FRANCE AUTHOR · INTERVIEWS · PHILOSOPHY
Sylvère Lotringer
Also known as: S. Lotringer, Sylvere Lotringer
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. 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.
Perhaps this time I will add an English subtitle to my French title, which Tom Bishop just pronounced for this conference whose posters have advertised, with a remarkable painting by May Tansey, that it would be given in French.
— from French theory in America
Most acclaimed
Overexposed
A report on the administration of deviant desire in specialized clinics that documents the way our postmodern society exposes sexuality to the point of overexposure. The most perverse perversions are not always those one would expect. Originally conceived as an American update to Foucault's History of Sexuality, Overexposed is even more outrageous and thought-provoking today than it was twenty years ago when first published by a commercial publisher. By a strange reversal, rather than being punished, deviant desire now is administrated in specialized clinics under medical supervision. Sexual excess is being turned into a "boredom therapy" claiming to rid patients of their own desires by forcing them to indulge them past the point of satiety. But are perversions still perverse when they are vindicated unconditionally? At once clinical, bewildering, and deeply poignant, Overexposed shows how science can pervert itself by identifying too closely with its object. This insider's exposition of controversial cognitive behavioral methods (carried out with instruments straight out of A Clockwork Orange—penile transducer? pupillometer?) is a hallucinatory document on the manner in which our postmodern society exposes sexuality to the point of overexposure—in order to exterminate it.
On Rage
Wie und wo manifestiert sich – die Wut? Welchen Stellenwert hat sie, welche Wege nimmt sie, wo schreibt sie sich ein und weiter ? Dieses Buch sondiert das mannigfaltige Phänomen Wut nicht nur dort, wo sie unmittelbar und spektakulär ausbricht, sondern sucht nach abstrakten und reflektierten Formen der Auseinandersetzung mit den kritischen Punkten, an denen menschliches Verhalten plötzlich umschlägt. Es geht um die großen politischen Fragen, um jene Momente, in denen Wut das Versagen diplomatischer Mittel bezeugt, die Verhandlungen scheitern, wenn andere – gesellschaftlich sanktionierte – Ausdrucksformen ins Spiel kommen. Mit einer kultur- und zeitübergreifenden Phänomenologie der Wut möchten wir Wut als Zustand neu denken. Es könnte zu einer Rehabilitierung dieses Gefühls führen und einen Ausgangspunkt für neue, weniger vermittelte Formen des Denkens bilden. Protest – ob organisiert oder nicht – ist das Zeichen unserer Zeit. In Verbindung mit einem Gefühl ökonomischer, ökologischer oder politischer Krise führt dies zu Ausnahmezuständen, die hilfreich sein könnten, neue Strategien für das Überleben in dieser Welt zu entwickeln. Der Band versteht sich als Glossar, die alphabetisch geordneten Einträge reichen von „Amplifying“ über „Blood“, „Dada“, „Monsters“, „Phobias“ und „Silence“ bis hin zu „Vacuum“ und „Wild West“. Arbeiten von Künstlern – zum Teil eigens für die Ausstellung „Über Wut“ (2010) entwickelt –, Diskussionen, Essays, Vorträge, Gedichte und vieles mehr machen den Band zu einer Enzyklopädie eines Gefühlszustands, der nach Lage der Dinge zu den bedeutendsten unserer Zeit zählt. Mit Beiträgen von Jimmie Durham, Ruediger John, Tadeusz Kantor, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Terézia Mora, Michael Rakowitz, Monika Rinck, Mick Taussig, Stefan Weidner, Aaron Ben Ze’ev, Jean Ziegler und vielen anderen.
Mad Like Artaud
Those who are mad like Antonin Artaud, are they just as mad as he was? Madness, like the plague, is contagious, and everyone, from his psychiatrists to his disciples, family, and critics, everyone who gets close to Artaud, seems to participate in his delirium. Sylvere Lotringer explores various embodiments of this shared delirium through what Artaud called "mental dramas"--a series of confrontations with his witnesses or "persecutors" where we uncover the raw delirium at work, even in Lotringer himself. Mad Like Artaud does not intend to add one more layer of commentary to the bitter controversies that have been surrounding the cursed poet's work since his death in 1948, nor does it take sides among the different camps who are still haggling over his corpse. This book speaks of the site where "madness" itself is simmering.