Description
Capital Pain
Book Summary
This essay analyzes how contemporary capitalism generates not only material inequality, but also specific emotional and physical suffering: "capital pain." Through a cartography of current malaise—stress, depression, loneliness, rage, or resentment—the work invites us to recognize these experiences not as personal failures, but as symptoms of an era. The book proposes a new affective awareness that allows for organizing rest, socializing care, and listening to exhaustion as a starting point for radical politics and a renewed form of community.
What is it about?
Capitalism does not just produce commodities, waste, and inequality: it also produces forms of pain, bodies that are exhausted, wounded, overexcited, and dazed. It turns our lives into a theater of efficiency and makes illness, fatigue, and malaise not an exception, but a general condition. We call this set of sufferings and marks that cut through us capital pain. The texts gathered in this volume develop a social map of exhaustion, a cartography of contemporary affects and malaise. They feature stress and depression, rage and shame, loneliness, grief, indolence, or resentment, not as merely private experiences, but as symptoms of an era. Confronting the privatization of suffering and the normalization of catastrophe, this book proposes an affective awareness of the present capable of opening a breach in it to inhabit it differently. Organizing rest, socializing care, listening to exhaustion: perhaps that is where radical politics begins today. Perhaps there, too, we will find a new way of being together.
Main Topics
- Critique of contemporary capitalism and its production of subjective malaise.
- Social cartography of exhaustion, stress, and depression as collective phenomena.
- Analysis of political affects: rage, shame, loneliness, grief, and resentment.
- Proposal for radical politics based on care, rest, and listening to exhaustion.
- Rejection of the privatization of suffering and search for new forms of community.
Who is it recommended for?
This book is aimed at readers interested in political and social philosophy, cultural criticism, and contemporary thought. It is especially relevant for those seeking to understand the emotional and affective dimensions of the crisis of capitalism, as well as for activists, mental health professionals, sociologists, and anyone who wishes to explore alternatives to the generalized malaise of modern life.
What this book offers
- A new perspective that connects personal malaise with economic and social structures.
- Conceptual tools to identify and name the political affects of the era.
- A practical and political proposal to reorganize life around care and rest.
- An analysis that de-privatizes suffering and positions it as a collective problem.
- An invitation to imagine alternative ways of being together in the face of loneliness and indolence.
Technical Specifications
- Author: Juan Evaristo Valls Boix
- Publisher: Nuevos Emprendimientos Editoriales S L
- Language: Spanish
- Subject: Social and Political Philosophy
- Collection: Libre
- Binding: Paperback
- Publication Date: May 2026
- Number of pages: 256
- Weight: 645 g
Editorial Review
Capital Pain offers a necessary and timely reflection on the link between the economic system and contemporary emotional suffering. Its approach, which transcends mere complaint to propose a politics of care and rest, makes it a stimulating read for those seeking to understand and transform the conditions that generate malaise. It is a rigorous, accessible essay that is deeply committed to its time.