Necroculture

"Charles Thorpe's Necroculture is a brilliant and powerful warning about America's embrace of the pathologies of violence, the abandonment of civic literacy, the destruction of the planet, and what he calls the tyranny of negative freedom ... . A beautifully written and accessible book, it is an important and crucial source for understanding America's descent into madness, war, militarism, and the death motivated mechanics of terminal exclusion. Necroculture is a must read to both understand and resist the death of democratic ideals in the United States." (Henry Giroux, Professor of English and Cultural Studies and Global TV Network Chair in Communications, McMaster University, Canada) "This is a wonderfully well-conceived, deeply researched, and compellingly argued study of contemporary capitalism as a kind of living death. Thorpe mobilizes a wide range of theoretical and cultural resources to make the case that technological mediation and the reification of everyday life have reached a point of apocalyptic zombification. Thorpe's readings of a broad array of cultural texts-from science-fiction novels to films and television series such as The Walking Dead-are astute and challenging, his analyses of socioeconomic contexts consistently arresting, and his command of Marxist and neo-Marxist theory breathtaking. Highly recommended." (Rob Latham, Science Fiction Studies)

In this book, the author draws on Karl Marx’s writings on alienation and Erich Fromm’s conception of necrophilia in order to understand these aspects of contemporary culture as expressions of the domination of the living by the dead under capitalism.In this book, the author draws on Karl Marx’s writings on alienation and Erich Fromm’s conception of necrophilia in order to understand these aspects of contemporary culture as expressions of the domination of the living by the dead under capitalism. Necroculture is the ideological reflection and material manifestation of this basic feature of capitalism: the rule of dead capital over living labor. The author argues that necroculture represents the subsumption of the world by vampire capital.