The debtor-creditor relation, which is at the heart of this book, sharpens mechanisms of exploitation and domination indiscriminately, since, in it, there is no distinction between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and non-working populations, between retirees and welfare recipients. They are all "debtors," guilty and responsible in the eyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor.--from The Making of the Indebted Man Debt -- both public debt and private debt Has become a major concern (...) of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx's lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies.Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of "public safety" through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the "entrepreneurs" of our lives, of our "human capital." In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured. How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt. (shrink)

An analysis of how capitalism today produces subjectivity like any other “good,” and what would allow us to escape its hold. “Capital is a semiotic operator”: this assertion by Félix Guattari is at the heart of Maurizio Lazzarato's Signs and Machines, which asks us to leave behind the logocentrism that still informs so many critical theories. Lazzarato calls instead for a new theory capable of explaining how signs function in the economy, in power apparatuses, and in the production of subjectivity. (...) Moving beyond the dualism of signifier and signified, Signs and Machines shows how signs act as “sign-operators” that enter directly into material flows and into the functioning of machines. Money, the stock market, price differentials, algorithms, and scientific equations and formulas constitute semiotic “motors” that make capitalism's social and technical machines run, bypassing representation and consciousness to produce social subjections and semiotic enslavements. Lazzarato contrasts Deleuze and Guattari's complex semiotics with the political theories of Jacques Rancière, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, and Judith Butler, for whom language and the public space it opens still play a fundamental role. Lazzarato asks: What are the conditions necessary for political and existential rupture at a time when the production of subjectivity represents the primary and perhaps most important work of capitalism? What are the specific tools required to undo the industrial mass production of subjectivity undertaken by business and the state? What types of organization must we construct for a process of subjectivation that would allow us to escape the hold of social subjection and machinic enslavement? In addressing these questions, Signs and Machines takes on a task that is today more urgent than ever. (shrink)

This paper draws from Foucault’s analysis of liberalism and neoliberalism to reconstruct the mechanisms and the means whereby neoliberalism has transformed society into an ‘enterprise society’ based on the market, competition, inequality, and the privilege of the individual. It highlights the role of financialization, neglected by Foucault, as a key apparatus in achieving this transformation. It elaborates the strategies of individualization, insecuritization and depoliticization used as part of neoliberal social policy to undermine the principles and practices of mutualization and redistribution (...) that the Welfare State and Fordism had promoted. It shows that the aim of neoliberal politics is the restoration of the power of capital to determine the distribution of wealth and to establish the enterprise as dominant form; this requires that it target society as a whole for a fundamental reconstruction, putting in place new mechanisms to control individual conduct. The analysis refers to the case of workers in the culture industry to illustrate the operation of these mechanisms in practice. It also outlines the main elements of the analytical apparatus that makes visible the new role of the state as an ensemble of apparatuses constituting the conditions for neoliberal market capitalism and the new type of individual appropriate for it. The paper thus adds a new dimension to Foucault’s analysis. (shrink)

Biopower agregates no longer families distributed on land but mobile individuals. How can power count forces and take energy from them, if they differ from each other, if they are free? Power comes from beneath, from strategic relations between subjects.

The Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato reveals the underpinnings of contemporary subjectivity in the aesthetics and politics of mass media. This book discloses the conceptual groundwork of Lazzarato's thought as a whole for a time when his writings have become increasingly influential.

This catalogue essay is based on a series of interviews conducted by the authors with international scholars who were asked to reflect on Guattari's scattered comments concerning animism. Interviewees are: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (anthropologist, Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro), Eric Alliez (philosopher, Paris), Jean Claude Polack (psychoanalyst, Paris), Barbara Glowczewski (anthropologist, Paris), Peter Pál Pelbart (philosopher, São Paolo) Janja Rosangela Araujo (master of Capoeira Angola, and professor, Salvador de Bahia) and Jean Jacques Lebel (artist, Paris). Animism was thought by (...) Guattari in relation to a number of themes and places in excess of religion and ritual but in the context of the shattering of capitalism. (shrink)

The genealogy of capitalism sketched by Foucault at the end of the 1970s shakes up whatever we thought we knew about liberalism. Adam Smith’s observation retains all its relevance : politics and the economy are neither to be superposed nor to be reconciled. Liberal governance attempts to face this fact. Its tasks of circumventing, encircling, reaching from the outside are mediated by two modalities of application, which correspond to two techniques of normalisation : the first one , predominant, deals with (...) the bigger items ; the second one , active in the underground, deals with the details. It corners more closely the multiplicities, life and the conducts. A true politics of multiplicities would suppose an intervention “from the outside of” the agents we take for natural or spontaneous, but which are the objects of a constant care and re-institution : market, firms, workers. (shrink)

Ten years of employment policies have demonstrated two fundamental discrepancies: a job is not a guarantee of a satisfactory income and growth does not guarantee the creation of jobs. In proposing a necessary displacement of the angle of approach to the dynamics of liberal globalization, and of the relation of capital/labor to the antagonism of capital/life, the article supports the demand for a guaranteed income: guaranteed income as a constituent process, that is, in order to open a constituent phase at (...) the level of social and economic institutions. (shrink)

Résumé La généalogie du capitalisme amorcée par Foucault à la fin des années 70 ébranle ce que nous croyons savoir du libéralisme. Le constat d’Adam Smith conserve toute sa force : le politique (droits) et l’économie (intérêts) ne sont ni superposables, ni réconciliables. Le gouvernement libéral se propose d’y répondre. Englober et « passer par l’extérieur », telles sont ses tâches, et elles connaissent deux modalités d’application depuis lors, qui sont aussi deux techniques de normalisation. La première, prédominante, s’occupe du (...) gros : la discipline. La seconde, active et souterraine, s’occupe des détails : la sécurité. Elle cerne de plus près les multiplicités, la vie, les conduites. Une véritable politique des multiplicités supposerait, bien davantage encore, de passer « par l’extérieur » des agents que nous tenons pour naturels ou spontanés, mais qui sont l’objet d’un souci et d’une ré-institution constants : le marché, l’entreprise, le travailleur. (shrink)

Founded on the mode of « coordination », the struggle of the « intermittents et précaires » of the Greater Paris area is a genuine laboratory which has the means to bring to light the invalidation of the political schema stemming front the socialist and communist tradition. Where the latter insists on a logic of contradiction, of the political representation of an injustice which stages remarkable identities, the political form of « coordination » is resolutely expressive, transformist, and attentive to (...) the unstable dynamics of post-identity identities which weave together the reality of our world. Coordination does not aim at the constitution of a unitary collective which seeks to guarantee the equality of its members at any cost, but rather, at the emergence and « becoming » of singularities which it brings together in an unstable rmtltiplicity, a network, a form always close to the patchwork - exceeding any theoretical definition, but also any appropriation by union forces or State representations. A politics of experimentation which dismisses prior forms of knowledge and opens itself up to the unknown, without which no new form of life is imaginable. (shrink)

Tomorrow’s politics will be a politics of multiplicity. Contemporary Marxism, in its political and trade-unionist manifestations, appears as a major obstacle, given its inability to escape from totalising categories and to reflect upon the political need for innovation . Maurizio Lazzarato attempts to show that this double inability originates in an ontological view of relations, present in Marx himself, a view which needs to be reconsidered in light of the philosophy of multiplicity developed during the same period. William James’ pragmatism, (...) for instance, allows us to understand how deeply Marx’s ontology of relation is indebted to the idealist philosophy of the 19th century, thus revealing the ontological limits of Marxist politics. (shrink)

In this interview, Maurizio Lazzarato revisits his interest in the work of Gabriel Tarde . He then reflects upon recent uses of the couple biopower/biopolitics, as well as upon the place of the “common” in the theory of the Multitude. He concludes by sketching some of the political implications of the philosophy of difference, which invites us to recognize and unleash the productive powers of variation and experimentation.