Brian Massumi: A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (1992)

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.

Publisher MIT Press, 1992
ISBN 0262132826, 9780262132824
229 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)

Bruno Latour, Vincent Antonin Lépinay: The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology (2009)

“How can economics become genuinely quantitative? This is the question that French sociologist Gabriel Tarde tackled at the end of his career, and in this pamphlet, Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lépinay offer a lively introduction to the work of the forgotten genius of nineteenth-century social thought. Tarde’s solution was in total contradiction to the dominant views of his time: to quantify the connections between people and goods, you need to grasp “passionate interests.” In Tarde’s view, capitalism is not a system of cold calculations—rather it is a constant amplification in the intensity and reach of passions. In a stunning anticipation of contemporary economic anthropology, Tarde’s work defines an alternative path beyond the two illusions responsible for so much modern misery: the adepts of the Invisible Hand and the devotees of the Visible Hand will learn how to escape the sterility of their fight and recognize the originality of a thinker for whom everything is intersubjective, hence quantifiable.

At a time when the regulation of financial markets is the subject of heated debate, Latour and Lépinay provide a valuable historical perspective on the fundamental nature of capitalism.”

Publisher Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, 2009
Volume 37 of Paradigm
ISBN 0979405777, 9780979405778
100 pages

Distributor

PDF (updated on 2020-7-13)
Source notes (added on 2012-8-1)

Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009–) [EN, CZ, CR, GR, ES, FR, IT]

“After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system – a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.”

Publisher Zero Books, Winchester, 2009
ISBN 1846943175, 9781846943171
81 pages

Interview with author: Matthew Fuller (Monthly Review, 2009).
Reviews: Steven Sherman (Marx&Philosophy, 2010), Ben Granger (Spike, 2010), John F. Murphy (Critical Sociology, 2010), Ed Rooksby (Historical Materialism, 2012), Todd Hoffman (Ctheory, 2016), Matěj Metelec (A2, 2010, CZ), Roman Rakowski (Britské listy, 2010, CZ).

Commentary: Mark Fisher (Strike!, 2012), Alison Shonkwiler, Leigh Claire La Berge et al. (Reading Capitalist Realism, 2014), Alfie Bown (LSE blog, 2017).

Wikipedia
Publisher
Worldcat

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (English, 2009, updated on 2017-7-12)
Kapitalistický realismus: proč je dnes snazší představit si konec světa než konec kapitalismu (Czech, trans. Radovan Baroš, 2010, 29 MB, added on 2020-4-7)
Kapitalistički realizam: Zar nema alternative? (Croatian, 2011, 4 MB, added on 2013-9-26, updated on 2020-4-7)
Καπιταλιστικός ρεαλισμός. Υπάρχει άραγε εναλλακτική; (Greek, trans. Θέμης Πανταζάκος, 2015, added on 2017-7-12, updated on 2020-4-7)
Realismo Capitalista. ¿No hay alternativa? (Spanish, trans. Claudio Iglesias, 2016, 7 MB, added on 2021-1-22)
Le réalisme capitaliste: n’y t’il qu’une alternative? (French, trans. Julien Guazzini, 2018, added on 2020-4-7)
Realismo capitalismo (Italian, trans. Valerio Mattioli, 2018, added on 2020-4-7)