Félix Guattari: Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, new ed. (2008)

“Chaosophy is an introduction to Félix Guattari’s groundbreaking theories of “schizo-analysis”: a process meant to replace Freudian interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, who utilized neuroses as his working model, Guattari adopted the model of schizophrenia—which he believed to be an extreme mental state induced by the capitalist system itself, and one that enforces 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 for its subversion.

Chaosophy includes Guattari’s writings and interviews on the cinema (such as ‘Cinema Fou’ and ‘The Poor Man’s Couch’), a group of texts on his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze (including the appendix to the second edition of Anti-Oedipus, not available in the English edition), and his texts on homosexuality (including his “Letter to the Tribunal” addressing the French government’s censorship of the special gay issue of Recherches he edited, which earned him a fine for publishing “a detailed exposition of depravity and sexual deviations… the libidinous exhibition of a minority of perverts”). This expanded edition features a new introduction by François Dosse (author of a new biography of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), along with a range of added essays—including ‘The Plane of Consistency,’ ‘Machinic Propositions,’ ‘Gangs in New York,’ and ‘Three Billion Perverts on the Stand’—nearly doubling the contents of the original edition.”

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer
Introduction by François Dosse
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2008
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350601, 9781584350606
300 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2017-6-26)

Bruno Gullì: Earthly Plenitudes. A Study on Sovereignty and Labor (2010)

A fierce critique of productivity and sovereignty in the world of labor and everyday life, Bruno Gullì’s Earthly Plenitudes asks: can labor exist without sovereignty and without capitalism? He introduces the concept of dignity of individuation to prompt a rethinking of categories of political ontology. Dignity of individuation stresses the notion that the dignity of each and any individual being lies in its being individuated as such; dignity is the irreducible and most essential character of any being. Singularity is a more universal quality.

Gullì first reviews approaches to sovereignty by philosophers as varied as Gottfried Leibniz and Georges Bataille, and then looks at concrete examples where the alliance of sovereignty and capital cracks under the potency of living labor. He examines contingent academic labor as an example of the super-exploitation of labor, which has become a global phenomenon, and as such, a clear threat to the sovereign logic of capital. Gullì also looks at disability to assert that a new measure of humanity can only be found outside the schemes of sovereignty, productivity, efficiency, and independence, through care and caring for others, in solidarity and interdependence.

Publisher: Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2010
ISBN 978-1-59213-979-8
200 pages

interview with author

publisher

PDF

Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber (eds.): Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (2007)

“From the ivory tower to the barricades! Radical intellectuals explore the relationship between research and resistance.

What is the relationship of radical theory to movements for social change? In a world where more and more global struggles are refusing vanguard parties and authoritarian practices, does the idea of the detached intellectual, observing events from on high, make sense anymore? In this powerful and unabashedly militant collection, over two dozen academic authors and engaged intellectuals—including Antonio Negri and Colectivo Situaciones—provide some challenging answers. In the process, they redefine the nature of intellectual practice itself.

The twenty essays cover a broad range: embedded intellectuals in increasingly corporatized universities, research projects in which factory workers and academics work side by side, revolutionary ethnographies of the Global Justice Movement, meditations on technology from the branches of a Scottish tree-sit. What links them all is a collective and expansive re-imagining of engaged intellectual work in the service of social change. In a cultural climate in where right-wing watchdog groups seem to have radical academics on the run, this unapologetic anthology is a breath of fresh air.”

Edited with Erika Biddle
Publisher AK Press, Oakland / Edinburgh / West Virginia, 2007
ISBN 1904859356, 9781904859352
336 pages

Publisher

PDF (4 MB, updated on 2017-3-28)