Bernard Stiegler is Director of Cultural Development at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His many books in English include Technics and Time, For a New Critique of Political Economy, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies and Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals.

• Introduction I. Sociopathology of 1968 1. The paradox of the super-ego in the transformations of capitalism2. The question of spirit is that of the we3. Knowledge and the super-ego: towards a new spirit of capitalism4. Technicity, hostility to civilization, and the intermittency of noetic action5. The crisis of capitalism as ‘ideological disarray’ and as crisis of spirit after May 19686. ‘Artistic critique’ and ‘social critique’, or the jargon of authenticity7. The recuperation of the ‘ideas of ’68’ by French capitalism and the establishment of control society8. Digression on the meteorological predictions of the Alaskan Eskimo9. False problems concerning action10. Authenticity and singularity: fantasy and the forgetting of what does not exist11. Supports and relations of production II. The automatization of the super-ego and the passage of desire as original diversion of libidinal energy 12. The historicity of psychoanalytic categories and the illusion of desire as a natural state13. From psychopathology to sociopathology14. Contradictions between Marcuse’s Marxism and his Freudianism in relation to struggle (eris) against the risk of decomposition. Moving beyond guilt15. Technics, super-ego and desublimation16. Processes of adoption and diversions of libido: Marcuse and the tendency of libidinal energy to fall17. ‘Liberation of instincts’, technesis and the passage of desire Ð the thrust of the knife18. The murder of the father, the opening of time and guilt, and ‘the instant of my death henceforth always pending’19. Diversions and decompositions20. The automatization of the super-ego21. The opposition of Narcissus and Prometheus22. Ontology and the reality principle23. Libidinal ecology Conclusion 24. Intoxications, prohibitions, cares25. The struggle for the life of the spirit26. Consistence of the health and authority of public power: the freedom of the spirit

''Capitalism has lost its spirit, not to mention its mind: destroying the desire it claims to channel, incapable of establishing any value beyond narrow calculation, it now needs saving from itself. Revisiting (and revising) Freud and Marcuse, proposing a ‘libidinal ecology’ to help us avoid the disaster ahead, Stiegler might just be the man for the job.''Martin Crowley, Queens’ College, University of Cambridge "Stiegler asks not how hyperindustrial capital can be reissted today but whether capitalism can be saved from itself and the Pandora's box of dead-end futures that it now generates, from zombie cultures of mass consumerism to the devastation of the biosphere. His bold response is to call for and lay out a new 'libidinal ecology', a project that will become a key reference point for anyone concerned with the central transformative questions of our time."Tom Cohen, State University of New York at Albany