Enter through the 2004 Matthew Fuller interview, then read Event and Evolution and Biotech: Life by Contagion. Abstract Sex is where those shorter pieces become one system. Inside the book, start with Symbiotic Sex; endosymbiosis is the hinge for everything else.
Why this work matters
Abstract Sex is Parisi's first monograph and her longest single argument. It turns the section's cyberfeminist and machinic-desire commitments into a signed systems philosophy. The grounding is Lynn Margulis's endosymbiosis and information theory, not hyperstitional fiction.
Then and now
Why this mattered then
In 2004 Abstract Sex gave the Warwick cyberfeminist line its first book-length system. Parisi took machinic desire, the Body without Organs, and bacterial sex out of the CCRU's anonymous fragments. She set them on a biological and information-theoretic footing. The move let a scene argument become a monograph with chapters, citations, and a series home.
Why it matters now
Now the book reads as the origin of Parisi's mature systems. The line runs to Contagious Architecture (MIT, 2013) and her later work on computation. It also anchors technofeminist arguments that treat sex as recombinant and machinic, not given. Readers who meet Parisi through short talks find the full derivation here.
How to read this
Read the three strata first: biophysical, biocultural, biodigital. Parisi keeps them distinct, so bacterial recombination, organismic reproduction, and biotech never collapse into a single story.
Track endosymbiosis as the book's engine. When cells absorb other cells, descent stops being filiative; sex becomes recombination, not inheritance.
Argument map
Primary claim
Sex is not tied to reproduction, gender, or the organism. Parisi calls the autonomous field abstract sex, a plane where bodies recombine below the level of the reproducing individual.
The mechanism
Three strata carry the argument: biophysical (bacterial and endosymbiotic sex), biocultural (organismic, gendered reproduction), and biodigital (cloning, biotech, information transfer). Endosymbiosis, after Lynn Margulis, replaces filiative descent with the absorption of one cell by another.
What it claims
Read through information theory and the Body without Organs, evolution becomes recombination, not a tree of descent. Sex is a machine for variation, and biotechnology is its current, accelerated stratum.
Style and mode
Monograph
Abstract Sex is dense theoretical prose across five chapters. Argument, biology, and philosophy arrive together; the three-strata scaffold is the fastest way to hold the whole.
Publication context
Continuum published Abstract Sex in 2004, in the Transversals: New Directions in Philosophy series. Bloomsbury now holds the title through its Continuum imprint. Library records also print the subtitle as "bio-technology".
The archive surfaces it in Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects, beside the shorter Parisi essays and the 2004 Matthew Fuller interview. The book is the full system those pieces compress.
How this work reaches the archive
The archive holds no local copy of Abstract Sex. This page is a catalogue and orientation record, not an extracted reading layer.
Routing runs outward: the Bloomsbury publisher record for citation, and the Internet Archive scan for a controlled reading copy. No passages are reproduced here.