To Live and Think like Pigs - The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies

Description

A startlingly prescient treatise on the cybernetic automation of society and a burlesque satire of its middle-class celebrants.An uproarious portrait of the evils of the market and a technical manual for its innermost ideological workings, this is the story of how the perverted legacy of liberalism sought to knead Marx's "free peasant" into a statistical "average man"-pliant raw material for the sausage-machine of postmodernity. Combining the incandescent wrath of the betrayed comrade with the acute discrimination of the mathematician-physicist, Ch telet scrutinizes the pseudoscientific alibis employed to naturalize "market democracy" and the "triple alliance" between politics, economics, and cybernetics. A bestseller in France on its publication in 1998, this book remains crucial reading for any future politics that wants to replace individualism with individuation and libertarianism with liberation, this new translation constitutes a major contribution to contemporary debate on neoliberalism, economics, and capitalist subjectivation.

Gilles Ch telet (1944-1999) was a mathematician and philosopher and a leading member of the Front homosexuel d'action revolutionnaire (FHAR). He was Professor at the University of Paris VIII, and Program Director at the Coll ge Internationale de philosophie. Alain Badiou is a French philosopher. He has published a number of major philosophical works, including The Immanence of Truths, the final installment of his Being and Event trilogy, released in French in 2018. Robin Mackay is a philosopher, Director of the UK arts organization Urbanomic, and Associate Researcher at Goldsmiths University of London.

While a surprising success in France, Chatelet's book was unavailable in English and has been somewhat overlooked. If we had been more aware of it outside of the Francophone context, then the anger and complexity of Chatelet's devastating account of the origins of our condition would have prepared us with frightening clarity and precision for what was to come. -Liam Gillick, e-flux