Derrida dismissed the Saussurean hypothesis that language is a stable ‘system of differences’, therewith marking one of the ways in which the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism was made.

These texts derived from Situationist circles, issuing from the crossing of a libertarian Marxism and the tradition of the French avant-gardes, Dadaist, Surrealist and Lettrist in particular.

Our age is characterized by the proliferation of ‘simulacra’: a ‘replacement of reality by signs of reality’.

The question of who is a Marxist today is highly complex. It always has been, because this current has always been plural. [...] Moreover, all contemporary critical theories are, in a sense, ‘post-Marxist’. Marxism was so dominant in the twentieth century that no theory escaped its influence.

Operaismo is a variegated tendency, the positions of whose main representatives have developed considerably over the years

Operaismo means ‘workerism’. In countries like France the term refers to the (over)valuation – not free of anti-intellectualism – of the industrial working class, its culture and organizations. In Italy its meaning is the converse.

a concept developed by Foucault – ‘biopower’ – which refers to the government of populations and bodies that Foucault believed had emerged in the nineteenth century

By dint of their reticular, mobile character, transnationals therefore possess primacy in the context of Empire, reducing states to the rank of mere ‘instruments’.

Empire is a ‘smooth space’, as Hardt and Negri put it with reference to a concept coined by Deleuze. It does not experience the ‘asperities’ that are the borders or political and/or economic inequalities characteristic of the national ancien régime.

In addition, his historical materialism – like all materialisms – assigns primacy to ‘production’. From this standpoint the international system is regarded as influenced by the ‘mode of production’ that obtains in the given epoch.