Bøger udgivet af Autonomedia

Cultural Writing. CALIBAN AND THE WITCH is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization. "It is both a passionate work of memory recovered and a hammer of humanity's agenda"--Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged.

A "dissident of the gender-sex binary system" reflects on gender transitioning and political and cultural transitions in technoscientific capitalism.

A call to arms by a group of French intellectuals that rejects leftist reform and aligns itself with younger, wilder forms of resistance.Thirty years of "crisis,” mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy... We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it. The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as "the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.” The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine capable of "spreading anarchy and live communism.” Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the "war on terror.” Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized life forms. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.

A new and radical reexamination of today's neoliberalist "new economy” through the political lens of the debtor/creditor relation."The debtor-creditor relation, which is at the heart of this book, sharpens mechanisms of exploitation and domination indiscriminately, since, in it, there is no distinction between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and non-working populations, between retirees and welfare recipients. They are all 'debtors,' guilty and responsible in the eyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor."—from The Making of the Indebted ManDebt—both public debt and private debt—has become a major concern of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx's lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies.Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of "public safety” through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the "entrepreneurs” of our lives, of our "human capital.” In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured.How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt.

A fascinating anthology of texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze."One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian," Michel Foucault once wrote. This book anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966 (on Rousseau, Kafka, Jarry, etc.), belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze's last book, Critique and Clinic (1993). But philosophy clearly predominates in the rest of the book, with sharp appraisals of the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza, Bergson. More surprising is his acknowledgement of Jean-Paul Sartre as his master. "The new themes, a certain new style, a new aggressive and polemical way of raising questions," he wrote, "come from Sartre." But the figure of Nietzsche remains by far the most seminal, and the presence throughout of his friends and close collaborators, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The book stops shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, and presents a kind of genealogy of Deleuze's thought as well as his attempt to leave philosophy and connect it to the outside—but, he cautions, as a philosopher.

A scathing critique of the Left from an indigenous anti-colonial perspective.

Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing.What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?—from Carceral CapitalismIn this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, "Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.

The second, and longest, volume in Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated Spheres trilogy, on the world history and philosophy of globalization.All history is the history of struggles for spheric expansion.—from GlobesIn Globes—the second, and longest, volume in Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated magnum opus Spheres trilogy—the author attempts nothing less than to uncover the philosophical foundations of the political history—the history of humanity—of the last two thousand years. The first, well-received volume of the author's Spheres trilogy, Bubbles, dealt with microspheres: the fact that individuals, from the fetal stage to childhood, are never alone, because they always incorporate the Other into themselves and align themselves with it. With Globes, Sloterdijk opens up a history of the political world using the morphological models of the orb and the globe, and argues that all previous statements about globalization have suffered from shortsightedness. For him, globalization begins with the ancient Greeks, who represented the whole world through the shape of the orb. With the discovery of America and the first circumnavigations of the earth, the orb was replaced by the globe. This second globalization is currently giving way to the third, which we are living through today, as the general virtuality of all conditions leads to a growing spatial crisis.Peter Sloterdijk tells here the true story of globalization: from the geometrization of the sky in Plato and Aristotle to the circumnavigation of the last orb—the earth—by ships, capital, and signals.

A manifesto against the concepts of growth and debt, and a call for a reinvestment in the social body.The Uprising is an Autonomist manifesto for today's precarious times, and a rallying cry in the face of the catastrophic and irreversible crisis that neoliberalism and the financial sphere have established over the globe. In his newest book, Franco "Bifo” Berardi argues that the notion of economic recovery is complete mythology. The coming years will inevitably see new surges of protest and violence, but the old models of resistance no longer apply. Society can either stick with the prescriptions and "rescues” that the economic and financial sectors have demanded at the expense of social happiness, culture, and the public good; or it can formulate an alternative. For Berardi, this alternative lies in understanding the current crisis as something more fundamental than an economic crisis: it is a crisis of the social imagination, and demands a new language by which to address it.This is a manifesto against the idea of growth, and against the concept of debt, the financial sector's two primary linguistic means of manipulating society. It is a call for exhaustion, and for resistance to the cult of energy on which today's economic free-floating market depends. To this end, Berardi introduces an unexpected linguistic political weapon—poetry: poetry as the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and desire, as that which cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. If the protests now stirring about the world are to take shape and direction, then the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent—it will be linguistic, or will not be at all.

An argument that under capitalism, debt has become infinite and unpayable, expressing a political relation of subjection and enslavement.

The first volume in Peter Sloterdijk's monumental Spheres trilogy: an investigation of humanity's engagement with intimate spaces.An epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk's three-volume, 2,500-page Spheres is the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger's Being and Time. Rejecting the century's predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, a self-described "student of the air,” reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial and immunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment, Sloterdijk is able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, René Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille into a morphology of shared, or multipolar, dwelling—identifying the question of being as one bound up with the aerial technology of architectonics and anthropogenesis.Sloterdijk describes Bubbles, the first volume of Spheres, as a general theory of the structures that allow couplings—or as the book's original intended subtitle put it, an "archeology of the intimate.” Bubbles includes a wide array of images, not to illustrate Sloterdijk's discourse, but to offer a spatial and visual "parallel narrative” to his exploration of bubbles.Written over the course of a decade, the Spheres trilogy has waited another decade for its much-anticipated English translation from Semiotext(e). Volumes II, Globes, and III, Foam, will be published in the coming seasons.

An urgent critique of the biopolitical subject and omnipresent Empire.Historical conflict no longer opposes two massive molar heaps, two classes—the exploited and the exploiters, the dominant and dominated, managers and workers—between which, in each individual case, it would be possible to differentiate. The front line no longer cuts through the middle of society; it now runs through each one of us... "—from This Is Not a ProgramTraditional lines of revolutionary struggle no longer hold. Rather, it is ubiquitous cybernetics, surveillance, and terror that create the illusion of difference within hegemony. Configurations of dissent and the rhetoric of revolution are merely the other face of capital, conforming identities to empty predicates, ensuring that even "thieves,” "saboteurs,” and "terrorists” no longer exceed the totalizing space of Empire. This Is Not a Program offers two texts, both originally published in French by Tiqqun with Introduction to Civil War in 2001. In This Is Not a Program, Tiqqun outlines a new path for resistance and struggle in the age of Empire, one that eschews the worn-out example of France's May '68 in favor of what they consider to be the still fruitful and contemporary insurrectionary movements in Italy of the 1970s. "As a Science of Apparatuses” examines the way Empire has enforced on the subject a veritable metaphysics of isolation and pacification, "apparatuses” that include chairs, desks, computers; surveillance (security guards, cameras); disease (depression); crutch (cell phone, lover, sedative); and authority. Tiqqun's critique of the biopolitical subject and omnipresent Empire is all the more urgent as we become inured to the permanent state of exception that is the War on Terror and to other, no less intimate forms of pacification. But all is not lost. In its unrelenting production of the Same, Empire itself creates the conditions necessary for the insurrection to come.

An autobiographical coming-of-age novel by the the "only gay man” in Morocco.An autobiographical novel by turn naïve and cunning, funny and moving, this most recent work by Moroccan expatriate Abdellah Taïa is a major addition to the new French literature emerging from the North African Arabic diaspora. Salvation Army is a coming-of-age novel that tells the story of Taïa's life with complete disclosure—from a childhood bound by family order and latent (homo)sexual tensions in the poor city of Salé, through an adolescence in Tangier charged by the young writer's attraction to his eldest brother, to a disappointing arrival in the Western world to study in Geneva in adulthood. In so doing, Salvation Army manages to burn through the author's first-person singularity to embody the complex mélange of fear and desire projected by Arabs on Western culture. Recently hailed by his native country's press as "the first Moroccan to have the courage to publicly assert his difference,” Taïa, through his calmly transgressive work, has "outed” himself as "the only gay man” in a country whose theocratic law still declares homosexuality a crime. The persistence of prejudices on all sides of the Mediterranean and Atlantic makes the translation of Taïa's work both a literary and political event. The arrival of Salvation Army (published in French in 2006) in English will be welcomed by an American audience already familiar with a growing cadre of talented Arab writers working in French (including Muhammad Dib, Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Katib Yasin).

A Situationist International roman à clef, written by Guy Debord's first wife, a founder of the movement and one of its influential thinkers.

An early work that lays the foundation for establishing a "polemical” dimension to psychoanalysis.We certainly have the unconscious that we deserve, an unconscious for specialists, ready-made for an institutionalized discourse. I would rather see it as something that wraps itself around us in everyday objects, something that is involved with day-to-day problems, with the world outside. It would be the possible itself, open to the socius, to the cosmos...—from The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in SchizoanalysisIn his seminal solo-authored work The Machinic Unconscious (originally published in French in 1979), Félix Guattari lays the groundwork for a general pragmatics capable of resisting the semiotic enslavement of subjectivity. Concluding that psychoanalytic theory had become part and parcel of a repressive, capitalist social order, Guattari here outlines a schizoanalytic theory to undo its capitalist structure and set the discipline back on its feet. Combining theoretical research from fields as diverse as cybernetics, semiotics, ethnology, and ethology, Guattari reintroduces into psychoanalysis a "polemical” dimension, at once transhuman, transsexual, and transcosmic, that brings out the social and political—the "machinic”—potential of the unconscious. To illustrate his theory, Guattari turns to literature and analyzes the various modes of subjectivization and semiotization at work in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, examining the novel as if he were undertaking a scientific exploration in the style of Freud or Newton. Casting Proust's figures as abstract ("hyper-deterritorialized”) mental objects, Guattari maps the separation between literature and science, elaborating along the way such major Deleuze-Guattarian concepts as "faciality” and "refrain,” which would be unpacked in their subsequent A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Never before available in English, The Machinic Unconscious has for too long been the missing chapter from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus project: the most important political extension of May 1968 and one of the most important philosophical contributions of the twentieth century.

Cultural Writing. In its third publication since 1985, this book contains essays and flyers on anarchy as well as a new preface by the author. Pieces from this collection have appeared in various publications around the world, including Ganymede (London) and Pan (Amsterdam). This work is a "literary masterpiece" - Freedom (London) and "Dear to our hearts" - Exquisite Corpse; reading it is "Like sending away for Kix boxtops and getting back real bazookas" - NY Native.

Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde offers a new way of analysing and theorizing the question of the avantgarde today. It is customary within art history and cultural history to argue that the avant-garde disappeared as an (anti)artistic gesture during the 1960s. The dissolution of the Situationist International in 1972 is often presented as the endpoint in the history of the avant-garde. The implosion of the ''68 revolt - quickly in France, after a long process of revolt and counter-revolt in countries like Italy - effectively ended the attempt to use art as a vehicle for a transformation of capitalist society. This book contributes to the discussion of the avant-garde today by discussing whether it is still relevant for a contemporary anti-systemic critique and analysing different instances where the avantgarde has creeped into protests and social experiments outside art and art institutions. Includes essays from Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Esther Leslie, Abigail Susik, Natasha Gasparian, Marina Vishmidt, Yves Citton, and Gene Ray.

With all appropriate modesties and heresies, Bruno Gulli and Richard Gilman-Opalsky think together in the ways of other kindred spirits like Gilles Deleuze and F(c)lix Guattari, bell hooks and Cornel West, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. Gulli and Gilman- Opalsky undertake a philosophical and political inquiry into capitalist forms of life and communist ontologies. From a deep, dialectical study of each other s work, they aim at a new synthesis of theory about possible and desirable beings-in-the-world. Rejecting capitalist conceptions of labor, politics, sovereignty, economy, (neo)liberalism, community, the individual, art, revolution, social change, and even the human person, Gulli and Gilman-Opalsky propose new ways of thinking and being antagonistic to the existing world (such as it is). They consider the prospects for new forms of life realized by way of the emancipatory dreams and struggles of everyday people.