Phantasmagoria
Phor Phree
To round off the holiday season BPC Publishing is offering yet another title FOR FREE as an ebook, for a limited period: 27th to 31st (December 25).
David Black, The Phantasmagoria of Capital: A Short History of the Commodity, the Spectacle and its Discontents. 150 pages, illustrated. BPC Publications (London: 2025). Paperback: £9.99. Kindle: £4.99.
Contents
Part One, ‘Origins’, takes off from Richard Seaford’s insight that the reason we see the poetry and philosophy of Greek Antiquity as much less alien to us than, say, the culture of Ancient Egypt, is because of the presence of monetization that we share with the Greeks.
Part Two, ‘New Passions - Post- Feudalism’, examines how, once the power of money, slavery and trade had undermined the feudal world, the spread of commodification gave rise to a new bourgeois ‘subject’. Within the cultures of both Protestantism and the Catholic Counter-Reformation the art of the ‘new’ world reflected and promoted a secular subjectivity which itself fell into crisis and abjectivity as it became objectified and reified in commodity production.
In Part Three, ‘Commodity Culture’, the roots of today’s ‘culture wars’ are traced to how artists of the avant-garde, philosophers and revolutionaries of the Far Left envisaged and sought to bring about a new society freed from the domination of commodities and value-production. Features: Lukács on Journalism as Prostitution, Culture Wars in Hegel’s Spiritual Animal Kingdom, Surrealism, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and the Situationists, T.J. Clark, C.L.R. James, Cornelius Castoriadis, Raya Dunayevskaya.
(AND IF YOU DON’T DO AMAZON) THE BOOK IS AVAILABLE THROUGH YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY, USING ISBN NUMBER: 9781919342573