Sylvère Lotringer
Encyclopedia
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
, Félix Guattari
Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
, Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...
, Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military....
and Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
, he is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
movements through his work with Semiotext(e)
Semiotext(e)
Semiotext is an American independent publisher. It is widely credited for having introduced so-called "French Theory" to North America through its magazine issues and Foreign Agents series. In 2000, the MIT Press began distributing Semiotext, taking it over from the anarchist publishing collective...
; and for his interpretations of French theory in a 21st century context. An influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, Lotringer invented the concept "extrapolationist" as a means of describing the hyperbolic world-views espoused by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Lotringer is a Professor of Foreign Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
Life and work
Sylvère Lotringer was born in Paris, he is the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants who fled Warsaw for France in 1930. His early life was marked by the Nazi occupation of Paris, which — like his contemporaries Georges PerecGeorges Perec
Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. He is a member of the Oulipo group...
and Sarah Kofman
Sarah Kofman
Sarah Kofman was a French philosopher, born in Paris.Kofman began her teaching career in Toulouse in 1960, and worked with both Jean Hyppolite and Gilles Deleuze. Her primary thesis, later published as Nietzsche et la métaphore, was supervised by Deleuze...
— he spent as a "hidden child" with documents forged by the French Resistance
French Resistance
The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...
.
As an interpreter of French theory, Lotringer has sought to contextualize the pre-modernist origins of "postmodern
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
" French thought. Writing about Jean Baudrillard's childhood, Lotringer reminds us just how far his generation has traveled to reach The Matrix. He recalls the 11 year old Jean and his grandparents riding an oxcart loaded with mattresses from Reims to Paris during the massive evacuation of the French populace that marked the onset of the War
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
In 1949, Lotringer immigrated to Israel with his family and returned to Paris the year after to join the left-wing Zionist movement Hashomer-Hatzair (The Young Garde) and became one of its leaders. He left the movement eight years later.
In 1957, while still at the lycée, Lotringer joined the editorial collective of La Ligne Generale headed by Georges Perec. Taking its name from Sergei Eisenstein's famous film, this group of brilliant young Jewish men favored Hollywood westerns, slapstick and pre-Stalinian communism. The project was praised by Henri Lefebvre but strongly criticized by Simone de Beauvoir, who found it "politically irresponsible".
Entering the Sorbonne in 1958, Lotringer created L’Etrave, a literary magazine, and contributed to Paris-Lettres, the journal of the French Students' Association (1959–61). As President of the Sorbonne, he led mobilizations against France's colonial Algerian war. In 1964, he entered the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, VIe section (Sociology) writing a doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf's novels under the supervision of Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldmann. His work was aided by his friendship with Leonard Woolf and his acquaintance with T.S. Eliot and Vita Sackville West, with whom he conducted interviews published in Louis Aragon's journal Les Lettres Francaises, for which Lotringer served as a correspondent for ten years.
Avoiding French military service in Algeria, Lotringer spent 1962 in the US and two years (1965–67) teaching for the French Cultural Services in Erzurum, Turkey. He finally returned to the US via Australia in 1969 with a teaching appointment at Swarthmore College. He joined the French and Comparative Literature Faculty at Columbia University in 1972, where he is presently Professor Emeritus.
Cultural Synthesis
Arriving in New YorkNew York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
in the early 70s, Lotringer saw the opportunity to introduce French theorists whose work, at that time, was largely unknown in the US to New York's burgeoning artistic and literary community. Marxism had bottomed out in France and post-’68 philosophers had turned to capitalism, eager extract from it the subversive energy no longer found in class struggles. Lotringer realized that America could be these theorists’ testing-ground. Playing chess in the West Village with John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, Lotringer sensed similarities between Thoreau and the "chance operations" being practiced by Fluxus, William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
, Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs...
and others, and the Nietzsche-inspired poststructuralist theorists. Uninspired by the doctrinaire post-Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
of the American Left
American Left
The American Left consists of individuals and groups, including socialists, communists and anarchists, that have sought fundamental change in the economic, political and cultural institutions of the United States. Although left-wing ideologies came to the United States in the 19th century, there...
, he sought to introduce independently the more fluid and rhizomatic ideas of power and desire developed by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. A few years later he discovered Paul Virilio's theory of speed and technology and Jean Baudrillard's analysis of consumer culture's infinite exchangeability, introducing them in turn into American political discourse.
Towards this end, he founded the journal Semiotext(e) with a group of Columbia University graduate students. After producing three scholarly issues on the epistemology of semiotics
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
, Lotringer and his group staged the provocative "Schizo-Culture" conference on "Madness and Prisons" in 1975 at Columbia University, where more than 2,000 attendees witnessed "show-downs" between Michel Foucault, conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche
Lyndon LaRouche
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. is an American political activist and founder of a network of political committees, parties, and publications known collectively as the LaRouche movement...
, Félix Guattari, feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, Ronald D. Laing and others. The event helped define a new mode of cultural discourse over the coming decade, and set the stage for future issues of Semiotexte, which abandoned its scholarly format in favor of collaged images and texts by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
, Guy Hocquenghem
Guy Hocquenghem
Guy Hocquenghem was a French writer and queer theorist.-Biography:Guy Hocquenghem was born in the suburbs of Paris and was educated at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. At the age of fifteen he began an affair with his high school philosophy teacher, René...
, Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
, Heiner Müller
Heiner Müller
Heiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. Described as "the theatre's greatest living poet" since Samuel Beckett, Müller is arguably the most important German dramatist of the 20th century after Bertolt Brecht...
and their (as Lotringer saw it) American counterparts: John Cage, William S. Burroughs, Richard Foreman
Richard Foreman
Richard Foreman is an American playwright and avant-garde theater pioneer. He is the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.-Life :...
, Jack Smith
Jack Smith (film director)
Jack Smith was an American filmmaker, actor, and pioneer of underground cinema...
, Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S...
, and others. This provocative mix of street and academy, theory, art and politics, would become Semiotextes trademark.
In 1978, Lotringer staged "The Nova Convention", a 3-day homage to William S. Burroughs at the Entermedia Theater, NYU and Irving Plaza in New York City's East Village. Featuring performances by Patti Smith
Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses....
, Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...
, Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s...
Timothy Leary, and Burroughs himself, the event acclaimed Burroughs as "a philosopher of the future [...] the man who best understood post-industrial society", and popularized his work among New York's punk
Punk subculture
The punk subculture includes a diverse array of ideologies, and forms of expression, including fashion, visual art, dance, literature, and film, which grew out of punk rock.-History:...
"no-wave" generation.
Recognizing that the collectivity that once marked New York's cultural life was fast disappearing in the 1980s, Lotringer ceased publication of the Semiotexte journal in 1985. In its place, he instituted the Semiotexte Foreign Agents series – a collection of "little black books" by French theorists. Published with no introductions or afterwords, the books were conceived to present "theory brut" like champagne into the American cultural marketplace. The series debuted in 1983 with Jean Baudrillard's Simulations, excerpted by Lotringer from Symbolic Exchange and Death (Galilée, Paris: 1977) and Simulacra and Simulations (Gallimard, Paris: 1981). An instant classic, Simulations spawned a new art movement and served as the theoretical template for the 1999 Keanu Reeves
Keanu Reeves
Keanu Charles Reeves is a Canadian actor. Reeves is perhaps best known for his roles in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Speed, Point Break and the science fiction-action trilogy The Matrix...
movie, The Matrix. Simulations was followed later that year by Pure War, his book-length conversation with Paul Virilio, in which the "philosopher of speed" expounded his vision of bunker archeology, accidents and dromology. The last, On the Line, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, included "Rhizome", which anticipated Internet culture.
New Politics
Defining himself as a "foreign agent provocateur" in the US, Lotringer traveled to Italy in 1979-80 to document first-hand Italy's embattled post-Marxist Autonomia movement and secure their legacy. His participant-observation with the innovative political movement resulted in Italy: Autonomia – Post-Political Politics, a 1980 special publication of Semiotexte.In 1992, he sought out former Black Panther Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, who had just been provisionally released from prison after spending 19 years incarcerated on a charge of "sedition". Lotringer invited Dhoruba to produce a Semiotexte book vindicating and updating the Black Panther Party
Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party wasan African-American revolutionary leftist organization. It was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982....
's position. The result was Still Black, Still Strong, an anthology of writings by Assata Shakur
Assata Shakur
Assata Olugbala Shakur is an African-American activist and escaped convict who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army...
, Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death. He has been described as "perhaps the world's best known death-row inmate", and his sentence is one of the most debated today...
and Bin-Wahad.
In 2001, Lotringer co-edited the ironically titled Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotexte Reader. Released in the wake of 9/11, the anthology strove to clarify Semiotexte's composite vision of politics, intelligence and radical humor. Summing up the Semiotexte self-styled mission, Lotringer used an observation made to him by filmmaker Jack Smith as an epigraph: "The world is starving for thoughts. If you can think of something, the language will fall into place, but the thought is what's going to do it".
Realizing that the Foreign Agents books of the 1980s were being absorbed within mainstream academe, Lotringer sought out new works that would address global politics from the perspective of activism. He commissioned Israeli journalist Amira Haas' award-winning Reporting From Ramallah (2003), and French military specialist Alain Joxe's Empire of Disorder (2002) for Semiotexte.
Resuming his dialogue with Paul Virilio in Crepuscular Dawn (2002), he pushed the philosopher to elaborate on the historical antecedents and repercussions of genetic engineering. His third dialogue with Virilio, Accident of Art (2006), expanded the Virilian notion of "accident" to encompass the impact of war on contemporary art.
In 2006, he returned to his interest in Italian political theory, commissioning and publishing works by Paolo Virno
Paolo Virno
-In Castilian:* * * * * * * * * * * -Other languages:* * * * *...
, Franco Piperno
Franco Piperno
Franco Piperno is an Italian former communist militant. He is currently an associated professor of Condensed Matter Physics in the University of Calabria..-Biography:Piperno was born at Catanzaro....
, Christian Marazzi and Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher.Negri is best-known for his co-authorship of Empire, and secondarily for his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university...
.
Influence
Teaching 20th century French literatureFrench literature
French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in French language, by citizens...
and philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
at Columbia University for more than 30 years, Lotringer elaborated the connections between modernist literature and fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
in his many lectures, interpreting the "crazed modernists" Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French writer and physician Louis-Ferdinand Destouches . Céline was chosen after his grandmother's first name. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and...
, Simone Weil
Simone Weil
Simone Weil , was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist.-Biography:Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. She grew up in comfortable circumstances, and her father was a doctor. Her only sibling was...
, Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
as harbingers of the Jewish Holocaust. As a scholar of the 20th century, he emphasized the experiential, "pre-modern" political roots of French theories that are often misread as cavalier orgies of cruelty, envisaging them as an attempt to create symbolic antidotes to both fascism and consumerism.
A legendary teacher on the order of Lycée Henri IV
Lycée Henri IV
The Lycée Henri-IV is a public secondary school located in Paris. Along with Louis-le-Grand it is widely regarded as one of the most demanding sixth-form colleges in France....
's famed Alain
Alain
Alain may refer to:* Alain , both a surname and common given name* 1969 Alain , a Main-belt Asteroid discovered in 1935* Al Ain International Airport in the United Arab Emirates...
, Lotringer's classes influenced the work of dozens of his former students, including filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow
Kathryn Bigelow
Kathryn Ann Bigelow is an American film director. Her best-known films are the cult horror film Near Dark , the surfer/bank robbery action picture Point Break , the science fiction/film noir Strange Days , the historical/mystery film The Weight of Water and the war drama The Hurt Locker...
, semiotician Marshall Blonsky, art critics Tim Griffin and John Kelsey, actor Jim Fletcher and poet Ariana Reines. He appears as a quasi-fictional character in Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S...
's Great Expectations and My Mother, Demonology, in his ex-wife, Chris Kraus
Chris Kraus
Chris Kraus is a writer, filmmaker, and professor of film at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Her books include I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, and Torpor. Video Green, Kraus' first non-fiction book examines the explosion of late 1990s art by high-profile graduate programs that...
' I Love Dick and in Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles is an American poet who has also worked in fiction, non-fiction, and theater.She won a 2010 Shelley Memorial Award.-Early life and career:...
' Inferno. He presently holds the Jean Baudrillard Chair at European Graduate School
European Graduate School
The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland is a privately funded graduate school founded by the non-profit European Foundation of Interdisciplinary Studies. Its German name is Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien...
(EGS).
Publications
External links
- Sylvère Lotringer at European Graduate SchoolEuropean Graduate SchoolThe European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland is a privately funded graduate school founded by the non-profit European Foundation of Interdisciplinary Studies. Its German name is Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien...
Biography, bibliography, articles and video lectures. - Sylvère Lotringer Appearance. This American Life. WBEZ. Episode 95: Monogamy)