Soft Subversions. Texts and Interviews 1977-1985

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 ascent of the Right, the spread of environmental catastrophe, the rise of a disillusioned youth with diminished prospects for career and future, and the establishment of a postmodernist ideology that offered solutions toward 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 book 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 This edition includes such previously unpublished, substantive texts as Institutional Intervention and About Schools , along with new translations of War, Crisis, or Life and The Nuclear State , interviews and essays on a range of topics including adolescence and Italy, dream analysis and schizo-analysis, Marcel Proust and Jimmy Carter, as well as invaluable autobiographical documents such as I Am an Idea-Thief and So What.