Soft Subversions, new edition

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 This edition includes such previously unpublished, substantive texts as "The Schizoanalyses," "Institutional Intervention," "Postmodern Deadlock and Post-Media Transition," "New Spaces of Liberty for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."

Foreign Agents series
Distributed for Semiotext(e)

Jonathan D. Moreno is David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense, among other books, and editor of In the Wake of Terror: Medicine and Morality in a Time of Crisis (MIT Press, 2003).