Ashley’s Reviews > Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets > Status Update

"They retreat into enclaves of privacy and erect more and more barriers to any public contact in order to preserve their private worlds. But by doing so, they play right into the hands of the structure they believe they are opposing. They accept that they have a private world and a private being to treasure. But one cannot defeat the privatization of the world by retreating into privacy."

"The capitalist subject oscillates between dissatisfaction and pleasure, between absence and presence, and it cannot recognize the satisfaction that underlies this oscillation. This subject remains, however, a subject animated by a lost object. As such, it derives its satisfaction from the series of failures to arrive at the pleasure it seeks. "

...In this sense, an image of the end of capitalism is implicit in its structure, and the key to capitalism’s staying power lies in the fact that this ultimately satisfying object doesn’t exist.”

"The psyche satisfies itself through the failure to realize its desire, and capitalism allows the subject to perpetuate this failure, all the while believing in the idea that it pursues success.”

“The essence of capitalism is accumulation”

“Capitalist accumulation envisions obtaining the object that would provide the ultimate satisfaction for the desiring subject, the object that would quench the subject’s desire and allow it to put an end to the relentless yearning to accumulate...

Capitalism =/= culture

“Culture gives the subject a sense of belonging that capitalism does not”

“The capitalist subject constantly experiences its failure to belong, which is why the recurring fantasy within capitalism is that of attaining some degree of authentic belonging... Though capitalism spawns the type of fantasy, it constantly militates against the fantasy’s realization”

Book “tries to understand why so much satisfaction accompanies capitalism and thus what constitutes its hold on those living within its structure.”

Starting point: “capitalism’s relationship to desiring subjectivity”

Next chapters: “how capitalism protects us; but it does enable use to experience the sublime in everyday life.”