To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies

by Gilles Chatelet, Alain Badiou (Foreword by)

Overview

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, Châtelet 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780983216988
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	01/15/2019
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Gilles Châtelet (1944–1999) was a mathematician and philosopher and a leading member of the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR). He was Professor at the University of Paris VIII, and Program Director at the Collège 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.

What People are Saying About This

Endorsement

Châtelet saw clearly the dangers of a taste for ideas such as chaos and emergence, and anticipates the buzz around big data, crowdsourcing, thought-leaders, market democracy, and even bespoke Brooklyn yogurt-makers. He is a Juvenal or Jonathan Swift for this disintegrating spectacle that is the over-developed world.

—McKenzie Wark, author of The Beach Beneath the Street

From the Publisher

Châtelet saw clearly the dangers of a taste for ideas such as chaos and emergence, and anticipates the buzz around big data, crowdsourcing, thought-leaders, market democracy, and even bespoke Brooklyn yogurt-makers. He is a Juvenal or Jonathan Swift for this disintegrating spectacle that is the over-developed world.

—McKenzie Wark, author of The Beach Beneath the Street

Editorial Reviews

While a surprising success in France, Châtelet'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—

From the Publisher