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(P/B) ARCHEOLOGY OF VIOLENCE
The war machine is the motor of the social machine; the primitive social being relies entirely on war, primitive society cannot survive without war. The more war there is, the less unification there is, and the best enemy of the State is war. Primitive society is society against the State in that it is society-for-war (from The Archeology of Violence). Anthropologist and ethnographer Pierre Clastres was a major influence on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, and his writings formed an essential chapter in the discipline of p...
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(H/B) BOOK OF MUTTER
Composed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno's "Book of Mutter" is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes - and dead calm - of grief. Book of Mutter is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author's searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of her mother's death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, There...
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(P/B) THE AGONY OF POWER
In these previously unpublished manuscripts written just before his death in 2007, Jean Baudrillard takes a last crack at the bewildering situation currently facing us as we exit the system of "domination" (based on alienation, revolt, revolution) and enter a world of generalized "hegemony" in which everyone becomes both hostage and accomplice of the global market. But in the free-form market of political and sexual liberation, as the possibility of revolution (and our understanding of it) dissipates, Baudrillard sees the hegemonic process...
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(P/B) THE COMING INSURRECTION
The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord-and with comparable elegance-it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as "the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality." The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription...
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(P/B) MERCURY STATION
Published by Semiotext(e) in 2005, Mark von Schlegell's debut novel Venusia was hailed in the sci-fi and literary worlds as a "breathtaking excursion" and "heady kaleidoscopic trip," establishing him as an important practitioner of vanguard science fiction. Mercury Station, the second book in Von Schlegell's System Series, continues the journey into a dystopian literary future. It is 2150. Eddard J. Ryan was born in a laboratory off Luna City, an orphan raised by the Black Rose Army, a radical post-Earth Irish revolutionary movement. But ...
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(P/B) THE IGUALA 43
On the night of September 26th, 2014, policemen attacked a group of student protestors in the Mexican town of Iguala. Forty-three of these students were then kidnapped and turned over to criminals who allegedly tortured and murdered them, and then burned their corpses. The families of the victims refused to accept the official story, which placed all blame on local actors and absolved the federal government of any culpability. The anger provoked by this atrocity, one of the most barbaric acts in recent times, divided Mexican society in two...
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(H/B) FOAMS
Foams completes Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated Spheres trilogy: his 2,500-page "grand narrative" retelling of the history of humanity, as related through the anthropological concept of the "Sphere." For Sloterdijk, life is a matter of form and, in life, sphere formation and thought are two different labels for the same thing. The trilogy also offers his corrective answer to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, reformulating it into a lengthy meditation on Being and Space - a shifting of the question of who we are to a more fundamental questio...
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(P/B) THIS IS NOT A PROGRAM
Traditional lines of revolutionary struggle no longer hold. Rather, it is ubiquitous cybernetics, surveillance, and terror that create the illusion of difference within hegemony. Configurations of dissent and the rhetoric of revolution are merely the other face of capital, conforming identities to empty predicates, ensuring that even "thieves," "saboteurs," and "terrorists" no longer exceed the totalizing space of Empire. This Is Not a Program offers two texts, both originally published in French by Tiqqun with Introduction to Civil War in...
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(P/B) THE ADMINISTRATION OF FEAR
We are living under the administration of fear: fear has become an environment, an everyday landscape. There was a time when wars, famines, and epidemics were localized and limited by a certain timeframe. Today, it is the world itself that is limited, saturated, and manipulated, the world itself that seizes us and confines us with a stressful claustrophobia. Stock-market crises, undifferentiated terrorism, lightning pandemics, "professional" suicides... Fear has become the world we live in. The administration of fear also means that states...
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(P/B) CORRESPONDENCE
Yesterday, the police interrogated me at length about the journal and the Situationist organization. It was only a beginning. This is, I think, one of the principle threats that came up quickly during the discussion: the police want to regard the SI as an association in order to set about its dissolution in France. I protested, emphasizing that the artistic movement was never legally constituted by moral individuals in a declared association. Not being constituted, the SI cannot be officially dissolved, but they tried to intimidate us heav...
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(P/B) POLITICS OF THE VERY WORST
Based upon a 1996 conversation Paul Virilio had with French journalist Phillipe Petit, The Politics of the Very Worst summarizes Virilio's speculations about the impact that accidents will have on the planet now that we operate on one-world time. Virilio argues that accidents have now lost all particularity. Accidents and events can no longer be confined to markers in history like Auschwitz or Hiroshima. Trajectories once had three dimensions: past, present, and future. But now, the hyper-concentration of time into "real time" reduces all ...
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(H/B) UTOPIE
The short-lived grouping of architects, sociologists, and urbanists known as Utopie, active in Paris from 1967 to 1978, was the product of several factors: the student protests for the reform of architectural education, the unprecedented expansion and replanning of the Parisian urban fabric carried out by the government of Charles de Gaulle, and the domestication of military and industrial technologies by an emerging consumer society. The group's collaborative publications included the work of Jean Aubert, Isabelle Auricoste, Jean Baudrill...
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(P/B) THE DIVINE LEFT
First published in French in 1985, The Divine Left is Jean Baudrillard's chronicle of French political life from 1977 to 1984. It offers the closest thing to political analysis to be found from a thinker who has too often been regarded as apolitical. Gathering texts that originally appeared as newspaper commentary on Franois Mitterand's rise to power as France's first Socialist president and the Socialist Party's fraught alliance with the French Communist Party, The Divine Left in essence presents Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum as ...
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(P/B) TERROR FROM THE AIR
According to Peter Sloterdijk, the twentieth century started on a specific day and place: April 22, 1915, at Ypres in Northern France. That day, the German army used a chlorine gas meant to exterminate indiscriminately. Until then, war, as described by Clausewitz and practiced by Napoleon, involved attacking the adversary's vital function first. Using poison gas signaled the passage from classical war to terrorism. This terror from the air inaugurated an era in which the main idea was no longer to target the enemy's body, but their environ...
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(P/B) FANTOMAS VERSUS THE MULTINATIONAL VAMPIRES
Octavio Paz: "If you love art, do something, Fantomas!" Fantomas: "I will, you can depend on it." First published in Spanish in 1975 and previously untranslated, Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires is Julio Cortazar's genre-jumping mash-up of his participation in the Second Russell Tribunal on human rights abuses in Latin America and his cameo appearance in issue number 201 of the Mexican comic book series Fantomas: The Elegant Menace. With his characteristic narrative inventiveness, Cortazar offers a quixotic meta-comic/novella t...
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(H/B) GLOBES
All history is the history of struggles for spheric expansion.--from Globes In Globes -- the second, and longest, volume in Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated magnum opus Spheres trilogy -- the author attempts nothing less than to uncover the philosophical foundations of the political history -- the history of humanity -- of the last two thousand years. The first, well-received volume of the author's Spheres trilogy, Bubbles, dealt with microspheres: the fact that individuals, from the fetal stage to childhood, are never alone, because they alw...
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(P/B) THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ICELAND
Poet and post-punk hero Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Myles travels the city - wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit - seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Be...
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(P/B) A THOUSAND MACHINES
In this "concise philosophy of the machine," Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of fi...
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(P/B) PRELIMINARY MATERIALS FOR A THEORY OF THE YOUNG-GIRL
"The Young-Girl is not always young; more and more frequently, she is not even female. She is the figure of total integration in a disintegrating social totality". First published in France in 1999, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl dissects the impossibility of love under Empire. The Young-Girl is consumer society's total product and model citizen: whatever "type" of Young-Girl she may embody, whether by whim or concerted performance, she can only seduce by consuming. Filled with the language of French women's magazines...
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(P/B) THE FEMICIDE MACHINE
In Ciudad Juarez, a territorial power normalized barbarism. This anomalous ecology mutated into a femicide machine: an apparatus that didn't just create the conditions for the murders of dozens of women and little girls, but developed the institutions that guarantee impunity for those crimes and even legalize them. A lawless city sponsored by a State in crisis. The facts speak for themselves. Best known to American readers for his cameo appearances as The Journalist in Roberto Bolano's 2666 and as a literary detective in Javier Marias's no...
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