Description:
A searing critique and exploration of commodity society and how the life of a commodity shapes contemporary living.
Brief description: 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).
Review Quotes:
"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
"The Adventures of the Commodity 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