Semiotexte

New Releases:

Good Sex Illustrated

Tony Duvert
Translated by Bruce Benderson [read Benderson's intro here >]

First published in France in 1973, Good Sex Illustrated gleefully deciphers the subtext of a popular sex education manual for children produced during that period. In so doing, Duvert mounts a scabrous and scathing critique of how deftly the “sex-positive” ethos was harnessed to promote the ideal of the nuclear family. Like Michel Houllebecq, Duvert is highly attuned to all the hypocrisies of late twentieth century western “sexual liberation” mass movements. As Bruce Benderson notes in his introduction, Good Sex Illustrated shows that, “in our sexual order, orgasm follows the patterns of any other kind of capital…‘good sex’ is a voracious profit machine.” But unlike Houllebecq, Duvert writes from a passionate belief in the integrity of unpoliced sex and of pleasure.

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twin time: or, how death befell me

Veronica Gonzalez

Poetic, sensuous and witty, Veronica Gonzalez’s debut novel unfolds like a fairy tale spanning the dusty hills of Los Angeles and the glittering nightlife of Mexico City. Raised in northeast LA by her widowed immigrant father, a baker, Mona has grown up believing her mother died minutes after her birth, and her twin brother was simply given away. Stifled by unnameable doubts as a child, when her father dies, Mona sets off on a quest to discover her long-lost twin brother. The journey takes her into the labyrinth of her own fabulations about her parents’ lives, and a dreamy Mexico City that exists only as cultural imagination. In the process she encounters a band of Nordic men, her Chinese double, a lascivious giant, and a tribe of feral children. Gonzalez masterfully probes the oddness of Mona’s interior world until it becomes a twisted parable for all kinds of displacement.

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Autonomia
Post-Political Politics

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi
with a new introduction by Sylvère Lotringer, "In the Shadow of the Red Brigades"

Semiotext(e) is reissuing in book form its legendary magazine issue Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, originally published in New York in 1980. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi with the direct participation of the main leaders and theorists of the Autonomist movement (including Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone, Paolo Virno, Sergio Bologna, and Franco Berardi), this volume is the only first-hand document and contemporaneous analysis that exists of the most innovative post-'68 radical movement in the West.

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Art and Revolution
Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century

Gerald Raunig
Translated by Aileen Derieg

Gerald Raunig has written an alternative art history of the "long twentieth century," from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the turbulent counter-globalization protests in Genoa in 2001. Meticulously moving from the Situationists and Sergei Eisenstein to Viennese Actionism and the PublixTheatreCaravan, Art and Revolution takes on the history of revolutionary transgressions and optimistically charts an emergence from its tales of tragic failure and unequivocal disaster. By eloquently applying Deleuze and Guattari's idea of the "machine," Raunig extends the poststructuralist theory of revolution through to the explosive nexus of art and activism.

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Molecular Revolution in Brazil

Felix Guattari and Suely Rolnik
Translated by Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes

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.

Lost Between the Edges

Eldon Garnet

"I didn't expect this book to take me where it did, and when I came back to my everyday world it didn't feel the same any more. Eldon Garnet employs a deadpan narrative that heightens one's awareness of the possibility for evil on your own street. It's a terrific book."

— Douglas Copeland

Tale of 2 Cities

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Overexposed
Perverting Perversions

Sylvère Lotringer

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 it was first published. By a strange reversal, instead of being punished, deviant desire now is administrated in specialized clinics under medical supervision. Sexual excess is being turned into a “boredom therapy” claiming to get patients rid of their own desires. But are perversions still perverse when they are vindicated unconditionally?

Beauty Talk

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Beauty Talk & Monsters

Masha Tupitsyn

Masha Tupitsyn's Beauty Talk & Monsters is a debut series of stories as told through the movies. Equally influenced by Brian De Palma and Kathy Acker, Tupitsyn revisits the ruins of childhood and youth, nurtured on the fringe of the glittering lower Manhattan art world and the Atlantic haven of Provincetown in the 1980s. Moving fluidly through space, time, and a range of cinematic frameworks, Tupitsyn cuts through the cynical glamour and illusion of Hollywood to a soft, secret heart.

Forget Foucault

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In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities
Translated by Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton
and Andrew Berardini
Introduction by Sylvère Lotringer

Jean Baudrillard

Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983; originally published in French in 1978) challenges political representation, mediation and dialectics. It probably is the most important socio-political manifesto of the 20th century (parallel to The Communist Manifesto), because it brought both sociology and politics to rest.

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The Politics of Truth
Translated by Lysa Hochroth & Catherine Porter
Edited by Sylvère Lotringer
Introduction by John Rajchman

Michel Foucault

In 1784, the German newspaper Berlinische Monatschrifte asked its audience to reply to the question “"What is Enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant, following Moses Mendelssohn, took the opportunity to investigate the purported truths and assumptions of his ‘"age of reason."’ Two hundred years later, Michel Foucault released a response to Kant's initial essay, positioning the philosopher as the initiator of the discourse, and critique, of modernity—a credit traditionally accredited to Nietzsche.

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Speed and Politics
Tanslated by Mark Polizzotti
Introduction by Benjamin Bratton

Paul Virilio

Speed and Politics (1986; first published in France in 1977) is the matrix of Virilio's entire work. Building on the works of Morand, Marinetti, and McLuhan, Virilio presents a vision more radically political than that of any of his French contemporaries: speed as the engine of destruction.