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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political science & theory
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What Makes Life Worth Living - On Pharmacology (Paperback)
Loot Price: R479
Discovery Miles 4 790
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What Makes Life Worth Living - On Pharmacology (Paperback)
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Loot Price R479
Discovery Miles 4 790
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In the aftermath of the First World War, the poet Paul Valéry
wrote of a ‘crisis of spirit’, brought about by the
instrumentalization of knowledge and the destructive subordination
of culture to profit. Recent events demonstrate all too clearly
that that the stock of mind, or spirit, continues to fall. The
economy is toxically organized around the pursuit of short-term
gain, supported by an infantilizing, dumbed-down media. Advertising
technologies make relentless demands on our attention, reducing us
to idiotic beasts, no longer capable of living. Spiralling rates of
mental illness show that the fragile life of the mind is at
breaking point. Underlying these multiple symptoms is consumer
capitalism, which systematically immiserates those whom it purports
to liberate. Returning to Marx’s theory, Stiegler argues that
consumerism marks a new stage in the history of proletarianization.
It is no longer just labour that is exploited, pushed below the
limits of subsistence, but the desire that is characteristic of
human spirit. The cure to this malaise is to be found in what
Stiegler calls a ‘pharmacology of the spirit’. Here,
pharmacology has nothing to do with the chemical supplements
developed by the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmakon, defined as
both cure and poison, refers to the technical objects through which
we open ourselves to new futures, and thereby create the spirit
that makes us human. By reference to a range of figures, from
Socrates, Simondon and Derrida to the child psychoanalyst Donald
Winnicott, Stiegler shows that technics are both the cause of our
suffering and also what makes life worth living.
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