-Capital is a semiotic operator- this assertion by Felix 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,...

-So the One Orb has imploded -- now the foams are alive.- -- from Foams

Foams completes Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated Spheres trilogy: his 2,500-page -grand narrative- retelling of the history of humanity, as related through the anthropological concept of the -Sphere.- For Sloterdijk, life is a matter of form and, in life, sphere formation and thought are two different labels for the same thing. The trilogy also offers his corrective answer to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, reformulating it into a lengthy meditation on Being and Space -- a shifting of...