Category Archives: Books

The books published by semiotext(e) (distributed by the MIT Press) are never disappointing. the Intervention series in particular, started a propos by the Coming Insurrection, succeeds to produce strong manifestos through the writings of Gerald Raunig (see previous article), Tiqqun, Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard etc. and more recently Franco “Bifo” Berardi in his book, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (thank you Greg). The latter is dedicated to a sharp description of the financialization of the world as well as the development of a revolutionary weapon against it: poetry.

Both of those antagonisms have the particularity of belonging in the domain of semiotics – which makes this book perfect for this publisher – and, although they do not seem to have much in common, they can take their part in what I call, the semio-war.

I want to understand the process of dissolution that is underway from the unusual point of view of the relationship between poetry and finance. What has poetry to do with finance, and finance with poetry? Nothing, of course. Investors, stockholders, and bankers are usually too busy, so they don’t waste their time with poetry. Poets are too poor to invest money in the stock market. […]My point here concerns the deterritorialization effect which has separated words from their semiotic referents and money from economic goods.

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As a third chapter of a series of articles about what I called the ideal normatized body, I would like to archive in the blog, the beginning of Judith Butler‘s introduction to her book Bodies That Matter. In this short text, she describes how bodies are being subjected to a normalization process which never fully reach the essence of the norm itself, in that case, “sex”. This oxymoron of an ideal norm is actually inherent to the status of the norm itself as it correspond to both a social construction describing a majority of behavioral and material characteristics, and an ideal in the sense that no body can actually incarnates absolutely the norm. J. Butler uses the notion of abjection to describe “those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject.” The abject constitutes precisely this excess considered as waste by a system that can find an economy with it, this “matter out of place” as British Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote in Purity and Danger (for more about this question, one might want to read my “underdog” contribution, Abject Matter to the most recent LOG). Living the unlivable, inhabiting the uninhabitable constitute the refusal to processes of subjectivation as those “able” terms are precisely attributed by the normative system served by these same processes.

See the two first “chapters” of this series:
- The Modernist Ideology of a Normative Body
- A Subversive Approach to the Ideal Normatized Body

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Teresa Margolles, Muro Baleado (Shot Wall), 2009

The 31st episode of the guests writers series is written by Greg Barton, currently curatorial fellow at the storefront for art and architecture. His name might be familiar to the funambulist’s sharpest readers as in last October, I published a short article about the exhibition Ecologias Correlativas that he co-curated with Emma Chammah. His text bases its discourse on the book The Femicide Machine written by Mexican journalist Sergio González Rodríguez  and published at the always excellent semiotext(e) edited by Sylvère Lotringer, Chris Kraus, and Hedi El Kholti.

The Femicide Machine describes the situation in the city of Ciudad Juarez near the American Border and which seems to incarnate an illustrative example of a urban life shaped by the maquiladoras -there is 300 of them in Ciudad Juarez. In this model, women are the primary victims from the collision of geo-political trade agreements and their cryptic version, the narco-industry and its wars. Greg quotes the film Sleep Dealer to evoke the capture of bodies’ energetic production (see previous article) in maquiladoras which correspond to an even more generalized capture in the case of women whose bodies is continuously at work and at risk between labor, rape and murder. In this regard, he also quotes Octavio Paz who wrote that a woman was considered by our world as “an undifferentiated manifestation of life, a channel for the universal appetite.” Just like the raw material they export to Mexico in order to gain it back under the form of merchandise, the United States are both at the source and at the exit of this machine which exploits the Mexican labor energy for its fuel. Those border territories, as places of human, goods and money fluxes, then constitute the ideal scene for other fluxes to plug themselves in the circuit. That is how the subindustries developed and sustain itself through violence on women bodies.

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