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Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader
Hatred of Capitalism( A Semiotext(e) Reader) <> Paperback <> ChrisKraus <> Semiotext(e)
430 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2001
54 people are currently reading
1893 people want to read
About the author
Chris Kraus
76 books903 followersChris Kraus is a writer and critic. She studied acting and spent almost two decades making performances and experimental films in New York before moving to Los Angeles where she began writing. Her novels include Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. She has published three books of cultural criticism—Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Where Art Belongs, and Social Practices. I Love Dick was adapted for television and her literary biography After Kathy Acker was published by Semiotext(e) and Penguin Press. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Kraus held the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in 2019 and was Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College between 2020–2024. She has written for various magazines and has been a coeditor of the independent press Semiotext(e) since 1990. Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability, and dazzling speed and has been translated into seventeen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
December 1, 2015
I was sitting in an Indigo in a particularly bourgeois area of Toronto. The woman next to me was reading a guide book about The Greek Islands and taking notes. I noticed a man standing behind me, and very close.
"Who wrote that?" he asked.
"It's a reader," I said and turned the book so the back cover was facing both of us. "Want to see?"
"I've got a meeting," he says. "Have you heard of Noam Chomsky?" he asks, and I curtly reply "Yes."
"Good" he says, and claps me on the back. "Keep reading."
He then walks away and I realize we never once made eye contact.
"Who wrote that?" he asked.
"It's a reader," I said and turned the book so the back cover was facing both of us. "Want to see?"
"I've got a meeting," he says. "Have you heard of Noam Chomsky?" he asks, and I curtly reply "Yes."
"Good" he says, and claps me on the back. "Keep reading."
He then walks away and I realize we never once made eye contact.
August 16, 2009
this book makes me feel stupid. actually, the only time i can ever really understand it is if i've had a cocktail or two. the ideas discussed are interesting, but i can't help but think these writers all take themselves way too serious.
September 17, 2017
To all the girls who never read enough Marx & Hegel... or just read the wrong books, period.
C: To think about anything for very long is delirium.
Tomorrow, with the aesthetics and logic forcing the disappearance of the architectonic, we will live everywhere.
Paul Virilio The Last Vehicle
I doubt that by saying that directly you’ll change anything. Language is corrupt.
Listen, you are a creature, artistic I can tell, that somehow got hung up on the issue of language. Forget it. It’s thinking. If you can think of a thought in a most pathetic language. . . Look at what I have to do in order to think of thoughts. I have to forget language. All I can do with no education, nothing, no advice, no common sense in my life, an insane mother I mean, no background, nothing, nothing, and I have to make art, but I know that under these conditions the one thing I had to find out was if I could think of a thought that has never been thought of before, then it could be in language that was never read before. If you can think of something, the language will fall into place in the most fantastic way, but the thought is what’s going to do it. The language is shit, I mean it’s only there to support a thought. Look at Susan Sontag, that’s a phenomenon that will never occur, only in every hundred years. Anybody like that. She says things that you would never have thought of. And the language is automatically unique. Whatever new thoughts you can think of that the world needs will be automatically clothed in the most radiant language imaginable.
Have you ever thought of another type of society . . .
I can think of billions of ways for the world to be completely different. I wish they would invent a scalpbrush. Do you realize that there is nothing on earth that you can brush your scalp with?... I can think of other types of societies. . . Like in the middle of the city should be a repository of objects that people don’t want anymore, which they would take to this giant junkyard. That would form an organisation, a way that the city could be organised… the city organised around that. I think this center of unused objects and unwanted objects would become a centre of intellectual activity. Things would grow up around it.
Jack Smith Uncle Fishhook and the Sacred Baby Poo Poo of Art
The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of sex but rather to use sexuality to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.
What we must work on, it seems to me, is not so much to liberate our desires but to make ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure. We must escape and help others escape the two ready-made formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lover’s fusion of identities.
Michel Foucault Friendship as a Way of Life
Shame!
What you do to me is shame
I’m only tryna ease the pain . . . ,
Deep in your arms
Is where I want to be
Cause shame was what we always felt, me and all my girlfriends, for expecting sex to breed complicity. (“Complicity is like a girl’s name,” writes Dodie Bellamy.)
“Is that what you wanted?” you asked me on Friday morning. It was nearly 10. We’d been arguing in bed without our clothes for hours. And you’d just charitably, generously told me a sad story from your life to make amends for calling me a psychotic. To try and make things right, “Is that what you wanted? A ragged kind of intimacy?”
Well yes and no. “I’m just trying to be honest”, I’d confessed to you that morning, and it sounded oh so lame. “Whenever someone makes a breakthrough into honesty,” David Rattray’d said in an interview I’d arranged for him with the editor Ken Jordan, “that means not just self-knowledge but knowledge of what others can’t see. To be honest in a real absolute way is to be almost prophetic, to upset the applecart.” I was trying to promote his book and he was ranting in a way that made me cringe about his hatred for everyone who’d kept him down, who were out to silence “every bright young person who comes along with something original to say.” The interview was made just three days before he collapsed on Avenue A with a massive and inoperable brain tumor.
“Because after all,” I typed, following his deep and unmistakable patrician voice, “the applecart is just an endless series of indigestible means and social commitments that are useless and probably shouldn’t be honoured and futile pointless conversations, gestures, and finally to die abandoned, treated like a piece of garbage by people in white coats who are no more civilised than sanitation workers . . . that’s what the applecart means to me.”
Shame is what you feel after being fucked on quaaludes by some artworld cohort who‘ll pretend it never happened, shame is what you feel after giving blowjobs in the bathroom at Max‘s Kansas City because Liza Martin wants free coke. Sham is what you feel after letting someone take you someplace past control – then feeling torn up three days later between desire, paranoia, etiquette wondering if they‘ll call.
All acts of sex were forms of degradation. Some random collections: East 11th Street, on the bed with Murray Gorman: “Swallow this mother ‘til you choke.” East 11th Street, in the bed with Gary Becker: “The trouble with you is, you’re such a shallow person”. Second Avenue, the kitchen, Michael Wainwright: “Quite frankly, I deserve a better-looking, better educated girlfriend”. What do you do with the Serious Young Woman (short hair, flat shoes, body slightly hunched, head drifting back and forth between the books she’s read?)? You slap her, fuck her up the ass and treat her like a boy. The Serious Young Woman looked everywhere for sex but when she got it it became an exercise in disintegration. What was the motivation of these men? Was it hatred she evoked? Was it some kind of challenge, trying to make the Serious Young Woman Femme?
Chris Kraus I Love Dick
C: To think about anything for very long is delirium.
Tomorrow, with the aesthetics and logic forcing the disappearance of the architectonic, we will live everywhere.
Paul Virilio The Last Vehicle
I doubt that by saying that directly you’ll change anything. Language is corrupt.
Listen, you are a creature, artistic I can tell, that somehow got hung up on the issue of language. Forget it. It’s thinking. If you can think of a thought in a most pathetic language. . . Look at what I have to do in order to think of thoughts. I have to forget language. All I can do with no education, nothing, no advice, no common sense in my life, an insane mother I mean, no background, nothing, nothing, and I have to make art, but I know that under these conditions the one thing I had to find out was if I could think of a thought that has never been thought of before, then it could be in language that was never read before. If you can think of something, the language will fall into place in the most fantastic way, but the thought is what’s going to do it. The language is shit, I mean it’s only there to support a thought. Look at Susan Sontag, that’s a phenomenon that will never occur, only in every hundred years. Anybody like that. She says things that you would never have thought of. And the language is automatically unique. Whatever new thoughts you can think of that the world needs will be automatically clothed in the most radiant language imaginable.
Have you ever thought of another type of society . . .
I can think of billions of ways for the world to be completely different. I wish they would invent a scalpbrush. Do you realize that there is nothing on earth that you can brush your scalp with?... I can think of other types of societies. . . Like in the middle of the city should be a repository of objects that people don’t want anymore, which they would take to this giant junkyard. That would form an organisation, a way that the city could be organised… the city organised around that. I think this center of unused objects and unwanted objects would become a centre of intellectual activity. Things would grow up around it.
Jack Smith Uncle Fishhook and the Sacred Baby Poo Poo of Art
The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of sex but rather to use sexuality to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.
What we must work on, it seems to me, is not so much to liberate our desires but to make ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure. We must escape and help others escape the two ready-made formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lover’s fusion of identities.
Michel Foucault Friendship as a Way of Life
Shame!
What you do to me is shame
I’m only tryna ease the pain . . . ,
Deep in your arms
Is where I want to be
Cause shame was what we always felt, me and all my girlfriends, for expecting sex to breed complicity. (“Complicity is like a girl’s name,” writes Dodie Bellamy.)
“Is that what you wanted?” you asked me on Friday morning. It was nearly 10. We’d been arguing in bed without our clothes for hours. And you’d just charitably, generously told me a sad story from your life to make amends for calling me a psychotic. To try and make things right, “Is that what you wanted? A ragged kind of intimacy?”
Well yes and no. “I’m just trying to be honest”, I’d confessed to you that morning, and it sounded oh so lame. “Whenever someone makes a breakthrough into honesty,” David Rattray’d said in an interview I’d arranged for him with the editor Ken Jordan, “that means not just self-knowledge but knowledge of what others can’t see. To be honest in a real absolute way is to be almost prophetic, to upset the applecart.” I was trying to promote his book and he was ranting in a way that made me cringe about his hatred for everyone who’d kept him down, who were out to silence “every bright young person who comes along with something original to say.” The interview was made just three days before he collapsed on Avenue A with a massive and inoperable brain tumor.
“Because after all,” I typed, following his deep and unmistakable patrician voice, “the applecart is just an endless series of indigestible means and social commitments that are useless and probably shouldn’t be honoured and futile pointless conversations, gestures, and finally to die abandoned, treated like a piece of garbage by people in white coats who are no more civilised than sanitation workers . . . that’s what the applecart means to me.”
Shame is what you feel after being fucked on quaaludes by some artworld cohort who‘ll pretend it never happened, shame is what you feel after giving blowjobs in the bathroom at Max‘s Kansas City because Liza Martin wants free coke. Sham is what you feel after letting someone take you someplace past control – then feeling torn up three days later between desire, paranoia, etiquette wondering if they‘ll call.
All acts of sex were forms of degradation. Some random collections: East 11th Street, on the bed with Murray Gorman: “Swallow this mother ‘til you choke.” East 11th Street, in the bed with Gary Becker: “The trouble with you is, you’re such a shallow person”. Second Avenue, the kitchen, Michael Wainwright: “Quite frankly, I deserve a better-looking, better educated girlfriend”. What do you do with the Serious Young Woman (short hair, flat shoes, body slightly hunched, head drifting back and forth between the books she’s read?)? You slap her, fuck her up the ass and treat her like a boy. The Serious Young Woman looked everywhere for sex but when she got it it became an exercise in disintegration. What was the motivation of these men? Was it hatred she evoked? Was it some kind of challenge, trying to make the Serious Young Woman Femme?
Chris Kraus I Love Dick
July 16, 2024
This is one of the most creative revolutionary compilations assembled. And the cover art with the fork next to the rose. Perfect. The devastating failed revolutions of the past are not without irony, or a path forward.
You have these brilliant feminist writers who speak with courage and candor…and you have these brilliant old white male intellectuals. Both with all the precisest ways to damn the man. And you ask yourself how would they have lunch with each other, in the same room?
And as long as these two groups of folks are convoluted and conflated by the Hegelian dividing lines infinitum, then autonomia again sputters. So what does that mean for a movement in America and across the world today?
Donald Trump is bringing someone legit looking into the mix for VP, so he can win the working class rust belt folks that democrats have left behind. And yet, Trump is not going to be able to do much for these folks being the president. Like last time. Neither would the dems.
TIME calling Vance “anti-capitalist”, like Trump is pulling from the “far left” is convoluted to say the least. This is another rich person who believes in the traditional work harder American dream thing. He is smart in areas that a "real" politician should be: political science, philosophy, law, military. Yale grad. But it will all be to distract and protect the rich in the end. As it always is. When you have to arm yourself with someone like this to decode propaganda. And you’re supposed to be the one in charge of the rich…and not the other way around…It’s a bad sign.
At best it will be a way of cutting bureaucracy but the rich won’t suddenly get taxed more like TIME juxtaposes as an anti capitalist stance. If Trump were actually anti-capitalist he would not be a greedy rich man, like every other politician and billionaire funding these politicians and media venues.
The good news is that publications have to start appropriating the "anti-capitalist" thing in America now. Class consciousness is the political evolution after the whole fascist catharsis is seen for what it really is. A politically impotent caste struggle. The concept of anti-capitalism, as territorialized in TIME, is a huge step in the right direction. That it has to be appropriated at all is a sign people are pushing the narrative in a better direction.
Unfortunately, now we’re back to a lot of the 90s narratives, when the first horrible wealth disparity hit American awareness. It will get retro fitted to our times and fed back to us to put the sheep back to sleep. The hipsters will be divided against the die hard anti-capitalists. The feminists against the old white philosophers and economists. Black men pitted against white women…all the same shit as ever before. And it will convolute the revolution.
The key is for actual anti-capitalists to drop out of these hipster debates before they get sucked into the gravity of big money narratives and say the wrong thing. It is about keeping it minimal. Sustaining presence of mind. Dropping out of exploitative infrastructures that horizontally negate to distract from vertical political issues.
This book is solid. I’m going to read it again.
You have these brilliant feminist writers who speak with courage and candor…and you have these brilliant old white male intellectuals. Both with all the precisest ways to damn the man. And you ask yourself how would they have lunch with each other, in the same room?
And as long as these two groups of folks are convoluted and conflated by the Hegelian dividing lines infinitum, then autonomia again sputters. So what does that mean for a movement in America and across the world today?
Donald Trump is bringing someone legit looking into the mix for VP, so he can win the working class rust belt folks that democrats have left behind. And yet, Trump is not going to be able to do much for these folks being the president. Like last time. Neither would the dems.
TIME calling Vance “anti-capitalist”, like Trump is pulling from the “far left” is convoluted to say the least. This is another rich person who believes in the traditional work harder American dream thing. He is smart in areas that a "real" politician should be: political science, philosophy, law, military. Yale grad. But it will all be to distract and protect the rich in the end. As it always is. When you have to arm yourself with someone like this to decode propaganda. And you’re supposed to be the one in charge of the rich…and not the other way around…It’s a bad sign.
At best it will be a way of cutting bureaucracy but the rich won’t suddenly get taxed more like TIME juxtaposes as an anti capitalist stance. If Trump were actually anti-capitalist he would not be a greedy rich man, like every other politician and billionaire funding these politicians and media venues.
The good news is that publications have to start appropriating the "anti-capitalist" thing in America now. Class consciousness is the political evolution after the whole fascist catharsis is seen for what it really is. A politically impotent caste struggle. The concept of anti-capitalism, as territorialized in TIME, is a huge step in the right direction. That it has to be appropriated at all is a sign people are pushing the narrative in a better direction.
Unfortunately, now we’re back to a lot of the 90s narratives, when the first horrible wealth disparity hit American awareness. It will get retro fitted to our times and fed back to us to put the sheep back to sleep. The hipsters will be divided against the die hard anti-capitalists. The feminists against the old white philosophers and economists. Black men pitted against white women…all the same shit as ever before. And it will convolute the revolution.
The key is for actual anti-capitalists to drop out of these hipster debates before they get sucked into the gravity of big money narratives and say the wrong thing. It is about keeping it minimal. Sustaining presence of mind. Dropping out of exploitative infrastructures that horizontally negate to distract from vertical political issues.
This book is solid. I’m going to read it again.
March 31, 2025
this was Absolutely Fine.... more of a book you skim read. some really great stuff in here (eileen myles! assata shakur! foucault! that final interview!) but a lot of it was kind of impossible for me to get into... maybe what i need is more of a thorough engagement with some of these writers before i jump into an anthology type reader and maybe that's a me problem... but i wasn't fully satisfied with this
Want to read
June 23, 2018I'll break down my review into reviews of each article that piqued my interest.
Women, Homosexuals and Youth: Latent Sexual Liberation - Kate Millett
I see myself as a pretty radical person but this article made me feel a little conservative. I'm onboard with the sexual liberation of women and homosexuals. I'm onboard (to a degree) with the economic liberation of children. But when we turn to the sexual liberation of children, I can feel myself transforming into a paternalistic grandpa. Sexual freedom between children of approximately the same age - sure, fine. Sexual freedom for children to engage in inter-generational relationships? Alarm bells. I am concerned that the author is fine with criticising the coercive and restricting role of the state in a child's freedom, but doesn't clarify how they will be protected from exploitation in inter-generational relationships in a world where these structures are deconstructed. The phrase non-exploitative inter-generational sexual relationship is used throughout, but it makes me wonder - is there an age, that if a child is under it, that means the child can not possibly have the same understanding or conception of a sexual relationship as an adult, and therefore can't consent? Are there certain ages where inter-generational sexual relationships are implicitly exploitative? My intuitions say yes. But perhaps I am thinking of a four-year-old being with a thirty-year-old when the author is thinking of a fifteen-year-old with a twenty-five-year-old? Am I imposing an extreme view on a theory I am not comfortable with because I am prejudiced? Am I being ageist? This is an area of theory I know little about, and this article has prompted me to explore more.
Women, Homosexuals and Youth: Latent Sexual Liberation - Kate Millett
I see myself as a pretty radical person but this article made me feel a little conservative. I'm onboard with the sexual liberation of women and homosexuals. I'm onboard (to a degree) with the economic liberation of children. But when we turn to the sexual liberation of children, I can feel myself transforming into a paternalistic grandpa. Sexual freedom between children of approximately the same age - sure, fine. Sexual freedom for children to engage in inter-generational relationships? Alarm bells. I am concerned that the author is fine with criticising the coercive and restricting role of the state in a child's freedom, but doesn't clarify how they will be protected from exploitation in inter-generational relationships in a world where these structures are deconstructed. The phrase non-exploitative inter-generational sexual relationship is used throughout, but it makes me wonder - is there an age, that if a child is under it, that means the child can not possibly have the same understanding or conception of a sexual relationship as an adult, and therefore can't consent? Are there certain ages where inter-generational sexual relationships are implicitly exploitative? My intuitions say yes. But perhaps I am thinking of a four-year-old being with a thirty-year-old when the author is thinking of a fifteen-year-old with a twenty-five-year-old? Am I imposing an extreme view on a theory I am not comfortable with because I am prejudiced? Am I being ageist? This is an area of theory I know little about, and this article has prompted me to explore more.
April 9, 2018
Semiotext(e) always puts out fascinating and frustrating books... this one was no different... ultimately a collection of thought-pieces for me... a few i skimmed, as i wasn't really reading this for personal accounts necessarily... a relative who's-who of theory and thought: Virilio (confounding), Foucault (genius), Millett (whose piece is disliked strongly as it seemed amazingly idealistic and disconnected from reality), Deleuze and Guattari (complex to the point of confusion), Lotringer, Meinhof (ahh, resistance and Marxism and the state and purity of purpose)... plenty of ideas to chew on and digest... the pages on genocide are fascinating and horribly pertinent and totally not what you'd expect... a bit of a mixed lot, possibly more of a toes-in-the-water test for the uninitiated... if it makes you think, it serves its purpose... if it encourages you to read further, even better... it if scares you, then you're probably alive and aware... keep on...
August 31, 2012
Love the old-fashioned polemical title, and from poetry to French theory, I love this collection!
September 9, 2017
crying at work because of that david wojnarowicz interview — strong finish
Read
January 9, 2021Started this book some years earlier so don’t have the recall to give it a reliable star rating. My own marginalia suggests I got the most out of the texts by Kathy Acker, John Cage (interview), Michelle Tea, William Burroughs, Cookie Mueller and David Wojnarowicz. Responding to the personal narratives more than the abstract theory. Perhaps I’m too stupid for the latter
Read
December 20, 2025took me ages to read this. highlights: Assata Shakur, Lynne Tillman, Jane Delynn, Fanny Howe, Michelle Tea, Foucault on friendship, Chris Marker's Sunless, Tisa Bryant, Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz interview.
June 25, 2017
Had no idea what was going on most of the time. A couple of really cool pieces were inspiring but mostly...idk. Just stuff that's out there.
June 2, 2020
Sort of insightful.
October 4, 2023
Great compilation of radical theory, fiction, and nonfiction - don't expect a formal dissertation on capitalism
February 13, 2025
A mixed bag. Some texts read like they harbour a (not so) secret, or maybe inchoate, love of capitalism.
March 25, 2025
siempre es interesante ver cómo se representa la gente a sí mismos. escalofriantes los de nina zivancevic y kathy acker; divertido el de michelle tea.
November 22, 2025
helpful anti-capitalist reader and also just a fun book to carry around
February 8, 2013
"To the memory of an era (1974-2002)", an era where French ideas entered American colleges, one of the conduits being semiotext(e), from which this anthology is drawn. There is not too much French writing actually, no more than the memoirs of life "in these United States". Good points: Michelle Tea & Tisa Bryant remembering difficult adolescence; Assata Shakur on her imprisonment for being a black radical; Guy Hocquengham discussing gay culture in the 70s (this now seems a period piece, given the current move toward marriage rights and full equality); Michel Foucault interviewed on "Friendship as a way of life". Bad points: Baudrillard being a windbag as ever; the various prosperous American voices for whom radical politics and transgressive culture are clearly just hobby-interests, of which the figurehead is Chris Kraus herself and her artless confessionalism. A Sinclair Lewis heroine trying to be Gertrude Stein.
May 5, 2008
this is a bold and at times erratic read - the nature of the beast when the beast is collected writings in social criticism, i suppose - but fulfilling and exciting when you hit on the pieces that strike a chord. i preferred the short, episodic fiction selections to the more abrasive conceptual theory.
March 12, 2009
i haven't finished every essay in this book, and it will probably be a long time before i do. may not even attempt the baudrillard stuff. i generally love everything that semiotext(e) puts out and this is no exception. i've been using it a bit as a guide to their catalog, picking out an essay by a writer to see if i want to check out their books. i love anthologies :)
July 3, 2012
a collection of essays from the Semiotexte magazine, mostly from the 70s. a lot of it is crazily abstract and therefore basically useless, especially the Baudrillard. but some of these articles are worthwhile and/or fun, notably the one by Assata on her imprisonment and torture, the Foucault piece on homosexuality, and the Jean-Francois Lyotard critique of Marx.
January 2, 2008
The voices contained within this book have had an immense effect on the conceptual development of my creative growth that I keep my one copy close in the home without looking at very much at all anymore. But this is a book whose grip I know very personally.
August 5, 2008
I thought the editors did a wonderful job in selecting works that supported and contrasted each other in surprising ways. This book really had me thinking, and I frequently pull it out to re-read particular selections.
May 24, 2007
Specfuckingtacular. I only wish i could find more.
No-Holds-Barred French Social theory, American Pop culture and Personal journalism.
No-Holds-Barred French Social theory, American Pop culture and Personal journalism.
September 5, 2007
semiotext!
January 18, 2008
Postmodern French philosophy, first person storytelling, anticapitalist rants, what more could you want from a book? It's great. Makes me yearn for the nineties.
July 3, 2022
An anthology of essays that have appeared in Semiotext(e).
Acquired Feb 14, 2005
Gift from Jenn
Acquired Feb 14, 2005
Gift from Jenn
Currently reading
July 8, 2009Re-reading the genius 10yr anniversary compilation of dream team Lotringer and Kraus. Bonus: people want to have a conversation when they see the title.
Want to read
December 20, 2009Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader by Chris Kraus (2001)
June 13, 2014
A very good sampling of Semiotext(e)'s most important works. Enjoyed reading many of the essays, some are a little pointless but many are very interesting.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews