Alfie Bown, CAPITALISMO & CANDY CRUSH, 2019

Enjoy! Here it is, the imperative that holds together our consumption and our own relationship with cultural products, whether it is video games, TV series, pop music or even daring treatises of critical theory. In this text, halfway between psychoanalysis and philosophy, Alfie Bown asks himself about the meaning and value of «enjoyment» in the context of late neoliberal apitalism: what distinguishes the way in which «we enjoy» of smartphone games like Candy Crush Saga from the way we approach the reading of Žižek or Deleuze? And how to address for the purposes of authentic emancipation the pleasure we experience from the vision of Game of Thrones or listening to «Gangnam Style»? A learned, original and at times unsettling reading to better understand how to talk about the things we like, and what we like about the things we talk about.

Alfie Bown, co-editor of the Hong Kong Review of Books, is the author of The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity 2018) and Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy (Bloomsbury 2018). He writes for the Guardian and Paris Review and is editor of the Everyday Analysis website.