In “Lyotard zur Einführung” (in JUNIUS), Walter Reese-Schäfer is obviously not able to do much with the LÖ. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that “the crisis of dissolution” of a socialist group (19) was certainly an occasion for writing the LO, […]
THE GREAT ZERO (Économie libidinale, Paris 1974) Jean-Francois Lyotard: Libidinal Economy
Last year I published an edited volume called Clickbait Capitalism. The title came as a surprise, even to me. The book was meant to be called Libidinal Economies of Contemporary Capitalism. No one was interested in the volume until I
Clickbait capitalism – or, the return to libidinal political economy
F : Freud’s first topographical theories were quite science-based, neurophysiological; then, along the way, these models become quasi-anthropomorphic; the second topographical theory—the ego that struggles with the id and the grimacing personage of the superego—is presented somewhat as a description
Guattari’s Seminar “Drive, Black Hole”
a recent essay published with Lundi Matin (#369, 06/02/2023). On the desire to smash time Why is life confined to its biological temporality (work time, the cycle of expenditure and recuperation, exhaustion and consumption) unliveable in the strict sense? Why
I started reading Félix Guattari in 1974. I was in a barracks in southern Italy, when military service was compulsory for young men of sound mind and body, but serving the country soon irritated me, and I was looking for
The quilting point was introduced in Jacques Lacan’s 1956 seminar on psychoses. He defined the quilting point as a kind of “anchor” or “button” that stitches together the flux of signification. We can understand this in both a general and specific
Digital Hall of Fame: The Quilting Point
Felix Guattari: After a systematic attack (at least I think so) on psychoanalysis, Gilles Deleuze and I began asking ourselves about the linguistic and semiotic conceptions underlying formations of power in psychoanalysis, in the university, and in general. A sort
Desire Is Power, Power is Desire
The book Anti-Oedipus, by the French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, has an interesting insight about three types of social formation and their registration surfaces: the primitive society where all is inscribed on land, the bodies are registered on
Thinking Collective Self-Determination Through Municipalism
… In the context of science fiction studies Guattari’s interest in Cyberpunkoffers an alternative to Frederic Jameson’s dismissal of the genre as failing to offer anything more than an uncritical celebration of late-capitalism’s technological ubiquity. In fact Guattari offers hisown
What is the relationship between machine and structure? What is it that differentiates a line of flight from becoming a pure line of death? Now, however unhelpful as it may seem, a perfectly adequate to answer to these questions would
‘Desire Never Stops Investing History’
The unlikely parable that Xenophon relates between Socrates and their mutual friend Aristippus of Cyrene serves as a lead in to the subject of this post. Socrates had observed his friend Aristippus for some time and felt that the young
The Hedonistic Imperative: The Seduction of Hypercapitalism
… In this sense the horrible final scene of Janice and UIQ merged in her body and unable to enunciate any stable subjective position, even to a point beyond death, is not a cautionary tale warning us back from the