St. Mark's Bookshop

Most of the writers who contributed to the issue were locked up at thetime in Italian jails.... I was trying to draw the attention of the American Left, which still believed in Eurocommunism, to the fate of Autonomia. The survival of thelast politically creative movement in the West was at stake, but no one in theUnited States seemed to realize that, or be willing to listen. Put together asevents in Italy were unfolding, the Autonomia issue--which has no equivalent inItaly, or anywhere for that matter--arrived too late, but it remains an energizingaccount of a movement that disappeared without bearing a trace, but with a bigfuture still ahead of it.--Sylv?re LotringerSemiotext(e) is reissuing in book formits legendary magazine issue Italy: Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, originallypublished in New York in 1980. Edited by Sylv?re Lotringer and Christian Marazziwith the direct participation of the main leaders and theorists of the Autonomistmovement (including Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone, Paolo Virno, Sergio Bologna, and Franco Berardi), this volume is the only first-handdocument and contemporaneous analysis that exists of the most innovative post-'68radical movement in the West. The movement itself was broken when Autonomia memberswere falsely accused of (and prosecuted for) being the intellectual masterminds ofthe Red Brigades; but even after the end of Autonomia, this book remains a crucialtestimony of the way this creative, futuristic, neo-anarchistic, postideological, and nonrepresentative political movement of young workers and intellectualsanticipated issues that are now confronting us in the wake of Empire. In the nexttwo years, Semiotext(e) will publish eight books by such Italian"Post-Fordist" intellectuals as Antonio Negri, Christian Marazzi, PaoloVirno, and Bifo, as they update the theories of Autonomia for the newcentury.Sylv?re Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext(e), lives in New York andBaja California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions(Semiotext(e), 2007). Christian Marazzi, an Italian economist, lives in Switzerland.He is the author of Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economyand Sock's Place, both forthcoming from Semiotext(e).