Books in the Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series series

A scathing critique of the Left from an indigenous anti-colonial perspective.

How and when American-style slavery created the racial system, not just in the United States but internationally."We see the hatred we elicit, Islamophobia, Negrophobia; we see police numbers increase, repression spread, mechanisms of control and surveillance strengthened, structures of corruption and cronyism flourish, and bodies of institutionalization, integration, and supervision develop, but we do not see the cause, or one of the causes, which is none other than the threat that we now pose to the white order."--from The Colonial Counter-RevolutionJust as Capital produced classes and patriarchy produced genders, colonialism produced race. In The Colonial Counter-Revolution, Sadri Khiari outlines how and when American-style slavery created the racial system, not just in the United States but internationally, and why the development of relationships of equality within the white community favored the crystallization of specifically racial social relations. More than just a response to the dialogue, debate, and trauma of immigration today, this book looks beyond the right/left dichotomy of the issue in politics to the more fundamental political existence of immigrants and Blacks, who must exist politically if they are to exist whatsoever. Race is not biological: race is political. And it is the manifestation of the colonial counter-revolution. In France, that counter-revolution started with General de Gaulle, and continues today, where the anti-colonialist fight of Palestinian Arabs and the anti-racist fight of Arabs and blacks in France have the same adversary: white Western domination.

A clear-eyed critique of collegiate jurisprudence, as the process of administering student protests and sexual-assault complaints rolls along a Moebius strip of shifting legality.

An urgent critique of the biopolitical subject and omnipresent Empire.Historical conflict no longer opposes two massive molar heaps, two classes—the exploited and the exploiters, the dominant and dominated, managers and workers—between which, in each individual case, it would be possible to differentiate. The front line no longer cuts through the middle of society; it now runs through each one of us... "—from This Is Not a ProgramTraditional 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 2001. In This Is Not a Program, Tiqqun outlines a new path for resistance and struggle in the age of Empire, one that eschews the worn-out example of France's May '68 in favor of what they consider to be the still fruitful and contemporary insurrectionary movements in Italy of the 1970s. "As a Science of Apparatuses” examines the way Empire has enforced on the subject a veritable metaphysics of isolation and pacification, "apparatuses” that include chairs, desks, computers; surveillance (security guards, cameras); disease (depression); crutch (cell phone, lover, sedative); and authority. Tiqqun's critique of the biopolitical subject and omnipresent Empire is all the more urgent as we become inured to the permanent state of exception that is the War on Terror and to other, no less intimate forms of pacification. But all is not lost. In its unrelenting production of the Same, Empire itself creates the conditions necessary for the insurrection to come.

The increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, and the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere: an essay on poetical therapy.

The emergence of a geopolitical war scenario, establishing a form of global governance that utilizes methods of surveillance and control.In times of war the law is silent.—from Field of BattleField of Battle presents the world today as nothing less than a war in progress, with Mexico an illustrative microcosm of the developing geopolitical scenario: a battlefield in which violence, drug trafficking, and organized crime—as well as the alegal state that works alongside all of this in the guise of fighting against it—hold sway. The rule of law has been replaced by the dominance of alegality and the rise of the "a-state.”This war scenario is establishing a form of global governance that utilizes methods of surveillance and control developed by the United States government and enforced through its global network of military bases and the multinational corporations that work in synergy with its espionage agencies. Geopolitics take advantage of social instability, drug cartels, state repression, and paramilitarism to establish the foundations of a world order.Sergio González Rodríguez argues that this surveillance and control model has been imposed on the international community through extreme neoliberal ideology, free markets, the globalized economy, and the rise of the information society. The threats are clear. Nation-states are increasingly unable to respond to societal needs, and the individual has been displaced by money and technique—the axis of the transhumanist future foretold by today's electronic devices. The human being as the prosthesis of an artificial world and as an object of networks and systems: citizens are the victims of a perverse vision of reality, caught between the defense of their rights and their will to insurrection.

Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing.What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?—from Carceral CapitalismIn this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, "Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.

An analysis of contemporary violence as the new commodity of today's hyper-consumerist stage of capitalism.

An early text from Tiqqun that views cybernetics as a fable of late capitalism, and offers tools for the resistance.The cybernetician's mission is to combat the general entropy that threatens living beings, machines, societies—that is, to create the experimental conditions for a continuous revitalization, to constantly restore the integrity of the whole.—from The Cybernetic HypothesisThis early Tiqqun text has lost none of its pertinence. The Cybernetic Hypothesis presents a genealogy of our "technical” present that doesn't point out the political and ethical dilemmas embedded in it as if they were puzzles to be solved, but rather unmasks an enemy force to be engaged and defeated. Cybernetics in this context is the teknê of threat reduction, which unfortunately has required the reduction of a disturbing humanity to packets of manageable information. Not so easily done. Not smooth. A matter of civil war, in fact. According to the authors, cybernetics is the latest master fable, welcomed at a certain crisis juncture in late capitalism. And now the interesting question is: Has the guest in the house become the master of the house?The "cybernetic hypothesis” is strategic. Readers of this little book are not likely to be naive. They may be already looking, at least in their heads, for a weapon, for a counter-strategy. Tiqqun here imagines an unbearable disturbance to a System that can take only so much: only so much desertion, only so much destituent gesture, only so much guerilla attack, only so much wickedness and joy.

A new political critique from the authors of The Coming Insurrection, calling for a "destituent process" of outright refusal and utter indifference to government.

A disorienting fictionalized portrayal of 9/11 mastermind Mohamed Atta and the meaning of madness.

A call to arms by a group of French intellectuals that rejects leftist reform and aligns itself with younger, wilder forms of resistance.Thirty years of "crisis,” mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy... We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it. 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 for an emergent war-machine capable of "spreading anarchy and live communism.” Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the "war on terror.” Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized life forms. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.