Content area
Full Text
Maurizio Lazzarato is an Italian sociologist and philosopher who lives and works in France. He collaborated on collective works with important figures like Antonio Negri and Yann Moulier-Boutang in the 1990s and has been a frequent contributor to the journal Multitudes in which the same two intellectuals were also leading voices. During the same period, he was closely involved as a theorist and activist in the long and inventive struggle of the intermittents du spectacle, French cultural workers defending a social security regime that took particular account of their unstable employment and the way in which their creativity overflowed their periods of paid activity. This involvement fed into a broader reflection and theorization around mutations of labor, the rise of precariousness, neo-liberal governance and leftist mobilization that found expression in a range of texts published in the 2000s. Lazzarato came forcefully to public attention in the English-speaking world when his timely, important book on debt, La Fabrique de l’homme endetté, was translated into English in 2013 as The Making of the Indebted Man. That book came out of his broader concern with neo-liberal governance and the subjectivities associated with it, but it was tightly focused on debt. The two books to be discussed here return to that larger picture, the prime focus of Governing by Debt being neo-liberal governance and that of Signs and Machines, the production of subjectivity under capitalism. Like La Fabrique, both books are in close dialogue with Foucault and particularly his famous analysis of neo-liberalism in his Birth of Bio-politics Lectures at the Collège de France, an analysis that, in one way or another, they seek to update. Again like La Fabrique, both are also heavily influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and make ample use of some of the main concepts that they deploy in books like Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (e.g., codes, deterritorialization, flows and their capture, axioms, assemblages, machines). The denser and more demanding of the two works, Signs and Machines, is also particularly indebted to Guattari’s discussion of signifying and a-signifying semiotics and draws heavily on theorists like Bakhtin and the filmmaker Pasolini while engaging in a sustained critique of key contemporary critical theorists like Judith Butler, Jacques...