Sylvère Lotringer (15 October 1938 – 8 November 2021) was a French literary critic and cultural theorist. Initially based in New York City, he later lived in Los Angeles and Baja California, Mexico.Hultkrans, Andrew. "Bookforum talks with Sylvère Lotringer," 14 September 2015. Retrieved 7 October 2021.Schwarz, Henry and Anne Balsamo. "Under the Sign of Semiotext(e): The Story According to Sylvere Lotringer and Chris Kraus," Critique, Spring 1996, p. 205–21. He is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements as founder of the journal Semiotext(e) and for his interpretations of theory in a 21st-century context.Darms, Lisa. "Semiotext at the Biennial: An Interview with Hedi el Kholti," Hyperallergic, 17 May 2014. Retrieved 7 October 2021.Whitney Museum of American Art. Semiotext(e) 2014 Biennial. Retrieved 7 October 2021.Semiotext(e). Sylvère Lotringer. Retrieved 7 October 2021. He is regarded as an influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, among others.Lotringer, Sylvère. "Jean Baudrillard," Artforum, Summer 2007. Retrieved 7 October 2021.
Life and work Lotringer was born in Paris to Doba (Borenstein) and Cudek Lotringer, Polish Jewish immigrants who left Warsaw for France in 1930, where they ran a fur shop.Grau, Donatien. Sylvère Lotringer, purple Magazine, Fall/Winter 2016. Retrieved 7 October 2021. His early life was marked by the Nazi occupation of Paris, and like his contemporaries Georges Perec and Sarah Kofman, he spent the war as a "hidden child." In 1949, Lotringer emigrated 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 Générale headed by Perec. Taking its name from Sergei Eisenstein's famous film The General Line, this group of young Jewish men favored Hollywood westerns, slapstick and pre-Stalinist 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’Étrave, a literary magazine, with Nicole Chardaire and contributed to Paris-Lettres, the journal of the French Students' Association (1959–61).Thomas, Jonathan. "Sylvère Lotringer," The Third Rail, Issue 6, 2016. Retrieved 7 October 2021. As President of the UNEF freshman class at the Sorbonne, he led mobilizations against France's colonial Algerian War. In 1964, he entered the École pratique des hautes études, VIe section (sociology). He received his Ph.D. in the sociology of literature from the institution in 1967 after completing a dissertation on Virginia Woolf's novels under the supervision of Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldmann.Marzoni, Andrew. "A Small but Important Job: Gary Indiana’s “Vile Days,'" Los Angeles Review of Books, 13 December 2018. Retrieved 7 October 2021. 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 during his ten years as a correspondent.
Avoiding French military service in Algeria, Lotringer spent 1962 in the United States and then taught for the French Cultural Services as a lecturer at Atatürk University in Erzurum, Turkey from 1965 to 1967.Waltemath, Joan. "A Life in Theory: Sylvère Lotringer with Joan Waltemath," The Brooklyn Rail, September 2006. Retrieved 7 October 2021. He returned to the United States via Australia (where he briefly taught at the University of New South Wales) as an assistant professor of French at Swarthmore College in 1969. Following two years as an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, he joined the faculty of Columbia University as a tenured associate professor of French and comparative literature in the autumn of 1972. He was promoted to full professor in 1985 and retired as professor emeritus in 2009. He was also known for his second marriage (1988–2014; sep. 2005) to writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus.
Lotringer died on Monday, 8 November 2021 in Baja California after a long illness."Sylvère Lotringer est mort, la French Theory perd son passeur" Liberation, (in French) November 2021. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
Cultural synthesis Arriving in New York City in the early 1970s, Lotringer saw the opportunity to introduce French theorists whose work at that time was largely unknown in the U.S. to the city's artistic and literary community. Playing chess in the West Village with John Cage, he sensed similarities between Thoreau and the "chance operations" being practiced by Fluxus, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and others, and the Nietzsche-inspired post-structuralist theorists.Hond, Paul. "Shoot Shoot, Bang Bang: The visceral cinema of Kathryn Bigelow ’79SOA has heady theoretical roots," Columbia Magazine, Winter 2009-10. Retrieved 7 October 2021. Uninspired by the doctrinaire post-Frankfurt School Marxism of the American Left, he sought to introduce independently the more fluid and rhizomatic ideas of power and desire developed by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. In his book on French Theory's influence in the U.S., François Cusset wrote that Lotringer and Semiotext(e) "played a breathtaking role in the early diffusion of French theory", positioned along the "porous border between the university and the countercultural networks".Cusset, François. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Retrieved 7 October 2021. A few years later Lotringer discovered Paul Virilio's theory of speed and technology and Baudrillard's analysis of consumer culture's infinite exchangeability, introducing them in turn into American political discourse.
A younger contemporary of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Baudrillard, Virilio and Michel Foucault, Lotringer invited a small group of graduate students to study these thinkers, who were not yet part of the curriculum. Together with his partner Susie Flato and graduate student John Reichman, he began the journal Semiotext(e) in 1973 with the goal of introducing French theory to America.Lvoff Sophie T. "The Center Is Not the Center: An Interview with Chris Kraus," Los Angeles Review of Books, 23 February 2019. Retrieved 7 October 2021.Lotringer, Sylvère. "My ’80s: Better Than Life," Artforum, April 2003. Retrieved 7 October 2021. The group expanded and produced three issues on the epistemology of semiotics. In 1975, they staged the provocative Schizo-Culture conference on Madness and Prisons at Columbia University, where more than 2,000 attendees witnessed "show-downs" between Foucault, conspiracy-theorist Lyndon LaRouche, Guattari, feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, Ronald D. Laing, and others.Hultkrans, Andrew. "Empire State of Mind," Artforum, 20 November 2014. Retrieved 7 October 2021.Fletcher, Jim. "Semiotext(e)’s Schizo-Culture," Artforum, April 2014. Retrieved 7 October 2021.Hothi, Ajay. "Schizo-Culture: Cracks In The Street", Artforum, 2014. Retrieved 7 October 2021. The event helped to define a new mode of cultural discourse over the coming decade, and set the stage for future issues of Semiotext(e), which abandoned its scholarly format in favor of collaged images and texts by Deleuze, Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Guy Hocquenghem, Jacques Derrida, Heiner Müller and their (as Lotringer saw it) American counterparts: Cage, Burroughs, Richard Foreman, Jack Smith, Kathy Acker, and others.Griffin, Tim. "Theoretical Physic," Artforum, April 2010. Retrieved 7 October 2021.The New York Times. "Avant‐Garde Unites Over Burroughs", 1 December 1978, p C11. Retrieved 7 October 2021. In 1978, Lotringer staged The Nova Convention, a three-day homage to Burroughs at New York University and in the East Village. Featuring performances and talks by Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson, Terry Southern, Robert Anton Wilson, 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 "no-wave" generation. This provocative mix of street and academy, theory, art and politics, would become Semiotext(e)'''s trademark.Morris, David. "Four Decades of Semiotext(e)", Frieze, 9 September 2013. Retrieved 7 October 2021.Apter, Emily. "The Whitney Biennial", Artforum, May 2014. Retrieved 7 October 2021.
Determining that the collectivity that marked New York's cultural life was disappearing in the 1980s, Lotringer ceased regular publication of the Semiotext(e) journal in 1985, though book-length issues appeared into the 1990s. In its place, he instituted the Semiotext(e) "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 Baudrillard's Simulations, excerpted by Lotringer from Symbolic Exchange and Death (1977) and Simulacra and Simulations (1981). Simulations spawned a new art-movement and served as the theoretical template for the Keanu Reeves movie, The Matrix (1999). Simulations was followed later in the same year by Pure War, Lotringer's 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 Deleuze and Guattari, included Rhizome, which anticipated Internet culture.
In 2004, Hedi El Kholti began working as an art director with Lotringer and Kraus on Semiotext(e) and soon after joined them as a co-editor.
Teaching and influence Teaching 20th century French literature and philosophy at Columbia University for 35 years, Lotringer elaborated connections between modernist literature and fascism in his lectures, interpreting the "crazed modernists" Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Simone Weil as harbingers of the Jewish Holocaust.Kelsey, John. "Electroconvlusive Lit: Sylvère Lotringer’s Mad Like Artaud," Texte Zur Kunst, Issue No. 100/ December 2015. Retrieved 7 October 2021.Lewis, Paul."A Saintly Jew Whose Spirituality Rejected Jews," The New York Times, 20 November 1999. Retrieved 7 October 2021. 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.