In late capitalism, the subjective character of enjoyment is appropriated into circuits of consumption. Philosophers have long remarked the self-subjugating effects of peoples’ absorption in the standard practices of their day, those taken to be ‘what everyone does’. In Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger pointed out that ‘We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure.’ If you like an activity because you have unthinkingly assumed an approving view of it from others, does this still count as an authentic pleasure?

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