2 New Books from MIT Press
Radical Alterity (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)
Translated by Ames Hodges
Where is the Other today? Can Otherness challenge our arrogant, insular cultural narcissism? From artificial intelligence to the streets of Venice, from early explorers to contemporary photographers, Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume discuss the traces of radical alterity in our world. These provocative seminars, held in 1990 and 1991, follow the multiple, intertwined trajectories first projected in Baudrillard’s work and his reading of the “radical exoticism” posited by Victor Segalen–ideas Baudrillard extends into the realms of mass media, pseudonyms, technology, and that illusorily close yet radically foreign “primitive society of the future,” America.
In a world where no corner is unexplored, the Other remains a challenge to thought, a crack in the shell of universal understanding, impossible to communicate but potentially the linchpin of communication itself. Together, Baudrillard and Guillaume explore the threatened and fatal figures of radical alterity.
This collection is no longer available in French, and this English edition includes an additional essay by Baudrillard, “Because Illusion and Reality Are Not Opposed.”
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Pure War (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)
featuring a new introduction by Sylvere Lotringer and Paul Virilio, and a postscript with two new interviews
In June 2007, Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer met in La Rochelle, France to reconsider the premises they had developed twenty-five years before in their frighteningly prescient classic, Pure War. Pure War was the book that first introduced Paul Virlio to English readers in 1983. It described the invisible war waged by technology against humanity, and the lack of any real distinction since World War II between war and peace. In conversation 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 École 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 Sylvère Lotringer and published by Semiotext(e). In 1998, he retired from teaching to devote himself to subh projects as working with homeless people in Paris and building the first Museum of the Accident. He now lives in La Rochelle, France and no longer travels.