In 1784, the German newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift asked its audience to reply to the question "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant took the opportunity to investigate the purported truths and assumptions of his age. Two hundred years later, Michel Foucault wrote a response to Kant's initial essay, positioning Kant as the initiator of the discourse and critique of modernity. The Politics of Truth takes this initial encounter between Foucault and Kant, as a framework for its selection of unpublished essays and transcripts (...) of lectures Foucault gave in America and France between 1978 and 1984, the year of his death. Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three-volume History of Sexuality. It also offers what is in a sense the most "American" moment of Foucault's thinking, for it was in America that he realized the necessity of tying his own thought to that of the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

Virilio and Lotringer revisit their prescient book on the invisible war waged by technology against humanity since World War II. In June 2007, Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer met in La Rochelle, France to reconsider the premises they developed twenty-five years before in their frighteningly prescient classic, Pure War. Pure War described the invisible war waged by technology against humanity, and the lack of any real distinction since World War II between war and peace. Speaking with Lotringer (...) in 1982, Virilio noted the “accidents” that inevitably arise with every technological development: from car crashes to nuclear spillage, to the extermination of space and the derealization of time wrought by instant communication. In this new and updated edition, Virilio and Lotringer consider how the omnipresent threat of the “accident”—both military and economic—has escalated. With the fall of the Soviet bloc, the balance of power between East and West based on nuclear deterrence has given way to a more diffuse multi-polar nuclear threat. Moreover, as the speed of communication has increased exponentially, “local” accidents—like the collapse of the Asian markets in the late 1980s—escalate, with the speed of contagion, into global events instantaneously. “Globalization,” Virilio argues, is the planet's ultimate accident.Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932 to an immigrant Italian family. Trained as an urban planner, he became the director of the École Speciale d'Architecture in the wake of the 1968 rebellion. He has published twenty-five books, including Pure War and The Accident of Art, both with Sylvère Lotringer and published by Semiotext. Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext, lives in New York and Baja California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions, 2007) and other books. (shrink)

Most of the writers who contributed to the issue were locked up at the time in Italian jails.... I was trying to draw the attention of the American Left, which still believed in Eurocommunism, to the fate of Autonomia. The survival of the last politically creative movement in the West was at stake, but no one in the United States seemed to realize that, or be willing to listen. Put together as events in Italy were unfolding, the Autonomia issue--which has (...) no equivalent in Italy, or anywhere for that matter--arrived too late, but it remains an energizing account of a movement that disappeared without bearing a trace, but with a big future still ahead of it.--Sylvère LotringerSemiotext is reissuing in book form its legendary magazine issue Italy: Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, originally published in New York in 1980. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi with the direct participation of the main leaders and theorists of the Autonomist movement, this volume is the only first-hand document and contemporaneous analysis that exists of the most innovative post-'68 radical movement in the West. The movement itself was broken when Autonomia members were falsely accused of being the intellectual masterminds of the Red Brigades; but even after the end of Autonomia, this book remains a crucial testimony of the way this creative, futuristic, neo-anarchistic, postideological, and nonrepresentative political movement of young workers and intellectuals anticipated issues that are now confronting us in the wake of Empire. In the next two years, Semiotext will publish eight books by such Italian "Post-Fordist" intellectuals as Antonio Negri, Christian Marazzi, Paolo Virno, and Bifo, as they update the theories of Autonomia for the new century.Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext, lives in New York and Baja California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions, 2007). Christian Marazzi, an Italian economist, lives in Switzerland. He is the author of Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy and Sock's Place, both forthcoming from Semiotext. (shrink)

Characterizing it as a "mythic discourse," Jean Baudrillard proceeds, in this brilliant essay, to dismantle the powerful, seductive figure of Michel Foucault. In 1976, Jean Baudrillard sent this essay to the French magazine Critique, where Michel Foucault was an editor. Foucault was asked to reply, but remained silent. Forget Foucault made Baudrillard instantly infamous in France. It was a devastating revisitation of Foucault's recent History of Sexuality—and of his entire oeuvre—and also an attack on those philosophers, like Gilles Deleuze and (...) Félix Guattari, who believed that desire could be revolutionary. In Baudrillard's eyes, desire and power were interchangeable, so desire had no place in Foucault's work. There is no better introduction to Baudrillard's polemical approach to culture than these pages, in which Baudrillard dares Foucault to meet the challenge of his own thought. This Semiotext edition of Forget Foucault is accompanied by a dialogue with Sylvère Lotringer, "Forget Baudrillard," a reevaluation by Baudrillard of his lesser-known early works as a post-Marxian thinker. Lotringer presses Baudrillard to explain how he arrived at his infamous extrapolationist theories from his roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth century social and anthropological works of Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, and Emil Durkheim. (shrink)

Baudrillard's remarkably prescient meditation on terrorism throws light on post-9/11 delusional fears and political simulations. Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities may be the most important sociopolitical manifesto of the twentieth century: it calls for nothing less than the end of both sociology and politics. Disenfranchised revolutionaries hoped to reach the masses directly through spectacular actions, but their message merely played into the hands of the media and the state. In a media society (...) meaning has no meaning anymore; communication merely communicates itself. Jean Baudrillard uses this last outburst of ideological terrorism in Europe to showcase the end of the "Social." Once invoked by Marx as the motor of history, the masses no longer have sociological reality. In the electronic media society, all the masses can do—and all they will do—is enjoy the spectacle. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities takes to its ultimate conclusion the "end of ideologies" experienced in Europe after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the death of revolutionary illusions after May 1968. Ideological terrorism doesn't represent anything anymore, writes Baudrillard, not even itself. It is just the last hysterical reaction to discredited political illusions. (shrink)

Virilio discusses the relationship of war trauma and art and the failure of visual art to reinvent itself when confronted with technology.

Chaosophy is an introduction to Félix Guattari's groundbreaking theories of "schizo-analysis": a process meant to replace Freudian interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, who utilized neuroses as his working model, Guattari adopted the model of schizophrenia--which he believed to be an extreme mental state induced by the capitalist system itself, and one that enforces neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. Guattari's post-Marxist vision of capitalism provides a new definition not only of (...) mental illness, but also of the micropolitical means for its subversion. Chaosophy includes such provocative pieces as "Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist," a group of texts on Guattari's collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze, and "How Martians Make Love," a roundtable discussion with Guattari, Lotringer, Catherine Clément, and Serge Leclaire from 1972. This new, expanded edition features a new introduction by François Dosse and a range of additional essays, including "Franco Basaglia: Guerrilla Psychiatrist," "The Transference," "Semiological Subjection, Semiotic Enslavement," "The Place of the Signifier in the Institution," and "Three Billion Perverts on the Stand.". (shrink)

I think "schizo-culture" here is being used rather in a special sense. Not referring to clinical schizophrenia, but to the fact that the culture is divided up into all sorts of classes and groups, etc., and that some of the old lines are breaking down. And that this is a healthy sign. -- William Burroughs, from _Schizo-Culture_ The legendary 1975 "Schizo-Culture" conference, conceived by the early Semiotext collective, began as an attempt to introduce the then-unknown radical philosophies of post-'68 France (...) to the American avant-garde. The event featured a series of seminal papers, from Deleuze's first presentation of the concept of the "rhizome" to Foucault's introduction of his _History of Sexuality_ project. The conference was equally important on a political level, and brought together a diverse group of activists, thinkers, patients, and ex-cons in order to address the challenge of penal and psychiatric institutions. The combination proved to be explosive, but amid the fighting and confusion "Schizo-Culture" revealed deep ruptures in left politics, French thought, and American culture. The "Schizo-Culture" issue of the Semiotext journal came three years later. Designed by a group of artists and filmmakers including Kathryn Bigelow and Denise Green, it documented the chaotic creativity of an emerging downtown New York scene, and offered interviews with artists, theorists, writers, and No Wave and pre-punk musicians together with new texts from Deleuze, Foucault, R. D. Laing, and other conference participants. This slip-cased edition includes _The Book: 1978_, a facsimile reproduction of the original Schizo-Culture publication; and _The Event: 1975_, a previously unpublished and comprehensive record of the conference that set it all off. It assembles many previously unpublished texts, including a detailed selection of interviews reconstructing the events, and features Félix Guattari, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michel Foucault, Sylvère Lotringer, Guy Hocquenghem, Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, Robert Wilson, Joel Kovel, Jack Smith, Jean-François Lyotard, Ti-Grace Atkinson, François Peraldi, and John Cage. (shrink)

Contributors:Todd Alden, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, David Brown, Gilles Deleuze, Craig Ellwood, Bob Flanagan, Michel Foucault, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Mike Kelley, Joseph Kosuth, Chris Kraus, Julia Kristeva, Don Kubly, Sylvère Lotringer, Deran Ludd, John Miller, Eileen Myles, Darcy Jo Paley, Ann Rower, Sue Spaid, Frances Stark, Mark Stritzel, James Tyler.

Currently in its fourth printing, Foucault Live is the most accessible and exhaustive introduction to Foucault's thought to date. Composed of every extant interview made by Foucault from the mid-60s until his death in 1984, Foucault Live sheds new light on the philosopher's ideas about friendship, the intent behind his classical studies, while clarifying many of the professional and popular misinterpretations of his ideas over the course of his career. As Gilles Deleuze noted, "the interviews in this book go much (...) further than anything Foucault ever wrote, and they are indispensable in understanding his life work." Most notably, Foucault Live includes interviews he made with the gay underground press during his stays in America during the 1970s. In them, Foucault suggests that homosexuality presents a new paradigm for ways of living beyond the predictable, binary couple. All of the philosopher's interests, from madness and delinquency to film and sexuality, and their resultant writings, are probed by knowledgeable critics and journalists. After reading this book, the reader can explore key notions such as episteme, savoir and connaissance, archeology, and archive, without the knitted brow that plagued Foucault's public when he was alive. This is the guide to Foucault's life as an agent provocateur in the world of philosophy and scholarship. (shrink)

Based upon a 1996 conversation Paul Virilio had with French journalist Phillipe Petit, The Politics of the Very Worst summarizes Virilio's speculations about the impact that accidents will have on the planet now that we operate on one-world time. Virilio argues that accidents have now lost all particularity. Accidents and events can no longer be confined to markers in history like Auschwitz or Hiroshima. Trajectories once had three dimensions: past, present, and future. But now, the hyper-concentration of time into "real (...) time" reduces all trajectories to nothing. Consequently, an accident of time is bound to affect our entire being as well as the entire planet. And this is the hidden face of technical and scientific progress that Virilio is attempting to reveal, shrugging off any illusion we may have left about its alleged benefits.Globalization doesn't make the planet bigger, it signals the beginning of "the great confinement." Speed pollutes the distances of the world. After the "green ecology", we are now experiencing another, more invisible and mental, kind of pollution: the "gray ecology." Soon, Virilio suggests, we are going to experience the end of the world -- not the apocalyptic end, but the world as finite. The communication revolution, the attainment of absolute speed, is the reduction of the world to a virtual city in which democracy is no longer possible. This extermination of world-space is a cataclysmic event. For the first time, history has hit a cosmological limit. (shrink)

This new edition of Soft Subversions expands, reorganizes, and develops the original 1996 publication, offering a carefully organized arrangement of essays, interviews, and short texts that present a fuller scope to Guattari's thinking from 1977 to 1985. This period encompasses what Guattari himself called the "Winter Years" of the early 1980s--the ascent of the Right, the spread of environmental catastrophe, the rise of a disillusioned youth with diminished prospects for career and future, and the establishment of a postmodernist ideology that (...) offered solutions toward adaptation rather than change--a period with discernible echoes twenty years later. Following Semiotext's release last season of the new, expanded edition of Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972--1977, this book makes Guattari's central ideas and concepts fully available in the format that had been best suited to Guattari's temperament: the guerrilla-styled intervention of the short essay and interactive dialogue. This edition includes such previously unpublished, substantive texts as "Institutional Intervention" and "About Schools," along with new translations of "War, Crisis, or Life" and "The Nuclear State," interviews and essays on a range of topics including adolescence and Italy, dream analysis and schizo-analysis, Marcel Proust and Jimmy Carter, as well as invaluable autobiographical documents such as "I Am an Idea-Thief" and "So What.". (shrink)

The "genetic bomb" marks a turn in the history of humanity. The accident is a new form of warfare. It is replacing revolution and war. Sarajevo triggered the First World War. New York is what Sarajevo was. September 11th opened Pandora's box. The first war of globalization will be the global accident, the total accident, including the accident of science. And it is on the way. In 1968, Virilio abandoned his work in oblique architecture, believing that time had replaced space (...) as the most important point of reflection because of the dominance of speed. We were basically on the verge of converting space time into space speed... Speed facilitates the decoding of the human genome, and the possibility of another humanity: a humanity which is no longer extra-territorial, but extra-human. Crespuscular Dawn expands Virilio's vision of the implosion of physical time and space, onto the micro-level of bioengineering and biotechnology. In this cat-and-mouse dialogue between Sylvere Lotringer and Paul Virilio, Lotringer pushes Virilio to uncover the historical foundations of his biotech theories. Citing various medical experiments conducted during World War II, Lotringer asks whether biotechnology isn't the heir to eugenics and the "science for racial improvement" that the Nazis enthusiastically embraced. Will the endocolonizataion of the body come to replace the colonization of one's own population by the military? Both biographical and thematic, the book explores the development of Virilio's investigation of space and time that would ultimately lay the foundation for his theories on biotechnology and his startling declaration that after the colonization of space begins the colonization of the body. (shrink)

Baudrillard's unsettling coda: previously unpublished texts written just before the visionary theorist's death in 2007. History that repeats itself turns to farce. But a farce that repeats itself ends up making a history.—from The Agony of Power In these previously unpublished manuscripts written just before his death in 2007, Jean Baudrillard takes a last crack at the bewildering situation currently facing us as we exit the system of “domination” and enter a world of generalized “hegemony” in which everyone becomes both (...) hostage and accomplice of the global market. But in the free-form market of political and sexual liberation, as the possibility of revolution dissipates, Baudrillard sees the hegemonic process as only beginning. Once expelled, negativity returns from within ourselves as an antagonistic force—most vividly in the phenomenon of terrorism, but also as irony, mockery, and the symbolic liquidation of all human values. This is the dimension of hegemony marked by an unbridled circulation—of capital, goods, information, or manufactured history—that is bringing the very concept of exchange to an end and pushing capital beyond its limits: to the point at which it destroys the conditions of its own existence. In the system of hegemony, the alienated, the oppressed, and the colonized find themselves on the side of the system that holds them hostage. In this paradoxical moment in which history has turned to farce, domination itself may appear to have been a lesser evil.This book gathers together three essays—“From Domination to Hegemony,” "The White Terror of World Order," and "Where Good Grows"—and a 2005 interview with Baudrillard by Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext launched Baudrillard into English back in the early 1980s; now, as our media and information infested “ultra-reality” finally catches up with his theory, Semiotext offers The Agony of Power, Baudrillard's unsettling coda. (shrink)

What does it mean to"do theory" in America? In what ways has "French Theory" changed American intellectual and artistic life? How different is it from what French intellectuals themselves conceived, and what does all this tell us about American intellectual life? Is "French Theory" still a significant force in America, raising conceptual questions not easily answered? In this volume of new work--including the French writers Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilled Delezue, as well as essays by Sylvere (...) class='Hi'>Lotringer and Sande Cohen, Mario Biagoli, Elie During, Chris Kraus, Alison Gingeras, and Kriss Ravetto, among others--French theorists assess the impact and reception of their work in America, and American-based critics account for their effects in different areas of cultural criticism and art over the last thirty years. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 551-552, July 2012.

From 1993-96, artist Rainer Ganahl held six reading seminars with six different bibliographies in six different countries and entitled this public project; "IMPORTED -- A READING SEMINAR, Or How to Reinvent the Coffee Table: 25 Books for Instant Use." Imported -- A Reading Seminar is an extension of that project and gathers together a collection of texts with the common theme of import. For this volume, Ganahl invited a series of authors who have an intimate relation with each country he (...) visited to contribute texts or interviews addressing the consequences of exchange, globalization, nationalism, multinationalism, Orientalism, Eurocentrism, tourism, languages, theory, desires, identity, and politics from a variety of perspectives.The interview between Kojin Karatani and Sabu Kohso, included in this volume, addresses important economical and political aspects along with its instrumentality in the construction of nations and of race consciousness; Bill Arning's text demonstrates how the author came to understand through his experience as a curator that sexuality always has a specific cultural context; Coco Fusco deals with issues of prostitution in socialist countries now in the process of transition to capitalism; dealing with displacement of collective identities and their representation, Sami Naïr asks the question: What is it to be Arab? And Sylvere Lotringer: How can one become a foreigner in a foreign country. The resulting volume includes texts in English, Japanese, Russian, German, and French by nineteen different authors. Knowledge of a foreign language helps, but is not necessary. Along with those already mentioned included are texts by Julia Kristeva, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Zeigam Azizov, Lisa Adkins, Dan Bacalzo, Benjamin Buchloh, Karen Kelsky, Dana Leonard, Edward Soja, Victor Tupitsyn, Wulf Schmidt-Wulfen. (shrink)

A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed... There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. That is why (...) one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there still is a danger that you will stratify again everything, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. Yes, couch grass is also a rhizome.Edited by Sylvere Lotringer, On the Line was the first book published in the new "Foreign Agents" series in 1983. It gathers together two seminal texts that Deleuze and Guattari would later elaborate on in A Thousand Plateaus. First delivered in French by Deleuze at the "Schizo-Culture" conference organized by Semiotext at Columbia University in 1975, "Rhizome" introduced a new kind of thinking in philosophy, both non-dialectical and non-hierarchical. The two didn't expect this neo-anarchical blue-print would eventually offer an early template for the understanding of the internet. "Rhizome" substitutes pragmatic, "couch grass," free-floating logic to the binary, oppositional, and exclusive model of the tree.In "Politics," superceding the Marxist concept of class, Deleuze envisages the social macrocosm as a series of lines, and reinvent politics as a process of flux whose outcome will always be unpredictable. It is, he emphasizes, the end of the idea of revolution, but not of the "becoming revolutionary." Throughout, he keeps dispelling the notion of capitalism as a repressive machine only meant to extract surplus value from exploited workers and suggest that it could be opposed from within by redirecting the creativity and multiplicity of its flows.The multiple must be made, not always by adding another dimension, rather in the simplest way, by dint of sobriety... A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radices. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes... Even some animals are, in their pack forms. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all their function of shelter, supply, movement, evasion and breakout... The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couch grass. (shrink)

In June 2007, Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer met in La Rochelle, France to reconsider the premises they developed twenty-five years before in their frighteningly prescient classic, Pure War. Pure War described the invisible war waged by technology against humanity, and the lack of any real distinction since World War II between war and peace. Speaking with Lotringer in 1982, Virilio noted the "accidents" that inevitably arise with every technological development: from car crashes to nuclear spillage, to the (...) extermination of space and the derealization of time wrought by instant communication. In this new and updated edition, Virilio and Lotringer consider how the omnipresent threat of the "accident"--both military and economic--has escalated. With the fall of the Soviet bloc, the balance of power between East and West based on nuclear deterrence has given way to a more diffuse multi-polar nuclear threat. Moreover, as the speed of communication has increased exponentially, "local" accidents--like the collapse of the Asian markets in the late 1980s--escalate, with the speed of contagion, into global events instantaneously. "Globalization," Virilio argues, is the planet's ultimate accident.Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932 to an immigrant Italian family. Trained as an urban planner, he became the director of the École Speciale d'Architecture in the wake of the 1968 rebellion. He has published twenty-five books, including Pure War and The Accident of Art, both with Sylvère Lotringer and published by Semiotext. Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext, lives in New York and Baja California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions, 2007) and other books. (shrink)

The first career retrospective of activist photographer Brian Weil, whose work and practice explored insular cultures. This book offers the first career retrospective of Brian Weil, an artist whose photographs pushed viewers into a deeply unsteadying engagement with insular communities and subcultures. A younger contemporary of such participant-observer photographers as Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, Weil took photographs that foreground the complex relationships between photographer and subject, and between photograph and viewer. Weil was a member of ACT UP and the (...) founder of New York City's first needle exchange, and his photographs became inextricably tied to his activist practice. His late work, an extensive series of portraits whose subjects bear witness to the emerging AIDS pandemic, is included here, along with selections from several earlier and concurrent projects: Sex, Miami Crime, Hasidim, and an extensive video project with members of nascent transgender support groups. This book commemorates a 2013 exhibition of Brian Weil's work at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and includes in-depth essays on Weil by Stamatina Gregory and Jennifer Burris, an interiew with the artist by Claudia Gould, and reprints of archival edited notes discussing crime and photographic evidence based on a series of interviews conducted by Sylvère Lotringer with filmmaker George Diaz in the 1980s. (shrink)

The "genetic bomb" marks a turn in the history of humanity. The accident is a new form of warfare. It is replacing revolution and war. Sarajevo triggered the First World War. New York is what Sarajevo was. September 11th opened Pandora's box. The first war of globalization will be the global accident, the total accident, including the accident of science. And it is on the way. In 1968, Virilio abandoned his work in oblique architecture, believing that time had replaced space (...) as the most important point of reflection because of the dominance of speed. We were basically on the verge of converting space time into space speed... Speed facilitates the decoding of the human genome, and the possibility of another humanity: a humanity which is no longer extra-territorial, but extra-human. Crespuscular Dawn expands Virilio's vision of the implosion of physical time and space, onto the micro-level of bioengineering and biotechnology. In this cat-and-mouse dialogue between Sylvere Lotringer and Paul Virilio, Lotringer pushes Virilio to uncover the historical foundations of his biotech theories. Citing various medical experiments conducted during World War II, Lotringer asks whether biotechnology isn't the heir to eugenics and the "science for racial improvement" that the Nazis enthusiastically embraced. Will the endocolonizataion of the body come to replace the colonization of one's own population by the military? Both biographical and thematic, the book explores the development of Virilio's investigation of space (architecture, urbanism) and time (speed and simultanaeity) that would ultimately lay the foundation for his theories on biotechnology and his startling declaration that after the colonization of space begins the colonization of the body. (shrink)

There is a catastrophe within contemporary art. What I call the "optically correct" is at stake. The vision machine and the motor have triggered it, but the visual arts haven't learned from it. Instead, they've masked this failure with commercial success. This "accident" is provoking a reversal of values. In my view, this is positive: the accident reveals something important we would not otherwise know how to perceive.-- Paul Virilio, The Accident of ArtUrbanist and technological theorist Paul Virilio trained as (...) a painter, studying under Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Bazaine and de Stael. In The Accident of Art, his third extended conversation with Sylvère Lotringer, Virilio addresses the situation of art within technological society for the first time. This book completes a collaborative trilogy the two began in 1982 with Pure War and continued with Crepuscular Dawn, their 2002 work on architecture and biotechnology.In The Accident of Art, Virilio and Lotringer argue that a direct relation exists between war trauma and art. Why has art failed to reinvent itself in the face of technology, unlike performing art? Why has art simply retreated into painting, or surrendered to digital technology? Accidents, Virilio claims, can free us from speed's inertia. As technological catastrophes, accidents are inventions in their own right. (shrink)

In 1976, Jean Baudrillard sent this essay to the French magazine Critique, where Michel Foucault was an editor. Foucault was asked to reply, but remained silent. Forget Foucault made Baudrillard instantly infamous in France. It was a devastating revisitation of Foucault's recent History of Sexuality--and of his entire oeuvre--and also an attack on those philosophers, like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who believed that desire could be revolutionary. In Baudrillard's eyes, desire and power were interchangeable, so desire had no place (...) in Foucault's work. There is no better introduction to Baudrillard's polemical approach to culture than these pages, in which Baudrillard dares Foucault to meet the challenge of his own thought. This Semiotext edition of Forget Foucault is accompanied by a dialogue with Sylvère Lotringer, "Forget Baudrillard," a reevaluation by Baudrillard of his lesser-known early works as a post-Marxian thinker. Lotringer presses Baudrillard to explain how he arrived at his infamous extrapolationist theories from his roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth century social and anthropological works of Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, and Emil Durkheim. (shrink)

“A great story, full of twists and turns.... Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie.” —Stanley Fish, _Think Again, New York Times_ “In such a difficult genre, full of traps and obstacles, French Theory is a success and a remarkable book in every respect: it is (...) fair, balanced, and informed. I am sure this book will become the reference on both sides of the Atlantic.” —Jacques Derrida “The Atlantic Ocean has two sides, and so does French Theory. Reinvented in America and betrayed in its own country, it has become the most radical intellectual movement in the West with global reach, rewriting Marx in light of late capitalism. Breathtakingly moving back and forth between the two cultures, Francois Cusset takes us through a dazzling intellectual adventure that illuminates the past thirty years, and many more decades to come.” —Sylvere Lotringer During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock ‘n’ roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation. Outside the academy, “French theory” had a profound impact on the era’s emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At the same time in academic departments across the country, their poststructuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America’s cultural and intellectual fabric. French Theory is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. François Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today-showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life. François Cusset, a writer and intellectual historian, teaches contemporary French thought in Paris at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and at Columbia University’s Reid Hall. His books include Queer Critics and La Décennie. Jeff Fort is assistant professor of French at the University of California, Davis. He has translated works by Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, and Jean-Luc Nancy. (shrink)

American outlier writer William S. Burroughs was a creative force – an homme de lettres in his own right, yes, but as a cultural theorist as well, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call ‘a society of control’ or ‘a surveillance culture’, and, moreover, as a textual embodiment as well. That is, Burroughs was as much a media theorist and performance artist as he was a traditional literary figure, what we generally call a writer, or novelist, although he (...) lauded those latter categories. Through such multimodality he offered critiques of a ‘control society’ and of ‘thought control’ by a media that strips us of volition. In his lectures on Michel Foucault delivered at the Université de Paris VIII in the 1980s, Gilles Deleuze detailed Burroughs's influence on both philosophers with his critique of our ‘control societies’, a term they adopted from him. These critiques of what Burroughs calls ‘thought control’ were and currently remain inseparable from his emergence as a performance artist, such embodiment of his art readily available amid our own image-obsessed electronic revolution. That is, the products of this period are currently being recirculated through commercial media outlets and through multiple open access formats to suggest – to confirm – that the artist whom many another ‘outsider’ has called ‘the Priest’ and who saw himself as a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’ and ‘a technician of consciousness’, this dystopic modernist author, visionary science fiction writer, and aesthetic weapons maker was one of the major media artists, social critics, cultural theorists and literary figures not only of his but of our ‘postpersonal’ time. Michel Foucault closes The Order of Things by imagining a time when ‘man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’. The closing image was crafted some fifteen years before Foucault met Burroughs in New York in 1975, but in the 1960s Burroughs, too, was already imagining and theorising the disappearing author and a post-human, media-dominated world. Such lines of thought suggest parallel trajectories that Deleuze will see as bridging philosopher and artist if not philosophy and art. (shrink)