Table of Contents

Translator’s Preface Introduction: The Failure of Socialism 1. The Devaluation of the Individual 2. Society and Class against the Living Individual 3. Marxism as a Fascist Theory 4. The Principle of Fascism 5. The Living Individual and the “Economy” 6. Life and Death in the Capitalist Regime 7. The Empire of Death: The Technical-Economic World 8. Death and Politics Conclusion: The Rendezvous in Samarkand Index

Promotional Information

Michel Henry uses the fall of communist regimes to reflect on the place of the individual in the late capitalist moment.

About the Author

Michel Henry (1922-2002) was a leading French philosopher and novelist. He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montpellier, France and author of five novels and numerous philosophical works. Scott Davidson is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Oklahoma City University, USA. He is the translator of Michel Henry's works: Material Phenomenology (2008), Seeing the Invisible (2009), and Barbarism (2012).

Reviews

First published in France in 1991, From Communism to Capitalism is finally available for the English speaking public thanks to a superb translation by Scott Davidson.
*Marx & Philosophy Review of Books*

Michel Henry remains 'the philosophers' philosopher' within the Continental tradition, having deconstructed Husserl, theorised affect, elevated immanence, and proclaimed a material phenomenology long before such gestures became commonplace. In From Communism to Capitalism, we are given access to how this maverick thinker of affect and life arrived at the political and economic implications of his thought at the decisive moment when Communism appeared to give way to the hegemony of late Capitalism.
*John Ó Maoilearca, Film and Television Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston University, UK*

Originally published in 1991, Michel Henry writes From Communism to Capitalism on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thus From Communism to Capitalism goes from the failure of communism to the success of capitalism. But for Henry, the success of capitalism is only alleged. Capitalism is a failure because, like the Marxist thought that animated communism, the liberal thought behind capitalism eliminates subjective life and the living individual. Thus, and this is the most powerful claim of Henry’s book, communism and capitalism “are only two figures of the same death.” While From Communism to Capitalism extends the criticisms of capitalism and technology that Michel Henry had initiated in his 1987 Barbarism, it could be read as a companion text to Derrida’s 1993 Specters of Marx.
*Leonard Lawlor, Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Penn State University, USA*