Chris Kraus

Sylvère Lotringer

Jean Baudrillard meets Cookie Mueller in this gathering of French theory and new American fiction. 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. Semiotext(e)'s three-decade history mirrors the history of American thought. Founded by French theorist and critic Sylvere 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.

A Reader

Hatred of Capitalism

Paul Virilio

Pure War (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)

Gilles Deleuze

An anthology of 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, of which the early texts belong to literary criticism. Philosophy clearly dominates the rest of the book with a surprise admission by Deleuze that Sartre was his master.

Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974

In this dazzling dialogue with Sylvere Lotringer, Paul Virilio for the first time displayed the whole range of his reflections on the effect of speed on our civilization—every one of which has been dramatically confirmed over the years since this book's publication.

Pure War

Paul Mattick

Rainer Ganahl

Between August 2001 and February 2002, the Austrian conceptual artist Rainer Ganahl, who lives and works in New York, created a series of drawings entitled Die letzten Tage der Sigmund Freud Banknote (The Last Days of the Sigmund Freud Banknote). This series is in reference to the introduction of the Euro as the new Austrian currency and the discontinuance of the Austrian 50 Schilling banknote, which bears a portrait of Sigmund Freud. In consideration of Freud's importance for dream analysis, Ganahl recorded his dreams each morning until February 28, 2002, when the Schilling ceased to be a legal tender in Austria. Each drawing contains one 50 Schilling note, the dream and its associations, as well as the daily recorded value of the 50 Schilling banknote in different currencies and the number of books on sale at major online booksellers, Amazon.com and Bücher.de. With an introduction by the artist and texts by Paul Mattick, professor of philosophy at Adelphi University, and Sylvère Lotringer, General Editor of Semiotext(e), and a professor at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.

Counting the Last Days of the Sigmund Freud Banknote

Money and Dreams

Donatien Grau

A personal take on French Theory by one of the people who invented it. In the mid-1970s, Sylvère Lotringer created Semiotext(e), a philosophical group that became a magazine and then a publishing house. Since its creation, Semio-text(e) has been a place of stimulating dialogue between artists and philosophers, and for the past fifty years, much of American artistic and intellectual life has depended on it. The model of the journal and the publishing house revolves around the notion of the collective, and Lotringer has rarely shared his personal journey: his existence as a hidden child during World War II; the liberating and then traumatic experience of the collective in the kibbutz; his Parisian activism in the 1960s; his time of wandering, that took him, by way of Istanbul, to the United States; and then, of course, his American years, the way he mingled his nightlife with the formal experimentation he invented with Semiotext(e) and with his classes. Since the early 2010s, Donatien Grau has developed the habit of visiting Lotringer during his trips to Los Angeles; some of their dialogs were published or held in public. This book is an entry into Lotringer's life, his friendships, his choices, and his admiration for some of the leading thinkers of our times. The conversations between Lotringer and Grau show bursts of life, traces of a journey, through texts and existence itself, with an unusual intensity.

Sylvère Lotringer in Conversation with Donatien Grau

I Was More American Than the Americans

Those who are mad like Antonin Artaud, are they just as mad as he was? Madness, like the plague, is contagious, and everyone, from his psychiatrists to his disciples, family, and critics, everyone who gets close to Artaud, seems to participate in his delirium. Sylvère Lotringer explores various embodiments of this shared delirium through what Artaud called “mental dramas”—a series of confrontations with his witnesses or “persecutors” where we uncover the raw delirium at work, even in Lotringer himself. Mad Like Artaud does not intend to add one more layer of commentary to the bitter controversies that have been surrounding the cursed poet’s work since his death in 1948, nor does it take sides among the different camps who are still haggling over his corpse. This book speaks of the site where “madness” itself is simmering.

Mad Like Artaud

Anti-Oedipus

Sande Cohen

This work demonstrates what French theory looks like today, thirty years after its first appearance

French Theory in America

Christian Marazzi

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. The movement itself was broken when Autonomia members were falsely accused of (and prosecuted for) being the intellectual masterminds of the Red Brigades; but even after the end of Autonomia, this book remains a crucial testimony of the way this creative, futuristic, neo-anarchistic, postideological, and nonrepresentative political movement of young workers and intellectuals anticipated issues that are now confronting us in the wake of Empire.

Sylvère Lotringer

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