Sylvère Lotringer

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.

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.

"In the wake of David Wojnarowicz's death, critic and cultural theorist Sylvere Lotringer undertook to track down all of Wojnarowicz's friends and former collaborators. Lotringer wanted to talk not just about David, but about the East Village cultural scene they'd created. Some - like Nan Goldin and Kiki Smith - had become luminaries in the international art world. Others - like Bill Rice, Marguerite Van Cook, and Steve Brown - remained local. Through their accounts, the protagonists of the East Village art scene reclaim their history, on their own terms. Illustrated with photographs and artworks by Gary Azon, Nan Goldin, James Romberger, Peter Hujar, Richard Kern, Marion Scemama, Andreas Sterzing, Tommy Turner and David Wojanarowicz, Five or Six Years tears open art history's myth of the single Great Artist to reveal Wojnarowicz's real life, and the real lives surrounding him."--Jacket.

There is a catastrophe within contemporary art. What I call the "optically correct" is at stake. The vision machine and the motor have triggered it, but the visual arts haven't learned from it. Instead, they've masked this failure with commercial success. This "accident" is provoking a reversal of values. In my view, this is positive: the accident reveals something important we would not otherwise know how to perceive.— Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art Urbanist and technological theorist Paul Virilio trained as a painter, studying under Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Bazaine and de Stael. In The Accident of Art, his third extended conversation with Sylvère Lotringer, Virilio addresses the situation of art within technological society for the first time. This book completes a collaborative trilogy the two began in 1982 with Pure War and continued with Crepuscular Dawn, their 2002 work on architecture and biotechnology. In The Accident of Art, Virilio and Lotringer argue that a direct relation exists between war trauma and art. Why has art failed to reinvent itself in the face of technology, unlike performing art? Why has art simply retreated into painting, or surrendered to digital technology? Accidents, Virilio claims, can free us from speed's inertia. As technological catastrophes, accidents are inventions in their own right.

What does it mean to"do theory" in America? In what ways has "French Theory" changed American intellectual and artistic life? How different is it from what French intellectuals themselves conceived, and what does all this tell us about American intellectual life? Is "French Theory" still a significant force in America, raising conceptual questions not easily answered? In this volume of new work--including the French writers Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilled Delezue, as well as essays by Sylvere Lotringer and Sande Cohen, Mario Biagoli, Elie During, Chris Kraus, Alison Gingeras, and Kriss Ravetto, among others--French theorists assess the impact and reception of their work in America, and American-based critics account for their effects in different areas of cultural criticism and art over the last thirty years.

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.