#Sylvère Lotringer

[garadinervi]

Still Black Still Strong. Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries. Dhoruba Bin Wadah, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Assata Shakur, Edited by Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones, and Sylvère Lotringer, Semiotext(e), Columbia University, New York, NY, 1993

Cover Design: Jim Fleming

[deadbutbetter]

Hi, i'm sorry this is so out of the blue but would you mind sharing sadomasochistic literature recs pls? I love your other rec lists<33

yo not out of the blue at all. i realise i post a lot of content related to sm.

for fiction: besides the obvious bataille, you should look into colette peignot's collected writings under the name laure.

for some rewritten material on her there's kathy acker's my mother demonology. but everything by kathy acker relates to the subject: blood and guts in highschool, empire of the senseless.

(sidenote from an interview w kris kraus on her biography: According to Eleanor Antin, Kathy worked at a massage parlor in Solana Beach for a while, and she did not give massages. [...] She was also, at the same time, tutoring Latin. / If she didn’t give massages, what did she do? / Well, hand jobs, probably.)

another classic but story of o written by pauline réage plus its beautiful illustrations by leonor fini. it's actually said her fantastical owl masks inspired the character of o + she was really close to andré pieyre de mandiargues, whose one story la marge was adapted by walerian borowczky in immoral tales. then there's sacher masoch's venus in furs. you've probably already heard of anais nin's delta of venus.

i specifically highly rec mary gaitskill. bad behaviour is a great short story collection - one of the stories specifically inspired the film secretary (2002). her essay, the trouble with following the rules, on rape culture and agency published in harper's bazaar (later repub in somebody with a little hammer) is one rare occurrence of nuance and grace accorded to women who've had sexual experiences that are difficult to categorise. it gives a rundown of the ways she personally relates to feminist scholars on the subject too.

there's problems by jade sharma. for a more modern story of the eye, try ryu murakami's ecstasy.

for non-fiction (disclaimer that i mostly haven't read these but they are on my list):

gilles deleuze, masochism: coldness and cruelty ; avgi saketopoulou, sexuality beyond consent ; virginie despentes, king kong theory

if you're similarly interested in boundary-pushing experiences, the limits of the body, attraction to the horrific (i getchu) this is moreso sociology, aesthetics, psychoanalysis focused:

elaine scarry, the body in pain ; anne dufourmantelle, in praise of risk ; sylvère lotringer, overexposed: perverting perversions ; umberto eco, on ugliness

other media: the podcast drunk church, the director catherine breillat.

hope this is of help & if you read anything tell me how it went. i'm always looking for more stuff on the subject too.

[some-velvet-morning]

drawing from semiotext(e)'s schizo-culture volume compiled by sylvère lotringer; texts, from paul virilio' s collaboration with her, crepuscular dawn & pure war

[concordewillfly]

this is for a niche audience but i find it sooo funny that sylvère lotringer had a relationship with chris kraus AND kathy acker. annoying man keeps dating hot and intelligent women he struggles to understand. anyway since we’re on the topic of lame guys being with cool girls i bought girl in a band by kim gordon today <3

[spaceintruderdetector]

https://archive.org/details/AutonomiaPostPoliticalPolitics/mode/2up

Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, originally published in New York in 1980. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi with the direct participation of the main leaders and theorists of the Autonomist movement. This volume is the only first-hand document and contemporaneous analysis that exists of the most innovative post-'68 radical movement in the West. This book remains a crucial testimony of the way this creative, futuristic, neo-anarchistic, postideological, and nonrepresentative political movement of young workers and intellectuals anticipated issues that are now confronting us in the wake of Empire.

[deepartnature]

Italy: Autonomia - Post-Political Politics

“The only first-hand document and contemporaneous analysis of the most innovative post-'68 radical movement in the West, the creative, futuristic, neo-anarchistic, postideological Autonomia. Most of the writers who contributed to the issue were locked up at the time in Italian jails.... I was trying to draw the attention of the American Left, which still believed in Eurocommunism, to the fate of Autonomia. The survival of the last politically creative movement in the West was at stake, but no one in the United States seemed to realize that, or be willing to listen. ...—Sylvère Lotringer ...”

MIT Press

Digging Up Autonomia

e-flux - Reading group: AUTONOMIA, OCCUPY, COMMUNISM: LEGACIES AND FUTURES

[PDF] Italy: Autonomia - Post-Political Politics

[justforbooks]

It was the misfortune, or perhaps privilege, of the critic, writer and professor Sylvère Lotringer, who has died aged 83, to be best known not as the man who launched postmodern French theory to America, but for his supporting role in his second wife’s 1997 semi-fictional epistolary memoir about her erotic obsession with another man.

In I Love Dick, later turned into an Amazon series with Griffin Dunne as Lotringer, the French professor goes on sabbatical to California, accompanied by his wife Chris Kraus, an experimental film-maker, who falls in love with the eponymous academic, modelled on the British critic Dick Hebdige. Lotringer joins the correspondence, signing himself in one letter as Charles Bovary, casting himself thereby as cuckolded husband to Emma Bovary and Dick as her lover Léon Dupuis.

The couple invite Dick to join what amounts to a postmodern art project that blurs fiction and reality. The project would involve pasting the letters in the correspondence on his car and around his house. “It seems to be a step toward the confrontational performing art you’re encouraging,” Lotringer writes to Dick at one point. In reality, Hebdige issued unsuccessful cease and desist letters.

Kraus and Lotringer publicised the book by reading from their letters to Dick on radio shows, never qualifying the correspondence as fiction but rather the letters as fiction: they were, they explained, piercing the false conceit of literature that protected the privacy of the author. The I Love Dick project was French postmodern theory in action, since the couple conceived it as akin to the feminist art stalking projects of the postmodernist artist Sophie Calle, who was Jean Baudrillard’s student. Baudrillard, for his part, was one of the philosophers whom Lotringer introduced to the US and with whom he collaborated on several books.

Lotringer was founding editor in 1974 of the postmodern theoretical journal and publishing house Semiotext(e), which enabled Lotringer to work, as he put it, as a “foreign agent provocateur” bringing together French theory and contemporary American art to fruitful collaboration. The project did not always work well. In 1975, he organised a conference, Schizo-culture, in New York, at which French postmodernist and poststructuralist philosophers for the first time met American artists, along with radical political groups including the Black Panthers.

Michel Foucault lectured on repression, while John Cage performed the chance-generated piece Empty Words. But fights broke out, speakers insulted each other, and Foucault was accused from the floor of being a CIA agent. The psychoanalyst Félix Guattari announced just before his panel: “I am the chair of this panel and I abolish this panel,” and then left. And yet, this conference and Semiotext(e), both Lotringer’s ideas, profoundly changed American intellectual and artistic cultures, for good or ill.

Lotringer was born in Paris, to Polish Jewish immigrants, Doba (nee Borenstein) and Cudek Lotringer, who ran a fur shop. Sylvère and his older sister, Yvonne, were the only Jewish pupils at their school. After enduring the Nazi occupation of Paris, the Lotringers emigrated to Tel Aviv in the new state of Israel in 1949.

There Sylvère joined Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist-Zionist youth movement and experienced life in a kibbutz called Bar Am. “[We] shared everything … Socialism was a reality,” he recalled. It was a collective idyll he sought to recapture in his later life. He and his family returned to Paris and, after graduating from the Lycée Jacques Decour, he studied for a BA (1962) and an MA (1963) in comparative literature from the Sorbonne.

He then enrolled at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, where he studied with Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes. His doctoral thesis, defended in 1967 and written with assistance from Leonard Woolf, whom he met while carrying out research in Britain, and following conversations with Clive Bell, TS Eliot and Vita Sackville-West, was entitled: Virginia Woolf: De la Mort des Valeurs aux Valeurs de la Mort (“From the Death of Values to the Values of Death”).

“I got my PhD as a way of postponing the draft,” said Lotringer. “Algeria was our Vietnam, and I wasn’t exactly keen on being sent there.” Indeed, at the Sorbonne he had led student protests against France’s colonial war.

Lotringer taught for two years (1965 to 1967) for the French government’s Cultural Services in Turkey. He went to the US in 1969 to become assistant professor of French at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, before joining the comparative literature faculty at Columbia University in New York in 1972. Even though he taught there until his retirement in 2009, he claimed to find academia increasingly stultifying: “The student rebellion was only four years [past] and no one dared [mention] it any more.”

Founding Semiotext(e) was a liberation. He recalled that one early issue of the journal was about art and madness: “trying to outplay the madness of capitalism by going further into it. This is what we’ve been doing ever since.”

During the late 1970s, Lotringer took to wearing a studded leather jacket and hanging out with his students at punk shows at CBGBs and SoHo art shows. He followed Baudrillard in opposing to the end of his life the idea that revolution against capitalism was possible; rather, what the latter called “fatal strategies” need to be developed. “There’s no ‘other side’ to capitalism, it is everywhere,” Lotringer said. “Cut one tentacle from the monster and others grow faster on other limbs. Capitalism is crawling inside of us all too, the best and the worst, and we have to keep pushing its creative energy in other directions, dodging the reduction to commerce and self-interest.”

Lotringer and Kraus, his second wife, whom he married in 1988, separated in 2005 and later divorced. His first marriage, to the translator Lucienne Binet, also ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, the artist Iris Klein, whom he married in 2014; by his daughter Mia, from an earlier relationship with Susie Flato, a co-founder of Semiotext(e); and by two grandchildren, Jonah and Nico.

🔔 Sylvère Lotringer, critic, writer and theorist, born 15 October 1938; died 8 November 2021

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[jacobwren]

Today it is difficult to imagine anything that could be excluded from art. Its field has expanded exponentially to include the entire society. Along the way, it has grabbed anything that could be used for its own purpose, recycling garbage, forging communities, investigating political issues and perfumes, tampering with biology, etc., simultaneously appearing and disappearing with an ambiguous promiscuity. Art has finally fulfilled the program of Dada with a vengeance, embedding art into life. The only thing left for art to do is ‘auto-dissolve.’ Most avant-gardes promised too much and never delivered. Their manifestos of ‘auto-dissolution’, on the contrary, revealed them at their most radical and paroxysmal moment. This moment has come to contemporary art, and it may even spare itself the trouble of publicizing its own exit. Forget art then. Unless it is capable of bringing us up to the next paradigmatic shift, as Andy Warhol once did, forgetting about its own name and past history. Artists themselves maybe have been showing the way by venturing so far astray from home. All it would take is to cut off the umbilical cord that still ties art to the market, or rather turn it into a rich rhizome. Some art groups are already working at it. Autonomists used to say, ‘The margins at the centre’. We haven’t yet given art a chance to grow autonomously.

Sylvère Lotringer

[sammeldeineknochen]

Artaud was capable of laughing about his own collapse.

Syvère Lotringer: “Mad like Artaud”, S.201

[mouth-almighty]

I loved those wee books. Especially the ones I could understand. RIP

[garadinervi]

Assata Shakur. Prisoner in the United States; in Still Black Still Strong. Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries. Dhoruba Bin Wadah, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Assata Shakur, Edited by Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones, and Sylvère Lotringer, Semiotext(e), Columbia University, New York, NY, 1993, pp. 205-220 (pt. 1) (pt. 2 here)

[contemporaryartdaily]

Bernadette Corporation at 186f Kepler

[mybarricades]

Antonin Artaud  Sylvère Lotringer | All Paranoiacs | False Witnesses (Interview with Paule Thévenin)

Read more: BLACKOUT

[queerographies]

La raccolta delle "Interviste" di William Burroughs è una vera e propria controstoria privata del secondo Novecento americano [Interviste][William Burroughs] Pistolero intellettuale, pecora nera di una ricca famiglia di fabbricanti di calcolatrici, disinfestatore di blatte e cimici, pittore a mano armata, esule uxoricida, tossico impenitente, profeta della paranoia, esploratore del queer, protagonista di oracolari cammei cinematografici e - soprattutto - autore di alcuni dei più stranianti romanzi sperimentali della letteratura americana: se è vero che ogni uomo vive molte vite durante la sua esistenza, quelle di William Burroughs sono state di più.

[reidio-silence]

The situation was a pressure cooker on the verge of exploding—which it did. Deleuze’s talk went relatively well. He refused a translator, promising to speak slowly and using the blackboard for his drawings. He mostly drew rhizomes, and the public seemed satisfied by his demonstrations. Guattari was next; his talk was simultaneously translated. He quickly provoked a stir that grew increasingly hostile; a good part of the audience started booing him. He was not being attacked for his ideas on power and desire but for being a man. Ti-Grace Atkinson, the leader of the radical feminist movement, had brought her followers, who saw all men as necessarily phallocentric. Guattari exacerbated the situation by speaking about women and desire: “I will always remember Félix leaning over the podium. He picked up his papers and must have gone to sit next to Deleuze and Foucault. It had started off badly and he was furious.” Next, Foucault was harassed while speaking about child sexuality. Outwardly attacking the tenets of the Frankfurt School, which thought it had taken strides by repeatedly denouncing the power structure’s exercise of censorship, he infuriated members of a group claiming to be Marxists, the Larouche Revolutionary Union Committee, which accused him of being paid by the CIA. At the end of the first day, people flooded around Foucault asking him if it were true. Beside himself, Foucault thundered at the audience, denouncing the last talk as illustrating the exaggerations of the 1960s and swearing that he would never set foot in that symposium again.

That night, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault met at the Chelsea with John Rajchman and picked apart the symposium’s disastrous organization, which had turned the event into a farce. After this apocalyptic beginning, Sylvère Lotringer wondered if Foucault would return the following day for the round table with the psychiatrist R. D. Laing and the radical activist Judy Clark. Foucault was mortified and couldn’t sleep that night, but the next day, when an agitator made the same accusation, he answered, “ ‘I am a CIA agent, Lotringer is a CIA, we are all CIA agents except for you: you are an agent of the KGB!’ The guy backed down and the audience laughed aloud.” The atmosphere remained tense, however. Two hundred people came in slinging accusations in all directions, assaulting speakers, and creating general mayhem that occasionally led to blows.

leftist achievement: get simultaneously called out by radfems and laroucheites

[krisis-krinein]

Ma logique était la suivante : si les médias et leurs images nous remplissent d’une illusion de présence, qui nous laisse ensuite avec un sentiment d’absence, pourquoi ne pas essayer le contraire ? C’est-à-dire offrir une absence qui puisse peut-être provoquer une présence.

Alfredo Jaar, in Rubèn Gallo, Hal Foster, Alfredo Jaar et Sylvère Lotringer, « Representation of Violence. Violence of Representation », Trans, vol. 1/2, no 3/4, 1997, p. 59.