Book Description
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."
Book Description
In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers.
The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America and away from her husband--and far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative.
I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world--and it's a book you won't put down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.
Customer Reviews:
A New Low for Academic Onanism.......2007-07-21
It's no secret that the academy aids and abets the various psychoses and neuroses of bookish female wrecks and the pantywaists who willfully endure and even indulge their rubbish. Dick's only sin is that he is too cool and too wise to their games and refuses to play. The man's a prince and this sad, pathetic lady knows it all to well but can't help herself. David Lodge tried to lampoon the academy but he's in diapers compared to this woman's effortless and shameless escapades in self-parody which echo out a collective indictment into the halls of every institution that has taken post-structuralism and its attendant nonsense seriously. Baby, when you're standing in hole, stop digging.
for anyone who has loved a dick.......2004-07-17
this book gives one an intricate look inside the mind of a married woman wrestling with the emotions of love and lust for a man who objectifies himself to her cause. while dick is the source of adornment and folly, chris's unsupported love is forced to take on new forms. a vicarious adventure in which the concept of love (for self and other) can be explored.
Fanx.......2000-02-29
This is a great book, Do buy it. I concur with the other reviewers especially the Aussie woman. Chris, thanks for the honourable mention. Hope that 'Aliens & Anorexia' is an even greater success
WOW.......1999-09-26
Okay, it's not a perfect book. It's scary and self-indulgent and could have been trimmed. Yet ... it sticks with me like few things I've read this year. I heard it set off a firestorm n the art world, and I can see why. It's rare to see female anger come out so real, so raw. I bet most men hate this book.
There's a party scene in this book that is the most honest thing I've ever read about female humiliation -- always being the "plus one" of some guy, or ignored for the prettier girls.
I think it's a little too real and that scares people (men and women alike).
I Love Dick Embraces Failure With Style.......1999-01-20
This intriguingly titled volume is authored by Chris Kraus, a New Zealand-born alternative film-maker and teacher, now based in LA and New York. Married to Sylvere Lottringer, progenitor of the Semiotext(e) publishing house and cult intellectual, Kraus is concerned to prove that she has a fierce intellect of her own. Obviously a fan of experimentation, Kraus has produced a book which consists of a pastiche of letters, old art reviews, travelogues, essays and philosophical pronouncements. I Love Dick begins with a crush and develops into a full-scale reworking of the epistolary novel. Ostensibly, the narrative arises from Kraus' pursuit of her husband's academic colleague named Dick. With her husband's somewhat hesitant blessing, Kraus constructs this affair then views it as a text and attempts deconstruction. This story of manufactured desire also delivers a vivid portrait of Kraus' life to date. This involves intimate insights into her chequered past including descriptions of her Crohns disease and anorexia as well as providing glimpses of various sexual encounters, public humiliations and minor triumphs. In fact, much of the book is devoted to the project of reclaiming her past and making sense of it. She says she aims to 'avenge the ghost of her former self' by putting down the 'dirty, murky and complex' elements of her experience in writing. I Love Dick attempts the near impossible task of dealing with dumb infatuation in a brilliantly self-reflexive way. For Kraus, Dick is an object of affection, a sounding-board, a symptom of malaise and despite his indifference to her advances, a solution of sorts. As a way of explaining her process Kraus says:' When I met Dick I saw the two of us falling into the quintessential rock n' roll romance seduction, and I wanted us to play it out together as grown-ups. He didn't want to, but he also never said he didn't want to, so I took that as permission to play..' Her belief in a kind of Kierkegaardian performative philosophy makes her recognise situations and move with them, even if this involves a degree of manipulation and exaggeration. As the protagonist as well as the narrator of this drama, she has the remarkable ability to be passionate and analytical simulataneously. Even at the height of this 'amour fou', there is a detached, ironic quality to her eloquently rendered observations. Kraus' ability to actively involve her husband is this particular 'art project' is testament to her belief that hetrosexuality may be lived differently. She says: 'I wanted to figure out heterosexuality before turning 40 because I wouldn't get another chance.' Knowingly, she uses her charms to insert herself between two intellectual men - Sylvere & Dick - as a challenge to their academic composure. However, she soon realises that the admiration and respect that exists between Dick and Sylvere poses more of a threat to her own subjectivity than to their friendship. Apparently, this amorous project arose directly from the failure of Kraus' film-making. The mixed reception of her films led her question her methods and to branch out in a more literary direction. As a consequence, she embarks on a hopeless affair as away of discussing failure itself. She writes to Dick about how she has shed her former ambitions in favour of love of him: 'Embracing you and failure has changed all that cause now I know I am no-one. And there's a lot to say..' This recognition of her own insignificance furnishes her with the freedom to express herself as she could never do before. Though she paints a rather unflattering portrait of Dick's character, Kraus is most critical of her own personality traits. As one reviewer has said of her writing : 'She makes self-esteem appear as some sort of gross pretension.' While this text may appear to be the mad ravings of an erotomaniac with a penchant for self-dramatisation, it would be a mistake to underestimate its concerns. Kraus sees her descent into the vortex of infatuation as an avowedly feminist journey. In al letter to Dick she tries to explain her reasons for launching into a correspondence of such Proustian intensity: 'No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whether it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope's turned back on her. Because emotion is just so terrifying and the world refuses to believe it can be pursued as discipline, as form. Dear Dick, I want to make my the world more interesting than my problems. therefore I have to make my problems social.' The author's willingness to name names and to record gossipy elements of real-life could give the impression that this book is a transparently artless 'roman a clef'. While she seems to be aiming for a devastatingly 'honest' account of her life and loves, the reader would be well advised to avoid any easy conflation of the fictional and real Kraus. She never rules out the possibility of a part or total fabrication of her persona or her autobiographical stories. The debate about whether these events 'really' happened tends to ignore the sophistication of its criticism of literary conceits and its referencing of conceptual art through its documentation of process. The deliberately radical nature of the novel has prompted vitriolic responses. Aside from questions of libel, one of the reasons why the book has been heavily criticised is that it doesn't fit into any particular genre. I Love Dick playfully blurs the lines between literary categories in a way that is guaranteed to unsettle most readerly preconceptions. An unfavourable review in Art Forum described the book as being ' not so much written as secreted'. This accusation, with its overtly misogynist overtones, may be countered by invoking Susan Sontag's famous essay 'On Style' which contends that 'the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.'
Book Description
People tend to confuse winning freedom with conversion to capitalism. It is doubtful that the joys of capitalism are enough to free peoples.... The American "revolution" failed long ago, long before the Soviet one. Revolutionary situations and attempts are born of capitalism itself and will not soon disappear, alas. Philosophy remains tied to a revolutionary becoming that is not to be confused with the history of revolutions.
--from Two Regimes of Madness
Covering the last twenty years of Gilles Deleuze's life (1975-1995), the texts and interviews gathered in this volume complete those collected in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974) . This period saw the publication of his major works: A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Cinema I: Image-Movement (1983), Cinema II: Image-Time (1985), all leading through language, concept and art to What is Philosophy? (1991). Two Regimes of Madness also documents Deleuze's increasing involvement with politics (with Toni Negri, for example, the Italian philosopher and professor accused of associating with the Red Brigades). Both volumes were conceived by the author himself and will be his last. Michel Foucault famously wrote: "One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian." This book provides a prodigious entry into the work of the most important philosopher of our time. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze never stopped digging further into the same furrow. Concepts for him came from life. He was a vitalist and remained one to the last.
Book Description
"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.
Customer Reviews:
Deleuze's Early Genius.......2005-08-20
It is always fascinating to see the development of a philosopher's thought. By the age of 28 Deleuze had already formulated the main ideas of what he would develop in Difference and Repetition, his most rigorous work. No understanding of Deleuze can truly take place without this work, since it is here for the first time that you see Deleuze most clearly articulating his ideas since they are also the time when he created them. The interviews are especially insightful and include an incredible short encounter between him and Merleau-Ponty.
Deleuze had an enormous amount of influences and drew on many things that he only mentions in his later works. You can see some of those influences in full form here. I wish Deleuze had permitted his works earlier than age 28 to be published, but most likely he was not clear in his style or concepts. But this is the earliest we have, and it is with the same rigor and genius that he writes and speaks in this work. Absolutely essential to any study of Deleuze.
The other two most important books by Deleuze:
1) Difference and Repetition (the masterwork)
2) The Logic of Sense
great collection!.......2004-01-22
This book is a collection of short texts, book reviews, and interviews by and with Deleuze, many of which I've never seen in print before. There are some tremendously interesting pieces, for example, where Deleuze is presenting his ideas in Difference and Repetition to a group that includes Canguilhem and Jacques Merleau-Ponty (yes, Jacques), followed by a Q&A session in which Deleuze is grilled for clarification and pressed by objections. Furthermore, it is just nice to have all in one volume the early essays on Bergson ("The Conception of Difference in Bergson") and other central essays, like "How do we recognize structuralism," all of which are collected here. There are reviews of works by Lyotard and Hyppolite, essays on Nietzsche, Hume, Crime Novels, and Color in painting--- and finally, a string of interviews concerning Anti-Oedipus circa 1972.
There won't be any revelations for the Deleuze scholar here, as most of this material has seen print elsewhere and been commented upon extensively. But, it is nevertheless invaluable, I think, to have all of these pieces under one cover. And, for beginners, this might very well be as good a place to start as any, as you get Deleuze's earliest work progressing up to his work with Guattari, ordered chronologically by the editors.
Well done!!
Book Description
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.
Book Description
A cult novel in France, this sci-fi thriller is now being made into a movie by Mathieu Kassovitz. Set in the hidden "flesh and chip" breeding grounds of the first cyborg communities and peopled by Serbian Mafiosi, Babylon Babies has as its hero a hard-boiled leatherneck veteran of Sarajevo named Thoorop who is hired by a mysterious source to escort a young woman named Marie Zorn from Russia to Canada. A garden variety job, he figures. But when Thoorop is offered an even higher fee by another organization, he realizes Marie is no ordinary girl. A schizophrenic and the possible carrier of a new artificial virus, Marie is carrying a mutant embryo created by an American cult that dreams of producing a genetically modified messiah, a dream that spells out the end of human life as we know it.
Inspired by Philip K. Dick, William S. Burroughs, Gilles Deleuze, and other extrapolationists of the future, Babylon Babies unfolds at breakneck speed as Thoorop risks his life to save Marie, whose brain -- linking to the neuromatrix -- loses all limits and becomes the universe itself. Exploring the symbiosis between organic matter and computer power to spin new forms of consciousness, Maurice Dantec rides Nietzsche's prophecy: "Man is something to be overcome."
Customer Reviews:
Too Many Dreams.......2007-09-20
At first I thought this might be a bit of a talking dog act. (You know, the marvelous thing is not that it's done well but that...) By this I mean that, maybe, the book was an almost-readable post-apocalyptic novel.
For some reason, after spinning off fantasy and its various genres, the old field of science fiction seems to have settled upon producing unreadable post-apocalyptic novels as the the acceptable media for what is to be called science fiction these days.
I'm not sure why science-fiction needs to be unreadable, (as well as depressing; while still boring, repetitive and above all, obscure), but this means that science fiction has basically come to a dead end.
After a few pages I thought that this novel might actually go somewhere. It has a plot of sorts, (an obscure one naturally), and actually has differentiable characters. I haven't seen that in years.
Sad to say it still manages to eventually bog itself down in nothingness. I've had to give up reading it somewhere in the middle, after hitting about 30 solid pages of dreams and nightmares by various characters. I just got tired of skimming and speed reading. Having gotten to the end of one meaningless, meandering dream I was plunked directly into another meaningless meandering nightmare. Too much to put up with.
b.t.w., in my opinion, the dream sequence is always a cop-out by the author. In lieu of figuring how to make something happen, he or she, (the author), just plunks it into the middle of a dream. It's just a cheapo' version of dies ex machina. If the author can't write a book with anything more than a minimal reliance upon dreams, I'm not willing to exert more effort in reading than appears to have been expended in writing.
I guess I'd end with the note that the Amazon blurb that was meant to highly praise this novel said that the reader who could perform the "arduous" task of finishing the novel would be rewarded. I'm not sticking around for my reward. I agree completely that reading this book is an arduous task, and I'm not being rewarded nearly enough to put up with it.
Yawn...........2007-06-26
Call me old-fashioned, but breathlessness, incoherence and a hectic pace do not a novel make. Characters are introduced almost every page, and the author seems to take pride in the fact that they are totally one-dimensional and generally disposable. Dantec has lots of ideas - so many, in fact, that none wind up being important, and few are developed beyond a sentence or two. If the author paid a bit more attention to narrative coherence and character development, he would be interesting. But as is it, I'd suggest skipping this and reading someone who makes this kind of technique work - Steve Erickson.
unique cyberpunk.......2006-05-04
Originally written in French several years ago, this novel does seem just a bit dated as it is finally released in English in 2005. Many of the flashbacks are to time periods that have already passed and that serves to break the reader out of the illusion at a few points. Other than that this was an enjoyable read.
The cloak and dagger form of other cyberpunk is evident here except it is metted out at a more measured pace. Dantec creates a unique cast of characters who evolve over the life of the story. The unusual locations (at least for most American fiction) like ex-Russian states and China set the novel apart from similar titles.
The central mystery slowly builds to a satisfying conclusion wrapping up the major plot points while leaving open the otion for a sequel. It would be interesting to see what the author would do in a sequel further expanding on the fascinating philosophy of evolution just touched on at the end of the novel.
Babylon Babies Blows!!.......2006-03-07
What started out as a different and exciting sci-fi story, after about 150 pages started to point towards dullsville.
Interesting concept, no action and adventure to drive it.
If Hollywood is thinking of making this a into Vin Deisel's next movie - then they better amp up the exciting aspects of this borefest.
The author held such promise too...
Cyberpunk meets Ballard, Dick and Deleuze.......2005-10-27
Babylon Babies is a vortex, blending the eurasian conflicts, the future of biological warfare, DNA, genetic manipulation, philosophy of the fold, schizophrenia, TAZ, urban guerilla...
Babylon babies is the french answer to Gibson, Ballard, Philippe K. Dick., an answer that links american's cyberpunk to the french philosophy of Deleuze, and the chaotic geopolitic of diying Europe.
Babylon babies is a ride in a sputnik over Tchernobyl and Canada in 2012, with NIN, Portishead, Laibach played loud on an old radio connected to the 80's ColdWave era...
Babylon Babies opened my mind to unclassical SF, underground litterature, avant-garde phylosophy, scientific research, and religions.
This book connects you towards unexpected new directions. It is not a book that enclose your vision, it is an explosion that expands your mind.
I can't wait for more translation of Maurice G. Dantec books.
Book Description
Sylvie wanted to believe that misery could simply be replaced with happiness. Time was a straight line, stretching out before you. If you could create a golden kind of time and lay it right beside the other time, the time of horror, Bad History could just recede into the distance without ever having to be resolved.
--from Torpor
Set at the dawn of the New World Order, Chris Kraus's third novel, Torpor loops back to the beginning of the decade that was the basis of I Love Dick, her pseudo-confessional cult-classic debut. It's summer, 1991, post-MTV, pre-AOL. Jerome Shafir and Sylvie Green, two former New Yorkers who can no longer afford an East Village apartment, set off on a journey across the entire former Soviet Bloc with the specious aim of adopting a Romanian orphan. Nirvana's on the radio everywhere, and wars are erupting across Yugoslavia.
Unhappily married to Jerome, a 53-year-old Columbia University professor who loathes academe, Sylvie thinks only of happiness. At 35, she dreams of stuffed bears and wonders why their lives lack the tremulous sincerity that pervades thirtysomething, that season's hot new TV show. There are only two things, Sylvie thinks, that will save them: a child of their own, and the success of The Anthropology of Unhappiness, her husband's long-postponed book on the Holocaust. But as they move forward toward impoverished Romania, Jerome's memories of his father's extermination at Auschwitz and his own childhood survival impede them.
Savagely ironic and deeply lyrical, Torpor explores the swirling mix of nationalisms, capital flows and negative entropy that define the present, haunted by the persistence of historical memory. Written in the third person, it is her most personal novel to date.
Customer Reviews:
Twenty Questions for Chris Kraus.......2007-02-08
An American girl meets and marries a French boy who's carrying around an enormous number of paralyzing memories of the Holocaust, and she decides to adopt a baby from a Third World country.
If only I could ask Chris Kraus my 20 questions! Among them would be, How would you describe the form you work in? It's very distinctive, very Chris Kraus, but what is it? I've heard people refer to your books as "comic" books, not like Nancy and Sluggo but something more like a Jane Austen sense of social comedy.
Torpor conveys like very few novels the misery of a long term relationship. You compare them to "hypothermia, giving yourself up in free and loose embtace into a dream state that turns out to be inertia." Do all relationships disintegrate into clownishness? You cite the comic French pairs, Mercier and Camier, Bouvard and Pechuchet, as models for your nagging lovers.
What's also so striking about your book is that you're not afraid to make a dog one of your main characters. I don't think any reader will forget the heroic dachshund Lily who gets carted around Europe in a sort of hideaway sack, nor that it's Lily's suffering that Sylvie and Jerome overlook in their picaresque adventure.
Sylvie is afraid that no one will ever take her seriously because she is untrained and has no MFA. And Jerome, who is a full professor at an Ivy League university, is always taunting her about this. Ms. Kraus, I read your book of essays, VIDEO GREEN, and the title essay is pretty much about the same thing, only translated to the art world. Galleries are everything, and there is no entry into getting a gallery unless you have an MFA from a select school. The whole system seems hopeless.
Back to Torpor, we of the New Narrative movement want to claim you as one of our own for your amazing vulnerability and the frankness with which you paint Sylvie as basically a sort of loser doomed to fail at anything she takes up.
And the gossip level is fairly astounding. We feel like we're backstage with Nan Goldin, Felix Guattari, Kathy Acker, so many more from the worlds of high art, French theory, transgressive literature. Of course, Ms. Kraus, everyone wants to know the identity of the few you have concealed in pseudonyms, especially "the writers Kenneth Broomfield and June Goodman."
Sylvie can't even look at Kenneth Broomfield or even think about him without one unfortunate comment, which he may or may not have made, ringing in her head. We've all been there, haven't we.
If you were here, I would ask you, do you write for a "particularly cultured audience?" And you would probably say something like, no, I write for a curious one, I want my books to be read by a girl just starting community college,
The problem with Europe, and Jerome by extension, is that people can't separate the present from the past of fifty years ago, or a thousand years ago. As Jerome is haunted and motivated by the events of his childhood, the Romanians seem to be trapped in a nightmare medievalism. In one city Jerome and Sylvie try to stay at, Brigitte Bardot appears to applaud the citizens who have let 300,000 wild dogs run feral in the streets. Meanwhile, in LA, there's no past and there's no imperfection and everything is beautiful.
Kraus writes beautifully about sex, and there's a strong passage where Sylvie is transported back to earlier ages when she's experiencing orgasm, back to 17, 14, once to age 5. It's very moving.
I don't know if I'll ever be able to ask these questions of the writer, but I can recommend TORPOR to anyone interested in either happiness or despair, America or Europe, the new or the old.
Powerfully rich and potent--Inspired writing- A FABULOUS WORK!.......2006-12-17
I immensely enjoyed taking this journey with Chris Kraus' heroine Sylvie, savoring every description and nugget of pathos. I began to feel a deep affection for her as the story unfolded. This work has broad appeal given the author's own background; a fascinating mélange centered around art, philosophy and the past. This background has provided the author with ingredients for a truly engaging and spectacular point of view about the time, places and subjects on which she bases her story. The writing has the flavor of a deeply satisfying stew, cooked to perfection. I was moved by Sylvie's appreciation of the beauty of the ordinary as she confronted the painful experiences in her life, described as only Chris Kraus can do.
"torpor" is a beautifully written novel by a brilliant author with a fresh and authentic voice. Both Kraus' style and subject matter will appeal to a wide audience. Not enough women are familiar with Chris Kraus' writing - hopefully "torpor" will change that. However, Kraus is not specifically a women's writer: the male audience will be just as spellbound. We are very fortunate for her gifts, and for "torpor".
I love her writing........2006-03-22
There are some books that can't easily be talked about in company because to share an enthusiasm for the work is to confess one's... well, either sins or transgressions, or what.... There are some writers, and Chris Kraus is one of them, who can't be easily taught because you can't discuss her without talking honestly about yourself. Anyone can be clever about, oh... you know... the writers who are easy to talk about.
THIS IS A GREAT BOOK. The last page is devastating but you need to read the whole thing ahead of it.
Read her other books, too.
She'll probably not get the attention she deserves, because the critics will find ways to keep her local and small.
But you won't, will you?
Book Description
In February 1991, the artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) and the philosopher Sylvère Lotringer met in a borrowed East Village apartment to conduct a long-awaited dialogue on Wojnarowicz's work. Wojnarowicz was then at the peak of his notoriety as the fiercest antagonist of morals crusader Senator Jesse Helms--a notoriety that Wojnarowicz alternately embraced and rejected. Already suffering the last stages of AIDS, David saw his dialogue with Lotringer as a chance to set the record straight on his aspirations, his personal history, and his political views. The two arranged to have this three-hour dialogue video-recorded by a mutual friend, the artist Marion Scemama.
Lotringer held on to the tape for a long time. After Wojnarowicz's death the following year, he found the transcript enormously moving, yet somehow incomplete. David was trying, often with heartbreaking eloquence, to define not just his career but its position in time. The subject was huge, and transcended the actual dialogue. Lotringer then spent the next several years gathering additional commentary on Wojnarowicz's life and work from those who knew him best--the friends with whom he collaborated.
Lotringer solicited personal testimony from Wojnarowicz's friends and other artists, including Mike Bildo, Steve Brown, Julia Scher, Richard Kern, Carlo McCormick, Ben Neill, Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, Marguerite van Cook, and others. What emerges from these masterfully-conducted interviews is a surprising insight into something art history knows, but systematically hides: the collaborative nature of the work of any "great artist." All these respondents had, at one time, made performances, movies, sculptures, photographs, and other collaborative works with Wojnarowicz. In this sense, Wojnarowicz appears not only as a great originator, but as a great synthesizer.
Book Description
"The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory," wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972), instigating one of the most daring intellectual adventures of the last half-century. Together, the well-known philosopher and the activist-psychiatrist were updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and "constructivist" vision of capitalism: "Capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies because it has no exterior limit itself. It works well as long as it keeps breaking down."
Few people at the time believed, as they wrote in the often-quoted opening sentence of Rhizome, that "the two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together." They added, "Since each of us was several, that became quite a crowd." These notes, addressed to Deleuze by Guattari in preparation for Anti-Oedipus, and annotated by Deleuze, substantiate their claim, finally bringing out the factory behind the theatre. They reveal Guattari as an inventive, highly analytical, mathematically-minded "conceptor," arguably one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in philosophy and sociopolitical theory today. The Anti-Oedipus Papers (1969-1973) are supplemented by substantial journal entries in which Guattari describes his turbulent relationship with his analyst and teacher Jacques Lacan, his apprehensions about the publication of Anti-Oedipus and accounts of his personal and professional life as a private analyst and codirector with Jean Oury of the experimental clinic Laborde (created in the 1950s).
Book Description
The Utopie group was born in 1966 at Henri Lefebvre's house in the Pyrenees. The eponymous journal edited by Hubert Tonka brought together sociologists Jean Baudrillard, René Lourau, and Catherine Cot, architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Antoine Stinco, and landscape architect Isabelle Auricoste. Over the next decade, both in theory and in practice, the group articulated a radical ultra-leftist critique of architecture, urbanism, and everyday life. Utopia Deferred collects all of the essays Jean Baudrillard published in Utopie as well as recent interviews with Jean Baudrillard and Hubert Tonka.
Utopie served as a workshop for Baudrillard's thought. Many of the essays he first published in Utopie were seminal for some of his most shockingly original books: For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, The Mirror of Production, Simulations, Symbolic Exchange and Death, and In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. But Utopie was also a topical journal and a political one; the topics of these essays are often torn from the headlines of the tumultuous decade following the uprisings of May 1968.
Books:
- A Vulgar Display Of Power: Courage and Carnage At The Alrosa Villa
- Air Guitar
- America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies
- American Cinema/American Culture
- American Government (Cliffs Quick Review)
- Associated Press Reporting Handbook
- At the Altar of Sexual Idolatry
- Behold a Pale Horse
- Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power: The Rise and Risks of the New Conservative Hate Culture
- Boys To Men: The Transforming Power of Virtue
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- History: Fiction or Science
- Classic Bulbs: Hidden Treasures for the Modern Garden
- The Oh Really
- Understanding and Using English Grammar
- Winning Chess Tactics, revised
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
- Advanced Dairy Chemistry Vol 3: Lactose, Water, Salts, and Vitamins
- Building Accounting Systems Using Access 2003
- Taxing Times: A Guide to Australia's Tax Debate
- Trading Options to Win: Profitable Strategies and Tactics for Any Trader
General
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)
"Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976 (Lectures at the College de France)
Empire
