The first presentation of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the "rhizome."
A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed... There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there still is a danger that you will stratify again everything, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. Yes, couch grass is also a rhizome.
Edited by Sylvere Lotringer, On the Line was the first book published in the new "Foreign Agents" series in 1983. It gathers together two seminal texts that Deleuze and Guattari would later elaborate on in A Thousand Plateaus. First delivered in French by Deleuze (drawing graphs on the blackboard) at the "Schizo-Culture" conference organized by Semiotext(e) at Columbia University in 1975, "Rhizome" introduced a new kind of thinking in philosophy, both non-dialectical and non-hierarchical. The two didn't expect this neo-anarchical blue-print would eventually offer an early template for the understanding of the internet. "Rhizome" substitutes pragmatic, "couch grass," free-floating logic to the binary, oppositional, and exclusive model of the tree. In "Politics," superceding the Marxist concept of class, Deleuze envisages the social macrocosm as a series of lines, and reinvent politics as a process of flux whose outcome will always be unpredictable. It is, he emphasizes, the end of the idea of revolution, but not of the "becoming revolutionary." Throughout, he keeps dispelling the notion of capitalism as a repressive machine only meant to extract surplus value from exploited workers and suggest that it could be opposed from within by redirecting the creativity and multiplicity of its flows.The multiple must be made, not always by adding another dimension, rather in the simplest way, by dint of sobriety... A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radices. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes... Even some animals are, in their pack forms. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all their function of shelter, supply, movement, evasion and breakout... The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couch grass.

On The Line (Foreign Agents Series)

Literature & Fiction

Félix Guattari

GILLES DELEUZE

History & Criticism

Semiotext

What is popular defense? From whom do we have to defend ourselves?
What is popular defense? From whom do we have to defend ourselves? Originally civilian populations were capable of defending themselves both in times of peace and war. A military racket was subsequently imposed upon them in the name of protection and popular defense lost its capacity to resist external attack. In case of total war, between the native populations which form the constitutional basis of all great modern states and the military now in charge of defending them there was no more "common culture." Industrial wars subsequently managed to replace the thousand-year-old pact of semi-colonization with total colonization. First experimented with in South America, this kind of "endo-colonization" (the military cracking down on its own population) was gradually extended to all the post-industrial countries through the exponential development of the techno-military complex.

Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles (Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series)

History

VIRILIO, PAUL

Military

classic of postmodern theory, tr Mark Polizzotti

Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (Foreign Agents Series)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

This book marks an important evolution in Jean Baudrillard's thought as he leaves behind his older and better-known concept of the "simulacrum" and tackles the new problem of digital technology acquiring organicity. The resulting world of cold communication and its indifferent alterity, seduction, metamorphoses, metastases, and transparency requires a new form of response. Writing in the shadow of Marshall McLuhan, Baudrillard insists that the content of communication is completely without meaning: the only thing that is communicated is communication itself. He sees the masses writhing in an orgiastic ecstasy of communications. Baudrillard navigates the Object's maelstrom with the euphoria of the astronaut reentering Earth's atmosphere with no possibility of assistance from Mission Control.

The Ecstasy of Communication (Foreign Agents)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

BAUDRILLARD, Jean

Psychology & Counseling

Oasis

Simone, Timothy

Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history."
First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history." Unlike recent works that make history end with the consumer, or project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essays perform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the "end of the world." The idea of a "unified world," they claim, has given way to new sensibilities about history. The essays evaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offer positive approaches to the "gamble of thinking" required in a society without traditional subjects and institutions. Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules of the game, and any nostalgia for "starting" from the familiar in terms of intellectual critique is doomed. Collectively, the authors sketch the unfamiliarity of the new, those moments when our categories dissolve in the face of connections and relations that announce all sorts of "ends." And other things besides.
Contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Gunter Gebauer, Dieter Lenzen, Edgar Morin, Gerburg Treusch-Dieter, Paul Virilio

Looking Back on the End of the World

Edgar Morin

Jean Baudrillard

Paul Virilio

Gunter Gebauer

Dietmar Kamper

Dieter Lenzen

Gerburg Treusch-Dieter

Christoph Wulf

Literary

In this shimmering manifesto against dialectics, Jean Baudrillard constructs a condemnatory ethics of the "false problem." One foot in social science, the other in speculation about the history of ideas, this text epitomizes the assault that Baudrillard has made on the history of Western philosophy. Posing such anti-questions as "Must we put information on a diet?" Baudrillard cuts across historical and contemporary space with profound observations on American corporations, arms build-up, hostage-taking, transgression, truth, and the fate of theory itself. Not only an important map of Baudrillard's continuing examination of evil, this essay is also a profound critique of 1980s American politics at the time when the author was beginning to have his incalculable effect on a generation of this country's artists and theorists.

Fatal Strategies

Philosophy

Pulp fiction writer Erje Ayden's coy novel is his most autobiographical work—if one accepts his claim that he worked as a spy for the Turkish government in the 1960s and 70s.
I wonder if it is lustful A tank in its dreams What do airplanes think When left alone? We did not seek happiness We invented sadness Were we not of this world? -- Orhan Veli, epigram to Sadness at Leaving
During the 1960s and 70s, Turkish-born Erje Ayden served as house pulp fiction writer to the New York School of painters and poets. Friend and sometime bodyguard to the artist Willem De Kooning, Ayden self-published 7 pop novels, written in rapid amphetamine bursts in borrowed apartments and rooming houses. Sadness at Leaving, re-published by Semiotext(e) in 1998, is Ayden's most autobiographical work -- if one accepts, as he claims, that he worked as a spy for the Turkish government throughout those years. East Berlin, 1959: Following the erection of the Berlin wall, special agent Carl Halman is assigned by East German intelligence to move to New York where he'll "sleep" as a writer until he is called. Using the code-name "April 23," Carl successfully infiltrates the uptown-downtown literary world in 1950s New York. He edits a magazine, follows the Knicks, and marries Melinda, the socialite wife of best-selling jock novelist Hubert Cleaver, Ayden's hilarious Norman Mailer pastiche. Through Carl's eyes, we see New York City change from an outpost of Europe to the new capital of an anarchistic, post-ideological world. But then, when Carl least expects it, he's called.

Sadness at Leaving: An Espionage Romance

Ayden, Erje

Erotica

Like Alain-Robbe Grillet, Georges Perec, and the great Oulipo writers, Swiss writer Jurg Laederach constructs seamless narratives based on sly compositional strategies.
The phone refuses to ring. I sit here on 82nd Street; no, on 83rd; no, on 81st; I forget where I am. The phone refuses to ring, to tear me out of this enforced solitude, which I know only too well. This solitude that makes me sick and stirs me to tears, but surely not tears of compassion. A call is bound to come any minute now up from the Village and afford me the company I desperately desire. The phone isn't ringing. The bell doesn't work.
Written after the Swiss writer Jurg Laederach's third trip to New York in the late 1980s, 69 Ways was hailed by award-winning author Walter Abish as a text predictive of "a Europe to come, when borders dissolve." Like Alain-Robbe Grillet, Georges Perec, and the great Oulipo writers, Laederach constructs seamless narratives based on sly compositional strategies. The reader is only somewhat aware of the rules of the game. Transposed to America, Laederach's texts, Abish argues, "function as a scanning device. Characters vanish, reappear. There is something relentless... Everything is transitory. No sentimentality. No clinging to the past. Everything is on the verge of being discarded. Everything is on the verge of dissolution. Everything resonates with imminent change."

69 Ways to Play the Blues (Foreign Agents)

Jurg Laederach

Contemporary

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