Critical Subjects of Capitalism?

Maurizio Lazzarato | 22.11.2013

Panel 2: Critical Subjects of Capitalism?

Maurizio Lazzarato is a Paris-based sociologist and philosopher. During the 1970s Lazzarato studied in Padua. His involvement in the workerist movement and his politically enforced move to Paris remained crucial for his theoretical work as well as for his film co-operations with the artist Angela Melitopolous. During the 1990s Lazzarato was a founding protagonist of the post-workerist discourse concerning the change towards ‘immaterial’ and ‘cognitive’ labour as a paradigm of post-Fordist Western society. His essays have been included in numerous anthologies relating to post-structuralist philosophy as well as to political and economic theory of the present. In the early 2000s he published Videophilosophie, a book that, following Félix Guattari, explicitly engages with a contemporary media theory (b_books, 2002). This work was followed by his books The Making of the Indebted Man (Semiotext(e), 2012), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Semiotext(e), 2014), and Governing by Debt (Semiotext(e), 2015).