Author Description

This new edition of Soft Subversions expands, reorganizes, and develops the original 1996 publication, offering a carefully organized arrangement of essays, interviews, and short texts that present a fuller scope to Guattari's thinking from 1977 to 1985. This period encompasses what Guattari himself called the "Winter Years" of the early 1980s--the imprisonment of Italian radicals, the disillusion with the socialists in power, the backlash against post-'68 thinking, the spread of environmental catastrophe, and the establishment of a postmodernist ideology aimed at adaptation rather than change--a period with discernible echoes twenty years later. Following Semiotext(e)'s release last season of the new, expanded edition of Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977, this collection offers some new exciting forays in schizo-analysis, and makes Guattari's central ideas and concepts fully available in the format that had been best suited to Guattari's temperament: the guerrilla-styled intervention of the short essay and interactive dialogue. This edition includes such previously unpublished, substantive texts as "The Schizoanalyses," "Institutional Intervention," "Postmodern Deadlock and Post-Media Transition," "New Spaces of Liberty for Minoritarian Desire," and "Minority and Terrorism," along with interviews and essays on a range of topics including adolescence and Italy, dream analysis and schizo-analysis, as well as invaluable autobiographical documents such as "I Am an Idea-Thief" and "So What." -- Publisher's description.