Chris Kraus, Sylvère Lotringer (eds.): Hatred of Capitalism: A Reader (2001)

“Compiled in 2001 to commemorate the passing of an era, Hatred of Capitalism brings together highlights of Semiotext(e)’s most beloved and prescient works. Founded by French theorist and critic Sylvère Lotringer as a scholarly journal in 1974, Semiotext(e) quickly took on the mission of melding French theory with the American art world and punk underground. Its Foreign Agents, Native Agents, Active Agents and Double Agents imprints have brought together thinkers and writers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Assata Shakur, Bob Flanagan, Paul Virillio, Kate Millet, Jean Baudrillard, Michelle Tea, William S. Burroughs, Eileen Myles, Ulrike Meinhof, and Fanny Howe. In Hatred of Capitalism, editors Kraus and Lotringer bring these people together in the same volume for the first time.”

Assistant editors: Shannon Durbin and Tessa Laird
Publisher Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2001
Double Agents series
ISBN 1584350121, 9781584350125
421 pages

Review: Brian Dillon (Mute, 2002).
Interview with editor (Leo Edelstein, Log, 2001).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (12 MB, updated on 2019-2-25)

Christoph Menke: The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (1988–)

“Recent discussions of aesthetics, whether in the hermeneutic or the analytic tradition, understand the place of art and aesthetic experience according to a model of “autonomy”—as just one among the many modes of experience that make up the realm of reason, situated beside the other “spheres of value.” In contrast, Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida view art and aesthetic experience as a medium for the dissolution of nonaesthetic reason, an experientially enacted critique of reason. Art is not only autonomous, following its own law, different from nonaesthetic reason, but sovereign: it subverts the rule of reason.

In this book Christoph Menke attempts to explain art’s sovereign power to subvert reason without falling into an error common to Adorno’s negative dialectics and Derrida’s deconstruction. The error, which already appeared in romanticism, is to conceive of the sovereignty of art as reflecting the superiority of its knowledge. For art entails no knowledge and its negativity toward reason cannot be articulated as an insight into the nature of reason: art is sovereign not despite, but because of, its autonomy. Menke brings to his arguments a firm grounding in both philosophy and literary studies, as well as familiarity with German, French, and American sources.”

First published in German as Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida, Athenäum, Frankfurt am Main, 1988.

Translated by Neil Solomon
Publisher MIT Press, 1998
Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought series
ISBN 0262631954, 9780262631952
310 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-7-12)

Brian Massumi: A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (1992)

A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a playful and emphatically practical elaboration of the major collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze’s entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text within current debates on postmodern culture and politics.

Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of “state-happy” Marxism and “school-building” strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.

Publisher MIT Press, 1992
ISBN 0262132826, 9780262132824
229 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)