Sylvère Lotringer

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Sylvère Lotringer (Photo by Iris Klein)

Sylvère Lotringer (* 1938 in Paris ) is a literary critic, cultural theorist and editor. As a younger contemporary of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze , Félix Guattari , Jean Baudrillard , Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault , Lotringer became known in the course of his work with the publisher Semiotext (e) for the synthesis of the theories of French poststructuralism with the US literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movement; he also emerged through his interpretation of post-structuralism in the context of the 21st century.

In an influential interpretation of the theories of Baudrillard Lotringer invented the concept of "extrapolationist" ( " Extrapolierers ") to describe the hyperbolic world view, as argued by Baudrillard and Virilio.

life and work

Sylvère Lotringer was born in Paris to Polish Jewish immigrants who immigrated to France from Warsaw in 1930. His early childhood was shaped by the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War , which he, like his contemporaries Georges Perec and Sarah Kofman, spent as a hidden child with papers forged by the French Resistance .

In 1949 Lotringer emigrated to Israel with his family, but returned to Paris a year later. There he joined the left-wing Zionist youth organization Hashomer-Hatzair ("The Young Guard"), of which he was a member for eight years.

While still in high school, Lotringer joined the editorial collective of the Perec-run La Ligne Générale magazine in 1957 , the title of which came from Sergei Eisenstein's feature film The General Line. The magazine promoted Hollywood westerns , slapstick and pre-Stalinist communism. It met with applause from Henri Lefebvre , but was heavily criticized by Simone de Beauvoir , who found it politically irresponsible.

After beginning his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1958, Lotringer started the literary magazine L'Etrave and from 1959 to 1961 contributed to Paris-Lettres , the magazine of the French student association. As a student leader, he mobilized against the Algerian war . To avoid military service in Algeria, he spent 1962 in the United States. In 1964, he joined Department IV for Sociology of the École pratique des hautes études and wrote a doctoral thesis on the novellas by Virginia Woolf with Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldmann . He benefited from his friendship with Virginia's widower Leonard Woolf and his acquaintances with TS Eliot and Vita Sackville-West . He also conducted interviews with them that appeared in the magazine Les Lettres françaises published by Louis Aragon , of which Lotringer had been a correspondent for ten years. Again to avoid the French military service, he taught from 1965 to 1967 in Erzurum, Turkey for the French cultural service.

After a stay in Australia, he returned in 1969 to the United States to a teaching position at Swarthmore College comply. From 1972 to 2007 Lotringer taught French and comparative literature as a professor at Columbia University .

Cultural synthesis

When Lotringer came to New York in the early 1970s, he saw the opportunity there to promote the works of French theorists in the then burgeoning New York art and literature scene. Marxism was considered to have failed in France and the post- 1968 philosophers had turned to capitalism, from which they wanted to extract the subversive energy that no longer seemed to exist in class struggles. Lotringer saw America as a testing ground for post-structuralism. He got to know the New York West Village , where he a. a. Acquainted with the composer John Cage . Lotringer felt similarities between Thoreau , the chance operations practiced by the Fluxus movement , William S. Burroughs , Brion Gysin and others, and the post-structuralist theorists influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche . Unimpressed by the doctrine of American Marxism influenced by the Frankfurt School , Lotringer tried instead to spread the fluid and rhizomatic ideas of power and desire developed by Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault . A few years later, Lotringer discovered Paul Virilio's theory of speed and technology and Jean Baudrillard's analysis of the infinite interchangeability of consumer culture and, in turn, introduced these ideas into the American discourse.

To this end, he founded the magazine Semiotext (e) together with a group of graduate students from Columbia University . After the publication of three academic editions on the epistemology of semiotics, Lotringer and his group held the provocative conference "Schizo-Culture" on the subject of madness and prisons in 1975 at Columbia University. More than 2,000 visitors witnessed verbal skirmishes between Foucault, conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche , Guattari, the feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson , Ronald D. Laing and others. This event helped shape a new kind of discourse over the next decade, and set the stage for the following editions of Semiotext (e) : The academic format was abandoned in favor of collaged images and texts by Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Guy Hocquenghem , Jacques Derrida , Heiner Müller , and as American counterparts John Cage , Burroughs, Richard Foreman , Jack Smith , Kathy Acker and others. The provocative mixture of street and academy, theory, art and politics became the trademark of Semiotext (e) .

In 1978 Lotringer hosted The Nova Convention , a three-day tribute to William S. Burroughs, held at New York University's Entermedia Theater and Irving Plaza in New York's East Village . The event, with performances by Patti Smith , Frank Zappa , Laurie Anderson , Timothy Leary and Burroughs himself celebrated the latter as "a philosopher of the future [...] who best understood post-industrial society" ("a philosopher of the future [...] the man who best understood post-industrial society ”) and contributed to the spread of Burrough's work in the New York punk and no-wave scene.

Lotringer discontinued the publication of the magazine edition of Semiotext (e) in 1985 after discovering how New York's cultural life was increasingly losing the collective spirit that had shaped it and taking on a more individualistic character. Instead, he launched the Semiotext (e) Foreign Agents series as a collection of small-format black books by French theorists without an introduction or an afterword. The series began in 1983 with Baudrillard's Simulations , whose text Lotringer had excerpted from Symbolic Exchange and Death (Galilée, Paris 1977) and Simulacres et Simulation (Gallimard, Paris 1981). The volume became an instant classic, evoked a new art trend and served as the theoretical model for the film Matrix from 1999. After Simulations , Pure War followed in the same year , in which Virilio in conversation with Lotringer his ideas of bunker archeology at book length ("Archeology of bunkers"), accidents ("accidents") and dromology , " dromology " expanded. The last volume in the On the Line series by Deleuze and Guattari also contained the famous text Rhizome .

New policy

Lotringer viewed himself as a foreign " agent provocateur " in the USA. From 1979 to 1980 he traveled to Italy to document firsthand the post-Marxist autonomous movement that was caught up in struggles there. In 1980, he processed his participatory observations for the semiotext (e) special volume Italy: Autonomia - Post-Political Politics .

In 1992 he tracked down former Black Panther member Dhoruba Bin-Wahad , who had just been paroled after 19 years in prison for rioting. Lotringer invited Bin-Wahad to defend and update the position of the Black Panther in a volume of the semiotext (s). The result was the anthology Still Black, Still Strong with writings by Assata Shakur , Mumia Abu-Jamal and Bin-Wahad.

In 2001 Lotringer was co-editor of a semiotext (e) anthology with the ironic title Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotexte Reader , which appeared after the attacks of September 11, 2001 . Lotringer summarized the mission of Semiotext (e) in an epigraph for which he used an observation from Jack Smith:

"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. "(" The world is hungry for thoughts. As soon as you can think of something, the language will come to you, but it only has an effect through thinking. ")

When Lotringer discovered that the books of the Foreign Agents series of the 1990s were entering the academic mainstream, he began to publish works by activists with views critical of imperialism. In Semiotext (e) in 2002 he published the book Empire of Disorder by the French military expert Alain Joxe 's and in 2003 Reporting From Ramallah by the Israeli journalist Amira Hass .

Lotringer resumed his conversations with Virilio: In 2002, Crepuscular Dawn deals with the historical predecessors and echoes of genetic engineering, and in the third volume of dialogues Accident of Art from 2006, Virilio's concept of “accident” is expanded to include the influence of wars on contemporary art .

Since 2006 Lotringer has again turned to Italian postoperaism and has published works by Paolo Virno , Franco Piperno , Christian Marazzi and Antonio Negri .

influence

Lotringer has taught 20th century philosophy and French literature at Columbia University for more than 30 years. In it he worked out connections between modernist literature and fascism based on the works of Antonin Artaud , Louis-Ferdinand Celine , Simone Weil and Georges Bataille, which appear to be “disturbed” . As a twentieth-century scholar, Lotringer emphasized the experimental, premodern roots of the works of poststructuralism, which are often misunderstood as orgies of cruelty, while Lotringer views them as attempts to create symbolic antidotes to both fascism and consumerism.

Lotringer's courses have inspired the later works of a number of his students, including filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow , semiotic Marshall Blonsky , art critics Tim Griffin and John Kelsey , actor Jim Fletcher, and poet Ariana Reines . Lotringer appears as a fictional character in the novels Great Expectations (1983) and My Mother. Demonology (1994) by Kathy Acker , I Love Dick by Lotringer's wife Chris Kraus, and Inferno by Eileen Myles .

Works (selection)

author

Articles, essays
  • with Jack Smith: Uncle Fishook and the Sacred Baby Poo-poo of Art . In: SchizoCulture . Semiotexts ed. III, 2, 1978
  • in Ted Morgan (Ed.): Literary Outlaw. The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs . Avon Books, New York 1990.
  • in David Bellos (Ed.): Georges Perec . A Life in Words . Harvill Books, London 1993, ISBN 0-00-272022-1 .
  • Better Than Life . In: Artforum . April 2003
  • Forget Baudrillard . In: Jean Baudrillard: Forget Foucault (History of the Present). Semiotexts, Cambridge 2006, ISBN 1-584-35041-5 .
  • Disappeared . In: Multitude eV: Dictionary of War / Dictionary of War . Merve Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3-88396-239-2 .
Monographs

editor

literature

  • Jacques Latrémolière: I spoke to Antonin Artaud about God. A conversation between Sylvère Lotringer and the neurologist Dr. Jacques Latrémolière . Alexander Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89581-020-7 .
  • Gaston Ferdière: Antonin Artaud and the good person from Rodez. Sylvère Lotringer in conversation with Gaston Ferdière Schlebrügger Verlag, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-8516-0026-6 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lotringer, Sylvère
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French art theorist, literary scholar, editor and author
DATE OF BIRTH 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris