? The ability to create thoughts is what lies at the base of philosophy and political theory and practice. One cannot hope to change the world, or even adequately critique it, without the possibility of the new in mental life. The Political Mind explores the possibility of thinking differently through connecting neuropsychological material on consciousness, nonconsciousness and affect to political theory. It spans diverse disciplines: from hard-edged neuropsychology to sociology, economics, political theory and Eastern and Western philosophy. Its originality lies in its ability to draw meaningful connections between such disparate literatures, weaving a coherent whole. It then applies the concepts created to the currently popular topics of consumerism and the anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movements.

Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture explores the recent rise in different types of men using digital media to sexualise their bodies. It argues that the male body has become a key site in contemporary culture where neoliberalism’s hegemony has been both secured and contested since 2008. It does this by looking at four different case studies: the celebrity male nude leak; the rise of young men sharing images of their muscular bodies on social media; RuPaul's Drag Race body transformational tutorial, and the rise of chemsex. It finds that on the one hand digital media has enabled men to transform their bodies into tools of value-creation in economic contexts where the historical means they have relied on to create value have diminished. On the other it has also allowed them to use their bodies to form intimate collective bonds during a moment when competitive individualism continued to be the privileged mode of being in the world. It therefore offers a unique contribution not only to the field of digital cultural studies but also to the growing cultural studies literature attempting to map the historical contradictions of the austerity moment.

In Post-Queer Politics, Ruffolo looks at the work of Foucault, Butler, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Guattari and others in his creative refocus on the queer/heteronormative dyad that has largely consumed queer studies and contemporary politics. He offers a radical and intersectional new way of thinking about class, race, sex, gender, sexuality and ability that extends beyond queer studies to be truly transdisciplinary in its focus and political implications. It will appeal to readers across a range of subjects, including gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, cultural studies, political science, and education.

An important new analysis of Native Hawaiian efforts to construct relationships with other Oceanic peoples as missionaries, diplomats, and tourists.