What is theory doing in America? Does high French theory continue to be a significant force in American intellectual life? This volume of new work presents both discussions of these questions and demonstrations of what French theory looks like today, thirty years after its first appearance.

In her photography, videos and installations, Josephine Meckseper (born 1964) sets images of political activism-photographs of demonstrations, newspaper cuttings-against twinkling consumer goods and advertising motifs. This publication concentrates on a new series of works, such as the installation "Ten High" (2007) in which silver mannequins bear anti-war slogans

In the mid-1970s, Sylvere Lotringer created Semiotext(e), a philosophical group that became a magazine and then a publishing house. Since its creation, Semio-text(e) has been a place of stimulating dialogue between artists and philosophers, and for the past fifty years, much of American artistic and intellectual life has depended on it. The model of the journal and the publishing house revolves around the notion of the collective, and Lotringer has rarely shared his personal journey: his existence as a hidden child during World War II; the liberating and then traumatic experience of the collective in the kibbutz; his Parisian activism in the 1960s; his time of wandering, that took him, by way of Istanbul, to the United States; and then, of course, his American years, the way he mingled his nightlife with the formal experimentation he invented with Semiotext(e) and with his classes. Since the early 2010s, Donatien Grau has developed the habit of visiting Lotringer during his trips to Los Angeles; some of their dialogs were published or held in public. This book is an entry into Lotringer's life, his friendships, his choices, and his admiration for some of the leading thinkers of our times. The conversations between Lotringer and Grau show bursts of life, traces of a journey, through texts and existence itself, with an unusual intensity.

American artist Nancy Spero (b.1929) concentrates on the depiction of women: mythological women, movie women, tortured women. Inspired by classical and modern sources, she collages and imprints her contemporary goddesses on to long, papyrus-like friezes that scroll around museum walls. Her subject matter, which has ranged from the writings of Artaud to the Vietnam War, mirrors her life. Working in Paris in the cultural ferment of the 1960s, she moved to New York in the 1970s to co-establish the feminist gallery A.I.R. and to join with artists and critics such as Leon Golub, Robert Morris and Lucy R Lippard in forming the Art Workers' Coalition. Since the 1980s she has attracted international acclaim, her exquisite works giving form to feminist issues and new critical discourses. The Survey by Jon Bird, cultural theorist and curator of the first British retrospective of Spero's work, discusses developments in her practice since the 1950s. Contemporary art scholar and critic Jo Anna Isaak talks with the artist about her life and work. Art historian Sylvere Lotringer, Edtior of Semiotext(e) and author of Overexposed, focuses on her 1993 installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In recognition of the impact Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove made on her, Spero has chosen a scene from the screenplay; key excerpts from Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity by feminist theorist Alice Jardine on the place of women in a patriarchal culture complete the Artist's Choice section. Also included are a selection of Spero's own writings, many published here for the first time.

Baudrillard's remarkably prescient meditation on terrorism throws light on post-9/11 delusional fears and political simulations. Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1978) may be the most important sociopolitical manifesto of the twentieth century: it calls for nothing less than the end of both sociology and politics. Disenfranchised revolutionaries (the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang) hoped to reach the masses directly through spectacular actions, but their message merely played into the hands of the media and the state. In a media society meaning has no meaning anymore; communication merely communicates itself. Jean Baudrillard uses this last outburst of ideological terrorism in Europe to showcase the end of the "Social." Once invoked by Marx as the motor of history, the masses no longer have sociological reality. In the electronic media society, all the masses can do-and all they will do-is enjoy the spectacle. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities takes to its ultimate conclusion the "end of ideologies" experienced in Europe after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the death of revolutionary illusions after May 1968. Ideological terrorism doesn't represent anything anymore, writes Baudrillard, not even itself. It is just the last hysterical reaction to discredited political illusions.

Jean Baudrillard meets Cookie Mueller in this gathering of French theory and new American fiction. Compiled in 2001 to commemorate the passing of an era, Hatred of Capitalism brings together highlights of Semiotext(e)'s most beloved and prescient works. Semiotext(e)'s three-decade history mirrors the history of American thought. Founded by French theorist and critic Sylvere Lotringer as a scholarly journal in 1974, Semiotext(e) quickly took on the mission of melding French theory with the American art world and punk underground. Its Foreign Agents, Native Agents, Active Agents and Double Agents imprints have brought together thinkers and writers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Assata Shakur, Bob Flanagan, Paul Virillio, Kate Millet, Jean Baudrillard, Michelle Tea, William S. Burroughs, Eileen Myles, Ulrike Meinhof, and Fanny Howe. In Hatred of Capitalism, editors Kraus and Lotringer bring these people together in the same volume for the first time.

Artist David Wojnarowicz on his work, his aspirations, his personal history, his political views; Wojnarowicz in dialogue with Sylvere Lotringer, along with personal accounts from friends and fellow artists collected after Wojnarowicz's death. In February 1991, the artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) and the philosopher Sylvere Lotringer met in a borrowed East Village apartment to conduct a long-awaited dialogue on Wojnarowicz's work. Wojnarowicz was then at the peak of his notoriety as the fiercest antagonist of morals crusader Senator Jesse Helms-a notoriety that Wojnarowicz alternately embraced and rejected. Already suffering the last stages of AIDS, David saw his dialogue with Lotringer as a chance to set the record straight on his aspirations, his personal history, and his political views. The two arranged to have this three-hour dialogue video-recorded by a mutual friend, the artist Marion Scemama. Lotringer held on to the tape for a long time. After Wojnarowicz's death the following year, he found the transcript enormously moving, yet somehow incomplete. David was trying, often with heartbreaking eloquence, to define not just his career but its position in time. The subject was huge, and transcended the actual dialogue. Lotringer then spent the next several years gathering additional commentary on Wojnarowicz's life and work from those who knew him best-the friends with whom he collaborated. Lotringer solicited personal testimony from Wojnarowicz's friends and other artists, including Mike Bildo, Steve Brown, Julia Scher, Richard Kern, Carlo McCormick, Ben Neill, Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, Marguerite van Cook, and others. What emerges from these masterfully-conducted interviews is a surprising insight into something art history knows, but systematically hides: the collaborative nature of the work of any "great artist." All these respondents had, at one time, made performances, movies, sculptures, photographs, and other collaborative works with Wojnarowicz. In this sense, Wojnarowicz appears not only as a great originator, but as a great synthesizer.

Cutting-edge theorist Jean Baudrillard on the complicitous dance of art, politics, economics, and media; includes "War Porn," on Abu Ghraib as a new genre of reality TV. The images from Abu Ghraib are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. The whole West is contained in the burst of sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies. Truth, but not veracity. As virtual as the war itself, their specific violence adds to the specific violence of the war. In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion: feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the "end of art," Baudrillard celebrates art's new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole. Conceived and edited by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylvere Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art presents Baudrillard's writings on art in a complicitous dance with politics, economics, and media. Culminating with "War Porn," a scathing analysis of the spectacular images from Abu Ghraib prison as a new genre of reality TV, the book folds back on itself to question the very nature of radical thought.

The "genetic bomb" marks a turn in the history of humanity. The accident is a new form of warfare. It is replacing revolution and war. Sarajevo triggered the First World War. New York is what Sarajevo was. September 11th opened Pandora's box. The first war of globalization will be the global accident, the total accident, including the accident of science. And it is on the way. In 1968, Virilio abandoned his work in oblique architecture, believing that time had replaced space as the most important point of reflection because of the dominance of speed. We were basically on the verge of converting space time into space speed... Speed facilitates the decoding of the human genome, and the possibility of another humanity: a humanity which is no longer extra-territorial, but extra-human. Crespuscular Dawn expands Virilio's vision of the implosion of physical time and space, onto the micro-level of bioengineering and biotechnology. In this cat-and-mouse dialogue between Sylvere Lotringer and Paul Virilio, Lotringer pushes Virilio to uncover the historical foundations of his biotech theories. Citing various medical experiments conducted during World War II, Lotringer asks whether biotechnology isn't the heir to eugenics and the "science for racial improvement" that the Nazis enthusiastically embraced. Will the endocolonizataion of the body come to replace the colonization of one's own population by the military? Both biographical and thematic, the book explores the development of Virilio's investigation of space (architecture, urbanism) and time (speed and simultanaeity) that would ultimately lay the foundation for his theories on biotechnology and his startling declaration that after the colonization of space begins the colonization of the body.

A critique of capital through the lens of war, and a critique of war through the lens of the revolution of 1968. "We are at war," declared the President of the French Republic on the evening of November 13, 2015. But what is this war, exactly? In Wars and Capital, Eric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato propose a counter-history of capitalism to recover the reality of the wars that are inflicted on us and denied to us. We experience not the ideal war of philosophers, but wars of class, race, sex, and gender; wars of civilization and the environment; wars of subjectivity that are raging within populations and that constitute the secret motor of liberal governmentality. By naming the enemy (refugees, migrants, Muslims), the new fascisms establish their hegemony on the processes of political subjectivation by reducing them to racist, sexist, and xenophobic slogans, fanning the flames of war among the poor and maintaining the total war philosophy of neoliberalism. Because war and fascism are the repressed elements of post-'68 thought, Alliez and Lazzarato not only read the history of capital through war but also read war itself through the strange revolution of '68, which made possible the passage from war in the singular to a plurality of wars-and from wars to the construction of new war machines against contemporary financialization. It is a question of pushing "'68 thought" beyond its own limits and redirecting it towards a new pragmatics of struggle linked to the continuous war of capital. It is especially important for us to prepare ourselves for the battles we will have to fight if we do not want to be always defeated.

A collection of early and not-so-early work by the mistress of gut-level fiction-making. You can say I write stories with sex and violence and therefore my writing isn't worth considering because it uses content much less lots of content. Well, I tell you this: 'Prickly race, who know nothing except how to eat out your hearts with envy, you don't eat cunt'... Edited by Sylvere Lotringer and published in 1991, this handy, pocket-sized collection of some early and not-so-early work by the mistress of gut-level fiction-making, Hannibal Lecter, My Father gathers together Acker's raw, brilliant, emotional and cerebral texts from 1970s, including the self-published 'zines written under the nom-de-plume, The Black Tarantula. This volume features, among others, the full text of Acker's opera, The Birth of the Poet, produced at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1985, Algeria, 1979 and fragments of Politics, written at the age of 21. Also included is the longest and definitive interview Acker ever gave over two years: a chatty, intriguing and delightfully self-deprecating conversation with Semiotext(e) editor Sylvere Lotringer-which is trippy enough in itself as Lotringer, besides being a real person, has appeared as a character in Acker's fiction. And last, but not least, is the full transcript of the decision reached by West Germany's Federal Inspection Office for Publications Harmful to Minors in which Acker's work was judged to be "not only youth-threatening but also dangerous to adults," and subsequently banned. Acker is the sort of the writer that should be read first at 16, so that you can spend the rest of your life trying to figure her out; she confuses, infuriates, perplexes and then all of a sudden the writing seems to be in your bloodstream, like some kind of benign virus. She's definitely not for the easily offended-but then, there are worse things in life than being offended. Such as the things that Acker writes about...

Those who are mad like Antonin Artaud, are they just as mad as he was? Madness, like the plague, is contagious, and everyone, from his psychiatrists to his disciples, family, and critics, everyone who gets close to Artaud, seems to participate in his delirium. Sylvere Lotringer explores various embodiments of this shared delirium through what Artaud called "mental dramas"-a series of confrontations with his witnesses or "persecutors" where we uncover the raw delirium at work, even in Lotringer himself. Mad Like Artaud does not intend to add one more layer of commentary to the bitter controversies that have been surrounding the cursed poet's work since his death in 1948, nor does it take sides among the different camps who are still haggling over his corpse. This book speaks of the site where "madness" itself is simmering.

A first-hand account of the Western world on the threshold of a major global mutation, bridging art and intellect, culture and politics, Europe and America. The German Issue (1982) was originally conceived as a follow-up to Semiotext(e)'s Autonomia/Italy issue, published two years earlier. Although ideological terrorism was still a major issue in Germany, what ultimately emerged from these pages was an investigation of two outlaw cities, Berlin and New York, which embodied all the tensions and contradictions of the world at the time. The German Issue is the Tale of Two Cities, then, with each city separated from its own country by an invisible wall of suspicion or even hatred. It is also the complex evocation of the rebelling youth-squatters, punks, artists and radicals, theorists and ex-terrorists-who gathered all their energy and creativity in order to outlive a hostile environment. Like a time capsule, The German Issue brings together all the major "issues" that were being debated on both sides of the Atlantic-which eventually found their abrupt resolution in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It involved the most important voices of the period-from writers and filmmakers to anthropologists, activists and poets, terrorists and philosophers: Joseph Beuys, Michel Foucault, Christo, Christa Wolf, Walter Abish, Alexander Kluge, Paul Virilio, Ulrilke Meinhof, William Burroughs, Jean Baudrillard, Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Maurice Blanchot, Hans Jurgen Syberberg, Heidegger, Andre Gorz, Helke Sander. Opening with Christo's "Wrapping Up of Germany" and the celebrated dialogue between East German dramaturge Heiner Muller and Sylvere Lotringer on the Wall ("Mauer"), since published in many languages, The German Issue offers a first-hand account of the Western world on the threshold of a major global mutation. It also embodies at its best Semiotext(e)'s tenacious effort to establish a creative bridge between art and intellect, culture and politics, Europe and America.

Virilio and Lotringer revisit their prescient book on the invisible war waged by technology against humanity since World War II. In June 2007, Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer met in La Rochelle, France to reconsider the premises they developed twenty-five years before in their frighteningly prescient classic, Pure War. Pure War described the invisible war waged by technology against humanity, and the lack of any real distinction since World War II between war and peace. Speaking with Lotringer in 1982, Virilio noted the "accidents" that inevitably arise with every technological development: from car crashes to nuclear spillage, to the extermination of space and the derealization of time wrought by instant communication. In this new and updated edition, Virilio and Lotringer consider how the omnipresent threat of the "accident"-both military and economic-has escalated. With the fall of the Soviet bloc, the balance of power between East and West based on nuclear deterrence has given way to a more diffuse multi-polar nuclear threat. Moreover, as the speed of communication has increased exponentially, "local" accidents-like the collapse of the Asian markets in the late 1980s-escalate, with the speed of contagion, into global events instantaneously. "Globalization," Virilio argues, is the planet's ultimate accident.Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932 to an immigrant Italian family. Trained as an urban planner, he became the director of the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in the wake of the 1968 rebellion. He has published twenty-five books, including Pure War (1988) (his first in English) and The Accident of Art (2005), both with Sylvere Lotringer and published by Semiotext(e). Sylvere Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext(e), lives in New York and Baja California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions (Semiotext(e), 2007) and other books.