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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 , 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.

Notes

1. Marazzi is a Swiss national, living and working in the Swiss Italian region of Switzerland, and has previously taught at the University of Padua in Italy.
2. "The insurrections have come, finally. At such a pace and in so many countries, since 2008, that the whole structure of this world seems to be disintegrating, piece by piece."
3. "On several occasions over the course of the 1970s the insurrectionary situation in Italy threatened to spread to France... It is thus easier to understand why the French speak of a 'creeping May' when it comes to Italy. They have the proud, public May, the state May. In Paris May 68 has served as the symbol of '60s and '70s world political antagonism to the exact extent that the reality of this antagonism lies elsewhere."
4. "In 2011, the Occupy movement protested the submission of social life to semio-capital. As widespread as Occupy was, the movement was a political failure."
5. "What was unforgivable about May '68 rebels or about the Autonomia movement at its peak in 1977 is that they did not want to take power. Franco Piperno, one of their leaders, admitted to me later on: 'We didn't know what we would have done with it.' As Baudrillard writes in The Agony of Power: 'Power itself must be abolished—and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated, which is at the heart of all traditional struggles—but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate."
6. "Can we really change the world or real life for everyone without taking political and economic power? That was the large question mark floating above the planet at the turn of the millennium. For some, the way forward was to transform minds and ways of being through new lateral solidarities, online media, and the principles of intellectual equality and collective intelligence. For those who were wary of surges of disempowerment or a politics that had its head in the clouds, the solution was instead the creation of organized alternative communities, the secession of entire neighborhoods in large cities and in remote rural areas, a kind of separatism that accepted its frontal opposition to power, not aiming to seize it but instead to constantly defy it, and to 'depose' it by all possible means and stratagems. Indeed, according to one of its theoreticians, this new emancipative power saw itself as a destituent rather than a constituent power."
7. "Thus, where the 'constituents' place themselves in a dialectial relation of struggle with the ruling authority to take possession of it, destituent logic obeys the vital need to disengage from it. It doesn't abandon the struggle, it fastens on to the struggle's positivity."
8. "In his important book on neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault, setting aside what had argued in the course mentioned above on the functions of money in ancient Greece, neglects the functions of finance, debt, and money, even though these constituted the strategic mechanisms of neoliberal government starting in the late 1970s."
9. "Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, try to define fascism, and they say: fascism is when a war machine is hidden in every niche, when in every nook and in every cranny of daily life a war machine is hidden. This is fascism. So I would say that neoliberalism is the most perfect form of fascism, in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's definition."
10. "The 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' is probably Gilles Deleuze's most famous essay. Almost as though in a manifesto, the French philosopher summarizes here the theses of his friend Michel Foucault on confinement (and on its crisis, agony and what follows from that)."
11. "With the exceptional antiterrorist legislation, the gutting of the labor laws, the increasing specialization of jurisdictions and courts of prosecution, the Law no longer exists. Take criminal law. On the pretext of antiterrorism and fighting 'organized criminality', what has taken shape from year to year is the constitution of two distinct laws: a law for 'citizens' and a 'penal law of the enemy'."
12. "Just as the War on Terror had usefully shifted attention away from the new social struggles at the time, the attacks by the Islamic State in Europe in 2015–17 and the state of emergency that was instituted in France (the hardest-hit country) as a response offered convenient, literally diabolical (in the Greek sense of diabolos, to separate) diversions from the global social struggle that was in the process of being reborn."
13. "...we must question the rise of the global 'securitocracy', fundamentalist positions, the connection between war and entertainment and the increasing turn to states of 'emergency' or 'exception' or the 'law of the enemy' (or law outside the law)."
14. "Nixon did something very, very important as far as changing the future went. Well, he decided to free the dollar from the gold standard."
15. "...a few discreet measures announcing a decisive evolution of the world economy (e.g. the end of the gold standard in 1971)..."
16. "The most recent profession in a similar vein came from Patrick Le Lay, CEO of TF1, the French television channel: 'Let's be realistic: the job of TF1 is to help Coca-Cola sell its products. For an advertising campaign to work properly, the viewer's brains have to be accessible. The goal of our programs is to make them available, by entertaining them, relaxing them between two messages. What we sell to Coca-Cola is relaxed-brains time... Nothing is harder than getting them to open up.'"
17. "But most importantly, attention has become the central object of the capitalist economy. It is what this economy is seeking to capture, much more so than natural resources, labor forces, or monetary capital. The phenomenon already existed with TV, as the CEO of a TV channel reminded us when he spoke of selling 'available brain time' to advertising agencies."
18. Autonomia was a 1980 Semiotext(e) journal issue devoted to coverage of the 1970s Italian leftist Autonomia Operaia movement. The issue was reprinted as a book in 2007, bearing the phrase "semiotext(e) intervention series 1" on its front cover. The reprint of Autonomia was thus a prototype volume of the series. Proper entries in the series are much shorter, but frequently deal with the related subject matter of 1970s left-wing Italian movements.

See also

• French Theory

References

1. “It’s Very Sad, Really: Art Writing, Orphaning, Migration of the Humanities and (No) Information – Conversation with Chris Kraus,” Mousse Magazine 39, December 2013.
2. “Under the Sign of Semiotext(e): The Story According to Sylvere Lotringer and Chris Kraus” (with Anne Balsamo) Critique 37.3 (Spring 1996): 205–221.
3. "Semiotext at the Biennial: An Interview with Hedi el Kholti." Hyperallergic. May 17, 2014.
4. ”The 2014 Whitney Biennial Is Taking Shape,” by Carol Vogel, NY Times, November 14, 2014.
5. "Semiotext(e)". whitney.org. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
6. Flood, Alison (February 19, 2010). "Glenn Beck sends 'evil' anarchist manual's sales rocketing". Guardian.
7. To Our Friends, p. 11.
8. This is Not a Program, pp. 19–22.
9. Breathing, p. 9.
10. Sylvère Lotringer, Introduction, The Agony of Power, p. 29.
11. How the World Swung to the Right, p. 151.
12. Now, p. 79.
13. The Making of the Indebted Man, p. 90.
14. The Uprising, p. 95.
15. Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, p. 45.
16. Now, p. 34.
17. How the World Swung to the Right, pp. 157–158.
18. Field of Battle, p. 147.
19. The Uprising, p. 87.
20. How the World Swung to the Right, p. 23.
21. The Agony of Power, pp. 37–38.
22. How the World Swung to the Right, p. 77.
23. Lotringer, Sylvère; Marazzi, Christian, eds. (2007). Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 1. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350538.
24. "Autonomia: Post-Political Politics". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
25. The Invisible Committee (2009). The Coming Insurrection. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 1. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350804.
26. "The Coming Insurrection". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
27. Marazzi, Christian (2009). The Violence of Financial Capitalism. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 2. Translated by Lebedeva, Kristina. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350835.
28. "The Violence of Financial Capitalism". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
29. Marazzi, Christian (2011). The Violence of Financial Capitalism, New Edition. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 2. Translated by Lebedeva, Kristina; McGimsey, Jason Francis. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584351023.
30. "The Violence of Financial Capitalism, New Edition". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
31. Hocquenghem, Guy (2009). The Screwball Asses. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 3. Translated by Wedell, Noura. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350811.
32. "The Screwball Asses". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
33. Tiqqun (2010). Introduction to Civil War. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 4. Translated by Galloway, Alexander R.; Smith, Jason E. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350866.
34. "Introduction to Civil War". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
35. Raunig, Gerald (2010). A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 5. Translated by Derieg, Aileen. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350859.
36. "A Thousand Machines". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
37. Lotringer, Sylvère (2010). Introduction. The Agony of Power. By Baudrillard, Jean. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 6. Translated by Hodges, Ames. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350927.
38. "The Agony of Power". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
39. Tiqqun (2011). This Is Not a Program. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 7. Translated by Jordan, Joshua David. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350972.
40. "This Is Not a Program". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
41. Kraus, Chris (2011). Where Art Belongs. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 8. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350989.
42. "Where Art Belongs". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
43. Kobek, Jarett (2011). ATTA & THE WHITMAN OF TIKRIT. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 9. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584351061.
44. "ATTA". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
45. Richard, Bertrand (2012). "Preface and Interview conducted". The Administration of Fear. By Virilio, Paul. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 10. Translated by Hodges, Ames. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584351054.
46. "The Administration of Fear". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
47. Rodríguez, Sergio González (2012). The Femicide Machine. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 11. Translated by Parker-Stainback, Michael. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584351108.
48. "The Femicide Machine". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
49. Tiqqun (2012). Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-girl. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 12. Translated by Reines, Ariana. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584351085.
50. "Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
51. Lazzarato, Maurizio (2012). The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 13. Translated by Jordan, Joshua David. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584351153.
52. "The Making of the Indebted Man". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
53. Berardi, Franco "Bifo" (2012). The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 14. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584351122.
54. "The Uprising". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
55. Negri, Antonio (2013). Afterword. Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity. By Raunig, Gerald. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 15. Translated by Derieg, Aileen; Mecchia, Giuseppina. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584351160.
56. "Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
57. Sloterdijk, Peter (2013). Nietzsche Apostle. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 16. Translated by Corcoran, Steven. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350996.
58. "Nietzsche Apostle". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
59. Lazzarato, Maurizio (2015). Governing by Debt. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 17. Translated by Jordan, Joshua David. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584351634.
60. "Governing by Debt". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
61. The Invisible Committee (2015). To Our Friends. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 18. Translated by Hurley, Robert. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584351672.
62. "To Our Friends". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
63. Doyle, Jennifer (2015). Campus Sex, Campus Security. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 19. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584351696.
64. "Campus Sex, Campus Security". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
65. Rodríguez, Sergio González (2017). The Iguala 43: The Truth and Challenge of Mexico's Disappeared Students. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 20. Translated by Neuhouser, Joshua. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584351979.
66. "The Iguala 43". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
67. Wang, Jackie (2018). Carceral Capitalism. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 21. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781635900026.
68. "Carceral Capitalism". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
69. West, Cornel (2017). Foreword. Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love. By Bouteldja, Houira. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 22. Translated by Valinsky, Rachel. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781635900033.
70. "Whites, Jews, and Us". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
71. The Invisible Committee (2017). Now. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 23. Translated by Hurley, Robert. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781635900071.
72. "Now". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
73. Valencia, Sayak (2018). Gore Capitalism. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 24. Translated by Pluecker, John. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781635900125.
74. "Gore Capitalism". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
75. Cusset, François (2018). How the World Swung to the Right: Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 25. Translated by Wedell, Noura. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781635900163.
76. "How the World Swung to the Right". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
77. Berardi, Franco "Bifo" (2019). Breathing: Chaos and Poetry. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 26. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781635900385.
78. "Breathing". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
79. Lida, David (2019). Introduction. Field of Battle. By Rodríguez, Sergio González. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 27. Translated by Neuhouser, Joshua. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781635900880.
80. "Field of Battle". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.
81. Tiqqun (2019). The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 28. Translated by Hurley, Robert. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781635900927.
82. "The Cybernetic Hypothesis". mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press.

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

• Book publishing companies based in California
• Publishing companies established in 1974
• Political book publishing companies
• 1974 establishments in the United States
• Small press publishing companies