The Miserables

by Sylvère Lotringer, Ames Hodges (Translator)

What societies of control are achieving in the West through invasive technologies and the soft violence of financial capitalism—the production of work slaves and human zombies—is being enforced in the rest of the world by the most brutal, extreme, inhuman means. Narco-Capitalism, the extreme violence now raging in Mexico, is only the latest in an enterprise of systematic dehumanization that is affecting the entire planet.

Number 1 in a series of 22 publications produced on the occasion of the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

63 pages, Saddle stitch

First published March 7, 2014

About the author

Sylvère Lotringer (born in 1938 in Paris, France) is a literary critic and cultural theorist. A younger contemporary of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, he is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements through his work with Semiotext(e); and for his interpretations of French theory in a 21st-century context. An influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, Lotringer invented the concept "extrapolationist" as a means of describing the hyperbolic world-views espoused by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Lotringer is a Professor of Foreign Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.