Chaosophy
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“When I was a child, I was, so to speak, in pieces: really a little schizo around the edges. I spent years trying to put myself back together again. Only my thing was, I would pull along different pieces of realities in doing it.” This collection of essays and interviews edited by Sylvère Lotringer and published in 1995, focuses on the French anti-psychiatrist and theorist’s work as director of the experimental La Borde clinic (“A Clinic Unlike Any Other”) and longtime collaborator with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
Chaosophy/iis a groundbreaking introduction to Guattari’s theories on “schizo-analysis”: a process meant to replace Freudian interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, Guattari believes that schizophrenia is an extreme mental state induced by the capitalist system itself, which keeps enforcing 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 of its subversion....
Read more about: Chaosophy »Pure War
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“We tried to reveal a number of important tendencies: the question of speed; speed as the essence of war; technology as the producer of speed; war as logistics, not strategy; endocolonization; deterrence; ultimate weapons; Pure War.”
The publication of Pure War in 1983 introduced Virilio’s thought to the United States, and has since remained one of the most influential and far-reaching essays of our time. Pure War names the invisible war that technology is waging against humanity. For Virilio, the foremost philosopher of speed, the “technical surprise” of World War I was the discovery that the wartime economy could not be sustained unless it was continued during peacetime. As a consequence, the distinction between war and peace ceased to apply, inaugurating the military-industrial complex and the militarization of science itself.
In this dazzling dialogue with Sylvère Lotringer, Paul Virilio displays, for the first time, the entire range of his reflections on the effects of speed on our civilization....
Read more about: Pure War »Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles
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“Ecological catastrophes are ony terrifying for civilians. For the military, they are but a simulation of chaos, an opportunity to justify an art of warfare which is the more autonomous as the political State dies out. At this point, all civilian populations are helpless victims of the scam, of this ransacking of the world’s resources.” – Paul Virilio
What is popular defense? From whom do we have to defend ourselves? Originally civilian populations were capable of defending themselves both in times of peace and war. A military racket was subsequently imposed upon them in the name of protection and popular defense lost its capacity to resist external attack. In case of total war, between the native populations which form the constitutional basis of all great modern states and the military now in charge of defending them there was no more “common culture.” Industrial wars subsequently managed to replace the thousand-year-old pact of semi-colonization with total colonization. First experimented with in South America,...
Read more about: Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles »On the Line
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On the Line gathers together two seminal texts that Deleuze and Guattari would later elaborate on in A Thousand Plateaus. “Rhizome,” first presented in person at the “Schizo-Culture” conference organized by Semiotext(e) at Columbia University in 1975, introduced a new kind of thinking, both non-dialectical and non-hierarchical, that turned out paradoxically to offer an early template for the understanding of the internet. “Rhizome” substitutes pragmatic, “crab grass,” free-floating logic to the binary, oppositional, and exclusive model of the tree.
In “Politics,” superseding the Marxist concept of class, Deleuze and Guattari envisage the social macrocosm as a series of lines, and reinvent politics as a process of flux whose outcome will always be unpredictable. It is, they emphasize, the end of the idea of revolution, but not of the “becoming revolutionary.” Throughout, the two writers keep 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....
Read more about: On the Line »Nomadology
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“The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus…. It is the invention of the nomads…. The very conditions that make the State possible…trace creative lines of escape.” In this daring essay inspired by Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari redefine the relation between the state and its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriers (the army) are nomads who always come from the outside and keep threatening the authority of the state. In the same vein, nomadic science keeps infiltrating royal science, undermining its axioms and principles. Nomadology is a speedy, pocket-sized treatise that refuses to be pinned down. Theorizing a dynamic relationship between sedentary power and “schizophrenic lines of flight,” this volume is meant to be read in transit, smuggled into urban nightclubs, offices, and subways.
Deleuze and Guattari propose a creative and resistant ethics of becoming-imperceptible, strategizing a continuous invention of weapons on the run. An anarchic bricolage of ideas uprooted from anthropology,...
Read more about: Nomadology »Fatal Strategies
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A major work offering “fatal alternatives” to postmodernity. Topics range from modes of political representationand strategies of refusal to aesthetic theory and commodification, situationist theory, seduction, gambling, andobesity. In this shimmering manifesto against dialectics, Jean Baudrillard constructs a condemnatory ethics of the “false problem.” One foot in social science, the other in speculation about the history of ideas, this text epitomizes the assault that Baudrillard has made on the history of Western philosophy. Posing such anti-questions as “Must we put information on a diet?” Baudrillard cuts across historical and contemporary space with profound observations on American corporations, arms build-up, hostage-taking, transgression, truth, and the fate of theory itself. Not only an important map of Baudrillard’s continuing examination of evil, this essay is also a profound critique of 1980s’ American politics at the time when the author was beginning to have his incalculable effect on a generation of this country’s artists and theorists.
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