Bøger i Semiotext(e) / Intervention serien

The stirring speech given by Peter Sloterdijk in Lucerne in October 2022.From time immemorial, humanity has had to organize their “metabolism with nature.” For Marx, the most important factor in this process was labor. When Prometheus, according to the myth, brought fire to earth, another crucial input was added. Fire has been used to cook food and harden tools for hundreds of thousands of years. In this sense, it can be said that all history implies the history of the uses of fire.But whereas trees could only be burnt once, labor and fire shifted with the discovery of underground deposits of coal and oil. Modern humanity, according to Peter Sloterdijk, can be considered a collective of arsonists who set fire to the underground forests and moors. If Prometheus were to return to earth today, he might regret his gift; after all, what looms is nothing less than Ekpyrosis, the demise of the world in fire. And only a new, energetic pacifism can prevent this catastrophe.

A foundational work of queer theory.First published anonymously in the notorious "Three Billion Perverts" issue of Félix Guattari's journal Recherches—banned by French authorities upon its release in 1973—The Screwball Asses was erroneously attributed to Guy Hocquenghem when it was first published in English in 2009. This second edition of that translation, with a new preface by Hocquenghem biographer Antoine Idier that clarifies the different theoretical positions within France’s Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionaire, returns the text to its true author: writer, journalist, and activist Christian Maurel. In this dramatic treatise on erotic desire, Maurel takes on the militant delusions and internal contradictions of the gay-liberation movement. He vivisects not only the stifled mores of bourgeois capitalism, but also the phallocratic concessions of so-called homophiles and, ultimately, the very act of speaking desire. Rejecting any “pure theory” of homosexuality that would figure its “otherness” as revolutionary, Maurel contends that the ruling classes have invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto, splitting and mutilating desire in the process. It is only when nondesire and the desire of desire are enacted simultaneously through speech and body that homosexuality can finally be sublimated under the true act of “making love.” There are thousands of sexes on earth, according to Maurel, but only one sexual desire. The Screwball Asses is a revelatory disquisition.

On the internet's transformation from communication tool to computational infrastructure.The internet is no more. If it still exists, it does so only as a residual technology, still effective in the present but less intelligible as such. After nearly two decades and a couple of financial crises, it has become the almost imperceptible background of today’s Corporate Platform Complex (CPC)—a pervasive planetary technological infrastructure that meshes communication with computation.In the essays collected in this book, written mostly between the mid-2000s and the late 2010s, Tiziana Terranova bears witness to this monstrous transformation. Mobilizing theories of cognitive capitalism, neo-monadology, and sympathetic cooperation, considering ideas such as the attention economy and its psychopathologies, and evoking the relation between algorithmic automation and the Common, she provides real-time takes on the mutations that have changed the technological, cultural, and economic ethos of the Internet. Mostly conceived, elaborated, and discussed in collective activist spaces, After the Internet is neither apocalyptic lamentation nor melancholic “rise and fall” story of betrayed great expectations. On the contrary, it looks within the folds of the recent past to unfold the potential futurities that the post-digital computational present still entails.