Sylvère Lotringer

partner = Susie Flato (c. 1972; sep. 1976) children = 1 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. He is regarded as an influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, among others.

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. 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." 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. He appears as a quasi-fictional character in Kathy Acker's Great Expectations and My Mother: Demonology, in Chris Kraus' I Love Dick, Alien & Anorexia and Torpor, and in Eileen Myles' Inferno. Lotringer was also Jean Baudrillard Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School.

New politics Defining himself as a "foreign agent provocateur" in the United States, Lotringer traveled to Italy in 1979 and 1980 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 Semiotext(e).

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 Hass' award-winning Reporting From Ramallah (2003), and French military specialist Alain Joxe's Empire of Disorder (2002) for Semiotext(e). 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.

Decorations Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters (2015)

Publications "Barthes After Barthes," Frieze, 2011. Pure War, with Paul Virilio, Semiotext(e) History of the Present, Cambridge: 2008 (first published by Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents, New York: 1983). Overexposed: Perverting Perversions, Pantheon, New York: 1987 and Semiotext(e) History of the Present, Cambridge: 2007. David Wojnarowitz: A Definitive History of Five or Six years on the Lower East Side, Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2006 "Forget Baudrillard," in Forget Foucault, Semiotext(e) History of the Present, Cambridge: 2006. Pazzi di Artaud, Medusa, Milan: 2006. The Accident of Art, with Paul Virilio, Semiotext(e), Cambridge: 2005. The Conspiracy of Art, with Jean Baudrillard, Semiotext(e), Cambridge: 2005. Oublier Artaud, Sens and Tonka, Paris: 2005. Boules de Suif, Sens and Tonka, Paris: 2005. "My '80s: Better Than Life," Artforum, April 2003. Fous d’Artaud, Sens and Tonka, Paris: 2003. The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2002 Crepuscular Dawn, with Paul Virilio, Semiotext(e), Cambridge: 2002. "Time Bomb," in Crepuscular Dawn, Semiotext(e), Cambridge: 2002. French Theory in America, New York, Routledge: 2001 Nancy Spero, London: Phaedon Press: 1996. Foreign Agent: Kuntz in den Zeiten des Theorie, Merve Verlag, Berlin: 1992. Germania, with Heiner Müller, Semiotext(e), New York: 1990. Antonin Artaud, New York: Scribners & Sons: 1990. Philosophen-Künstler, Merve Verlag, Berlin: 1986. "Uncle Fishook and the Sacred Baby Poo-poo of Art," with Jack Smith in SchizoCulture, Semiotext(e) ed. III, 2, 1978.