Semiotext(e) foreign agents series

A report on the administration of deviant desire in specialized clinics that documents the way our postmodern society exposes sexuality to the point of overexposure. The most perverse perversions are not always those one would expect. Originally conceived as an American update to Foucault's History of Sexuality, Overexposed is even more outrageous and thought-provoking today than it was twenty years ago when first published by a commercial publisher. By a strange reversal, rather than being punished, deviant desire now is administrated in specialized clinics under medical supervision. Sexual excess is being turned into a "boredom therapy" claiming to rid patients of their own desires by forcing them to indulge them past the point of satiety. But are perversions still perverse when they are vindicated unconditionally? At once clinical, bewildering, and deeply poignant, Overexposed shows how science can pervert itself by identifying too closely with its object. This insider's exposition of controversial cognitive behavioral methods (carried out with instruments straight out of A Clockwork Orange—penile transducer? pupillometer?) is a hallucinatory document on the manner in which our postmodern society exposes sexuality to the point of overexposure—in order to exterminate it.

""A vast treasure chest, a bewildering collection . . . to dazzle and fascinate everyone who lifts the lid."-Geoffrey Grigson"--

"Post-situationist theory from Baudrillard. Here he wrings ecstasy from interaction. 'Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake in the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication.'"--PUBLISHER.

"In 2004 and 2005, Antonio Negri held ten workshops at the College International de Philosophie in Paris to formulate a new political grammar of the postmodern. Postmodernity, Negri suggests, can be described as a "porcelain workshop": a delicate and fragile construction that could be destroyed through one clumsy act. Looking across twentieth-century history, Negri warns that our inability to anticipate future developments has already placed coming generations in serious jeopardy. In the impassioned debates recounted in this book, Antonio Negri attempts to describe the formation of an alternative political horizon and looks for a way to define the practices and modes of expression that democracy could take."--book jacket.

The post-'68 psychoanalyst and philosopher visits a newly democratic Brazil in 1982 and meets future President Luis Ignacia Lula da Silva: a guide to the radical thought and optimism at the root of today's Brazil. Following Brazil's first democratic election after two decades of military dictatorship, French philosopher Félix Guattari traveled through Brazil in 1982 with Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik and discovered an exciting, new political vitality. In the infancy of its new republic, Brazil was moving against traditional hierarchies of control and totalitarian regimes and founding a revolution of ideas and politics. Molecular Revolution in Brazil documents the conversations, discussions, and debates that arose during the trip, including a dialogue between Guattari and Brazil's future President Luis Ignacia Lula da Silva, then a young gubernatorial candidate. Through these exchanges, Guattari cuts through to the shadowy practices of globalization gone awry and boldly charts a revolution in practice.

Italian political thinker Paolo Virno argues that the category of "multitude" is a far better tool to analyze contemporary issues than the Hobbesian concept of "people." Globalization is forcing us to rethink some of the categories -- such as "the people" -- that traditionally have been associated with the now eroding state. Italian political thinker Paolo Virno argues that the category of "multitude," elaborated by Spinoza and for the most part left fallow since the seventeenth century, is a far better tool to analyze contemporary issues than the Hobbesian concept of "people," favored by classical political philosophy. Hobbes, who detested the notion of multitude, defined it as shunning political unity, resisting authority, and never entering into lasting agreements. "When they rebel against the state," Hobbes wrote, "the citizens are the multitude against the people." But the multitude isn't just a negative notion, it is a rich concept that allows us to examine anew plural experiences and forms of nonrepresentative democracy. Drawing from philosophy of language, political economics, and ethics, Virno shows that being foreign, "not-feeling-at-home-anywhere," is a condition that forces the multitude to place its trust in the intellect. In conclusion, Virno suggests that the metamorphosis of the social systems in the West during the last twenty years is leading to a paradoxical "Communism of the Capital."

Peter Sloterdijk first became known in this country for his late 1980's Critique of Cynical Reason, which confronted headlong the "enlightened false consciousness" of Habermasian critical theory. Since then he has published a wide range of books, including Spheres, his magnum opus, a three-volume archeology of the human attempt to dwell within spaces, from womb to globe: Bubbles, 1998; Globes, 1999; Foam, 2004, all forthcoming from Semiotext(e). -- In Neither Sun nor Death, Sloterdijk answers questions posed by German writer Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs about world mobilization, fascism and post-humanism, technological catastrophes, media contagion and self-intoxication, and the theory of globalization. -- Iconoclastic and provocative, Sloterdijk is the most exciting and controversial German philosopher to appear on the world scene since Nietzsche and Heidegger. Like Nietzsche, Sloterdijk is convinced that contemporary philosophers have to think dangerously and allow themselves to be "kidnapped" by contemporary "hypercomplexities," forsaking old humanistic and national worldviews for a wider horizon, at once ecological and global. -- Neither Sun nor Death is the best available introduction to his philosophical itinerary. It reveals an extraordinary philosopher as much at ease with current French Theory as with Kant, Heidegger and Indian mystic Osho Rajneesh, whom he met during his seven-year sojourn in India in the 1970's, studying Eastern philosophy. --Book Jacket.

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 Art Urbanist 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.

In this book, Franco Berardi presents an examination of new forms of alienation in our never-off, plugged-in culture - and a clarion call for a 'conspiracy of estranged people'.

"The War machine is the motor of the social machine; the primitive social being relies entirely on war, primitive society cannot survive without war. The more war there is, the less unification there is, and the best enemy of the State is war. Primitive society is society against the State in that it is society-for-war." "Anthropologist and ethnographer Pierre Clastres was a major influence on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, and his writings formed an essential chapter in the discipline of political anthropology. The posthumous publication in French of Archeology of Violence in 1980 gathered together Clastres's final groundbreaking essays and the opening chapters of the book he had begun before his death in 1977 at the age 43. Elaborating upon the conclusions of such earlier works as Society Against the State, in these essays Clastres critiques his former mentor, Claude Levi-Strauss, and devastatingly rejects the orthodoxy of Marxist anthropology and other Western interpretive models of "primitive societies." Discarding the traditional anthropological understanding of war among South American Indians as arising from a scarcity of resources, Clastres instead identifies violence among these peoples as a deliberate means to territorial segmentatin and the avoidance of a State formation. In their refusal to separate the political from the social, and in their careful control of their tribal chiefs--who are rendered weak so as to remain dependent on the communities they represent--the "savages" Clastres presents prove to be shrewd political minds who resist in advance any attempt at "globalization."". "The essays in this, Clastres's final book, cover subjects ranging from ethnocide and shamanism to "primitive" power and economy, and are as vibrant and engaging as they were thirty years ago. This new edition--which includes an introduction by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro--holds even more relevance for readers in today's era of malaise and globalization."--BOOK JACKET.