Books like Human, All Too Human — picked by fans

According to the Debord, concepts are fluid and open since they express alienation, class struggle, and the unavoidable contradictions inherent in capitalism.

Therefore, his theory has a strong anarchic character and does not ignore the economy or the social conflicts confronted in everyday life, as some readers of his theory may believe. The spectacle, as used by the Situationists and Debord, does not take place on a different plane from that of commodity fetishism or alienation in everyday living, as sadly some scholars hold.

His theory casts light on the idea of the inverted topsy-turvy world and the negativity that defetishises the apparent, closed, and reified forms, such as the bourgeois form of democracy and the state, that constitute a closed and fetishized social totality.

For my study, Benjamin succeeds in showing how the dominant social forms in each capitalist society can be debunked and that the official narrative that perpetuates the logic that supports the current system can be seriously questioned.

Benjamin’s goal was not to build another totality, another theoretical system that would bring certainty and stability to those who want to change the world radically towards socialism.

Rather, his philosophy encourages us to continue fighting to open the cracks in capitalism, to create multiple ruptures in the capitalist system, even though we do not have all the answers and are aware that our struggle will have an uncertain result.

This is how we redeem and vindicate past generations who spilled their blood for another world. This is how we redeem Benjamin himself, who dedicated his life's work to this purpose.

This collection of articles shows that the theory of the Situationists has a strong anarchic character and does not ignore the economy or the social conflicts confronted in everyday life, as some readers of their theory may believe.

The spectacle, as used by the Situationists, does not take place on a different plane to that of commodity fetishism or alienation in everyday living, as sadly some scholars hold.

In my understanding, the Situationists had a clear understanding of commodity fetishism and alienation in everyday life. They also had a concept of corporeal materialism and the negativity that defetishizes the apparent, closed, and reified social forms that constitute a fetishized social totality, like the state or the bourgeois form of democracy. 

Nietzsche demystifies the idea that the state provides stability and certainty in our lives and, as a result, the concept that is necessary. He has a dialectic between phenomenon and essence, for which the state is the social form that corresponds to the alienation we experience in our everyday life in capitalism. Thus, as a corresponding social form to the mass culture, it reiterates our unfreedom. Nietzsche holds a concept of fetishization that brings him much closer to critical Marxism than previously thought. 

Maurizzio Lazaratto is a critic of contemporary capitalism. 

His view of the subject finds powerful expression in Making of the Indebted Man, a study that tracks the development of a neo-liberal, or financialized, global economy organized around a new form of exploitation – no longer the extraction of surplus value from industrial labor, but the ever-mounting debt assumed by consumers seeking to maintain their standard of living while wages keep falling. 

The accruing debts serve as an effective means for disciplining the population while at once becoming an immensely lucrative source of profit for banks and other corporations that buy and sell them on the world’s financial markets.

This book is a treasure chest for me, which I take from my bookshelf again and again. When I first bought it—many years ago—I read it in one breathtaking sweep. It is THE book that incorporates modernity, the ‘break’ being the signum of modernity (in Adorno’s own words).

Adorno left ‘high philosophical theory’, escaped from the intricate loops of Hegelianism, to land in a landscape of seemingly trivial paragraphs hiding deep thought. As a mysterious pillar saint of the youth revolt of 68 (which he despised), his insights in this book remain in my brain like little hooks.

They make me return to my bookshelf again and again. The modern world is broken like the paragraphs in this book. Based on that, we will return.

White argues it isn’t enough for environmentalists to simply point a finger at oil drillers and multinational corporations. He instead interrogates how greater humanity has maintained an elusive system of stints and bypasses for what he calls a Barbaric Heart. As citizens of Nature, White maintains we fail ourselves in numerous ways. We call upon the rhetoric and logic of technical, scientific, and bureaucratic systems even though we suspect they might have caused the problem in the first place. 

He points to the value of redefining work into vocations, of reconsidering what we principally consider to be holy and beautiful, and of directing our large brains toward expanding the project of Being rather than the GDP. Like Nietzsche, White believes the purpose of thought is not to locate Truth but rather to make it ever less convenient to lie to ourselves and live in perpetual dishonesty. White doesn’t spoon-feed us… show more.

Waite’s book is an often brilliant account of how Nietzsche (and Heidegger too) have duped the philosophical and cultural Left. The book is too long, and also often unwieldy and self-indulgent. Yet it contains many gems. Part of what I was trying to do in my book was to make some of Waite’s best insights accessible by writing a much shorter, more punchy book.

Nietzsche’s greatest admirers often distort his views. Mishima is no exception. Considering his nationalism, militarism, and ritualistic suicide, it’s little surprise he endorses the popular misconception of Nietzsche as a champion of egoism and power. 

In this fascinating, disturbing story, adolescent boys create a club devoted to an amoral, pseudo-Nietzschean ideal. When they encounter a mysterious sailor, they worship him as a living embodiment of their values until he defies the image they’ve created. 

Mishima misinterprets Nietzsche but in a critically illuminating way. The boys’ ultimate reaction to their disappointing demi-god proves their hypocrisy, revealing that they idolize precisely the qualities they lack. So Mishima inadvertently debunks the stereotypical image of the “overman,” a cartoonishly impossible superhero, a fantasy who attracts only his polar opposites: the insecure, resentful, conformist, and childish.

This early study of the young Nietzsche is probably the most personal choice as it returns me to an earlier self who first encountered Nietzsche as an undergraduate in the 1960s. In one sense this was my first introduction to what later became known as `Continental Philosophy’. But more than this, it demonstrated that there were fundamental issues and problems that were simply evaded and occluded by the standard histories of philosophy and European culture. The passion to return to the ancient world as a way of understanding the modern world has remain with me to the present. Nietzsche’s reflections on tragedy and `the tragic age’ struck me as a vital source of radical questions and pointed toward problems that remain with me to the present day: the Indo-European language roots of the first thinkers, the seminal role of Homer and Homeric poetry within the problematics of thought, the rejection… show more.