Semiotexte

Coming Soon:

Multitude Between Innovation and Negation

Paolo Virno
Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson

The publication of Paolo Virno's first book in English, A Grammar of the Multitude, by Semiotext(e) in 2004 was an event within the field of radical political thought and introduced post-'68 currents in Italy to American readers. Multitude between Innovation and Negativity, written several years later, offers three essays that take the reader on a journey through the political philosophy of language.

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Introduction to Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View

Michel Foucault
Translated by Roberto Nigro Introduction by Dominique Séglard and Sylvère Lotringer

This introduction and commentary to Kant's least discussed work, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, is the dissertation that Michel Foucault presented in 1961 as his doctoral thesis. It has remained unpublished, in any language, until now.

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Radical Alterity

Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume
Translated by Ames Hodges

Where is the Other today? Can Otherness challenge our arrogant, insular cultural narcissism? From artificial intelligence to the streets of Venice, from early explorers to contemporary photographers, Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume discuss the traces of radical alterity in our world. These provocative seminars, held in 1990 and 1991, follow the multiple, intertwined trajectories first projected in Baudrillard's work and his reading of the "radical exoticism" posited by Victor Segalen--ideas Baudrillard extends into the realms of mass media, pseudonyms, technology, and that illusorily close yet radically foreign "primitive society of the future," America.

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The Porcelain Factory

Antonio Negri
Translated by Noura Wedell

In 2004 and 2005, Antonio Negri held ten workshops at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris to formulate a new political grammar of the postmodern. Biopolitics, biopowers, control, the multitude, people, war, borders, dependency and interdependency, state, nation, the common, difference, resistance, subjective rights, revolution, freedom, democracy: these are just a few of the themes Negri addressed in these experimental laboratories.

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Pornocracy

Catherine Breillat
Translated by Paul Buck and Catherine Petit

Introduction by Chris Kraus, Afterword by Peter Sotos

As celebrated as it is reviled, internationally acclaimed filmmaker Catherine Breillat's novel Pornocracy viscerally enacts the dramatic confluence of mystery, desire, and shame that lies at the heart of sexuality. In Pornocracy, a beautiful woman wanders through a gay disco and engages a man, confident that he will follow her. Perversely and dispassionately, she offers her body as the ground of a ritualistic game in which, over the course of three evenings, the two will explore the numbing mechanics of sexual brutality. What follows is an exchange between a man and a woman that is both frankly sexual and deeply philosophical.

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Fatal Strategies

Jean Baudrillard
Translated by Philippe Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski Introduction by Dominic Pettman

When Fatal Strategies was first published in French in 1983, it represented a turning point for Jean Baudrillard: an utterly original, and for many readers, utterly bizarre book that offered a theory as proliferative, ecstatic, and hallucinatory as the postmodern world it endeavored to describe. Arguing against the predetermined outcomes of dialectical thought with his renowned, wry, ambivalent passion, with this volume Jean Baudrillard mounted an attack against the "false problems" posed by Western philosophy.