Semiotext(e)

Semiotext(e)

Founded	1974
Founder	Sylvère Lotringer
Country of origin	United States
Headquarters location	Los Angeles
Distribution	MIT Press
Key people	Hedi El Kholti, Chris Kraus, Sylvère Lotringer
Publication types	Books, magazines, pamphlets
Imprints	Active Agents, Foreign Agents, Intervention Series, Native Agents and Animal Shelter
Official website	semiotextes.com

Semiotext(e) is an independent publisher of critical theory, fiction, philosophy, art criticism, activist texts and non-fiction.

History

Founded in 1974, Semiotext(e) began as a journal that emerged from a semiotics reading group led by Sylvère Lotringer at the Columbia University philosophy department. Initially, the magazine was devoted to readings of thinkers like Nietzsche and Saussure. In 1978, Lotringer and his collaborators published a special issue, Schizo-Culture, in the wake of a conference of the same name he had organized two years before at Columbia University. The magazine brought together artists and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat and Lee Breuer. Schizo-Culture brought out connections between "high theory" and underground culture that had not yet been made, and forged the "high/low" aesthetic that remains central to the Semiotext(e) project.

As the group dispersed over time, issues appeared less frequently. In 1980, Lotringer began to assemble the Foreign Agents series, a group of "little black books", often culled from longer texts, to polemically debut the work of French theorists to US readers. He was aided in this by Jim Fleming, whose collective press Autonomedia would be Semiotext(e)'s distributor for the next twenty-one years. Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations was the first of these books to appear, followed by titles by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Paul Virilio, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault, among others. Spin magazine cited the little black books as "Objects of Desire" in a 19XX design feature.

In 1990, Chris Kraus proposed a new series of fiction books by American writers, which would become the Native Agents imprint. Kraus worked at the St. Marks Poetry Project and saw an overlap between the theories of subjectivity advanced in the Foreign Agents books and the radical subjectivity practiced by female first-person fiction writers. Designed to promote an anti-memoiristic "public I", the series published Kathy Acker, Barbara Barg, Cookie Mueller, Eileen Myles, David Rattray, Ann Rower, Lynne Tillman and many others.

A third series, Active Agents, began in 1993 with the publication of Still Black Still Strong by Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal, with the goal of presenting explicitly political, topical material. It has also published texts by Kate Zambreno, Bruce Hainley, and Eileen Myles.

In 2001 Semiotext(e) changed its base of operations from New York to Los Angeles, ceasing its involvement with Autonomedia to begin an ongoing distribution arrangement with MIT Press. Hedi El Kholti, the Moroccan-born artist and writer who co-founded the now-defunct Dilettante Press, became Semiotext(e)’s art director.

As the decade progressed, El Kholti saw a need to re-imagine the Semiotext(e) project beyond the small-format books of the series. Earlier titles would be republished as large-format books within the new History of the Present imprint.

In 2004, El Kholti became managing editor of the press. He, Kraus and Lotringer then became joint, list-wide co-editors. Semiotext(e)'s new goal was to advance its original conflation of literature and theory, and to expand the anti-bourgeois queer theory presented in early issues of the Semiotext(e) journal.

The purview of Native Agents expanded to include science fiction books by Maurice Dantec and Mark von Schlegell and works by writers like Tony Duvert, Pierre Guyotat, Travis Jeppesen, Grisélidis Real, Bruce Benderson, and Abdellah Taïa. Aware that the theorists he introduced in the 1980s had by now been absorbed into the academic mainstream, Sylvère Lotringer turned his attention to Italy's post-Autonomia critical theory, commissioning and publishing works by Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, Christian Marazzi [fr], Maurizio Lazzarato and others. Semiotext(e) also became the English-language publisher for Peter Sloterdijk’s notable Spheres trilogy. Re-visioning New York's ‘last avant-garde’ of the 1980s, Semiotext(e) published archival works by or about some of that era's most important artists, including Penny Arcade, Gary Indiana and David Wojnarowicz.

Semiotext(e) was invited to participate as an artist in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, for which it produced twenty-eight pamphlets by writers and artists associated with the press. These included "new, commissioned works by Franco “Bifo" Berardi, John Kelsey, Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles, Ariana Reines, and Abdellah Taïa, among others, and previously unpublished texts by such influential twentieth-century figures as Simone Weil, Julio Cortazar, and Jean Baudrillard."

Semiotext(e) Intervention Series

Semiotext(e) publishes the Intervention Series (2009—present), an ongoing series of short books on subjects related to left-wing politics. Topics of the series include anti-capitalism, anti-authoritarianism, post-structuralism, feminism, and economics. All books in the series are designed by Hedi El Kholti. The series is notable for its first installment: The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee, a French pseudonymous author (or authors). Upon its release, the book was condemned by American conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who described it as a dangerous radical leftist manifesto. The Coming Insurrection is also known for its association with the legal case of the Tarnac Nine, a group of nine people, including Julien Coupat, who were arrested in Tarnac, rural France, on November 11, 2008, on suspicion of sabotaging French railways. The method of sabotage actually used was similar to one suggested in the book, and members of the group were suspected to be members of the Invisible Committee. Coupat later co-founded Tiqqun, a short-lived philosophical magazine whose work is also represented in the Intervention Series.

Major topics of the series include French anarchism (The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun), Italian Marxist economic criticism (Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco Berardi, Christian Marazzi) and violence in the context of the Mexican Drug War (Sergio González Rodríguez, Sayak Valencia). Other topics discussed include art history (Gerald Raunig, Chris Kraus), racism and the criminal justice system (Houria Bouteldja, Jackie Wang), continental philosophy (Jean Baudrillard, Peter Sloterdijk), and contemporary culture (François Cusset, Jennifer Doyle, Paul Virilio).

Although the series treats a variety of subjects in left-wing politics and culture, there are also commonalities and through-lines among the works. Several of the series' entries address the Financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the consequent protest movements of the early 21st century, particularly Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring; these are compared by several of the series' authors with the French protests of May 1968 and the Italian Years of lead. In the context of these protest movements, authors in the series describe a tendency to refuse to seize political power, thus also refusing to engage with states, businesses, and traditional power entities in expected ways. This refusal of power is also described as "destituent". Twentieth-century continental philosophy is frequently cited by the series' authors, particularly the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben. Several of the series' authors decry the state of exception, a legal theory attributed to the German jurist Carl Schmitt (and later criticized and further theorized by Agamben as well as Achille Mbembe), which posits that the state has authority to act outside the rule of law in extreme circumstances (e.g. a state of emergency) in the name of the public good. Works in the series also criticize Richard Nixon's decision to remove the United States from the gold standard in 1971, and French television executive Patrick Le Lay who stated that his network's job was to sell Coca-Cola to its viewers via advertising, not provide content.

The Semiotext(e) Intervention Series

Number	Author	Title	Date	Summary
1	Various authors	Autonomia: Post-Political Politics	1980/2007	"The only first-hand document and contemporaneous analysis of the most innovative post-'68 radical movement in the West, the creative, futuristic, neo-anarchistic, postideological Autonomia."
1	The Invisible Committee	The Coming Insurrection	2009	"A call to arms by a group of French intellectuals that rejects leftist reform and aligns itself with younger, wilder forms of resistance."
2	Christian Marazzi [fr]	The Violence of Financial Capitalism	2009/2011	"An innovative analysis of financialization in the context of postfordist cognitive capitalism." New edition: "An updated edition of a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis from a postfordist perspective."
3	Guy Hocquenghem	The Screwball Asses	2009	"A founder of queer theory contends that the ruling classes have invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto, splitting and mutilating desire in the process."
4	Tiqqun	Introduction to Civil War	2010	"Activists explore the possibility that a new practice of communism may emerge from the end of society as we know it."
5	Gerald Raunig [de]	A Thousand Machines	2010	"The machine as a social movement of today's "precariat"—those whose labor and lives are precarious."
6	Jean Baudrillard	The Agony of Power	2010	"Baudrillard's unsettling coda: previously unpublished texts written just before the visionary theorist's death in 2007."
7	Tiqqun	This is Not a Program	2011	"An urgent critique of the biopolitical subject and omnipresent Empire."
8	Chris Kraus	Where Art Belongs	2011	"Chris Kraus examines artistic enterprises of the past decade that reclaim the use of lived time as a material in the creation of visual art."
9	Jarett Kobek	ATTA	2011	"A disorienting fictionalized portrayal of 9/11 mastermind Mohamed Atta and the meaning of madness."
10	Paul Virilio	The Administration of Fear	2012	"A new interview with the philosopher of speed, addressing the ways in which technology is utilized in synchronizing mass emotions."
11	Sergio González Rodríguez	The Femicide Machine	2012	"An account and analysis of the systematic murder of women and girls in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez."
12	Tiqqun	Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl	2012	"A theoretical dissection of capitalism's ultimate form of merchandise: the living spectacle of the Young-Girl."
13	Maurizio Lazzarato	The Making of the Indebted Man	2012	"A new and radical reexamination of today's neoliberalist "new economy" through the political lens of the debtor/creditor relation."
14	Franco "Bifo" Berardi	The Uprising	2012	"A manifesto against the concepts of growth and debt, and a call for a reinvestment in the social body."
15	Gerald Raunig [de]	Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity	2013	"With the economy deindustrialized and the working class decentralized, a call for alternative horizons for resistance: the university and the art world."
16	Peter Sloterdijk	Nietzsche Apostle	2013	"Peter Sloterdijk's essay on Friedrich Nietzsche and the benefits and dangers of narcissistic jubilation."
17	Maurizio Lazzarato	Governing by Debt	2015	"An argument that under capitalism, debt has become infinite and unpayable, expressing a political relation of subjection and enslavement."
18	The Invisible Committee	To Our Friends	2015	"A reflection on, and an extension of, the ideas laid out seven years ago in The Coming Insurrection."
19	Jennifer Doyle	Campus Sex, Campus Security	2015	"A clear-eyed critique of collegiate jurisprudence, as the process of administering student protests and sexual-assault complaints rolls along a Möbius strip of shifting legality."
20	Sergio González Rodríguez	The Iguala 43	2017	"A well-researched and powerfully argued account of the disappearance of forty-three students and an analysis of the cruelty that normalizes atrocity."
21	Jackie Wang	Carceral Capitalism	2018	"Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing."
22	Houria Bouteldja [fr]	Whites, Jews, and Us	2017	"A scathing critique of the Left from an indigenous anti-colonial perspective."
23	The Invisible Committee	Now	2017	"A new political critique from the authors of The Coming Insurrection, calling for a 'destituent process' of outright refusal and utter indifference to government."
24	Sayak Valencia	Gore Capitalism	2018	"An analysis of contemporary violence as the new commodity of today's hyper-consumerist stage of capitalism."
25	François Cusset	How the World Swung to the Right	2018	"An examination of the reactionary, individualist, cynical, and belligerent shift in global politics to the right, implemented both by the right and the establishment left."
26	Franco "Bifo" Berardi	Breathing	2019	"The increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, and the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere: an essay on poetical therapy."
27	Sergio González Rodríguez	Field of Battle	2019	"The emergence of a geopolitical war scenario, establishing a form of global governance that utilizes methods of surveillance and control."
28	Tiqqun	The Cybernetic Hypothesis	2019	"An early text from Tiqqun that views cybernetics as a fable of late capitalism, and offers tools for the resistance."
29	Maurizio Lazzarato	Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution	2021

Bibliography

• Sylvère Lotringer, "My 80s: Better Than Life," Artforum, April 2003
• Hedi El Kholti Chris Kraus Sylvère Lotringer: "SOMEWHERE IN THE UNFINISHED: The History of Semiotext(e) Part 2, Los Angeles,” Whitney Biennial Catalogue, Whitney Museum of Art, New York: 2014

External links

• Official website
• Semiotext(e) titles at the MIT Press
• David Rattray, New York Times obituary