Lotringer, Sylvère

Sylvère Lotringer is a literary critic and cultural theorist. He is best known for founding the journal Semiotext(e), which is largely credited with introducing the work of French theorists like Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze,Paul Virilio, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard to an English-speaking audience.

Lotringer was born in Paris to Polish-Jewish immigrants. He spent the Nazi occupation of Paris as a "hidden child", later relocating with his family to Israel. He returned to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne, where he founded the literary magazine L’Etrave. In 1964, Lotringer entered the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf's novels under the supervision of Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldmann. During this period he organized conferences at the Maison des Lettres of the Sorbonne where he forged connections with French literary critics, sociologists and writers as well as with the Bloomsbury Group in London (Leonard Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, David Garnet, etc.) as a freelance writer for Louis Aragon's journal Les Lettres Francaises.

After teaching in Scotland, Turkey, Australia and the American Midwest, Lotringer joined the French and Comparative Literature Faculty at Columbia University in 1972, where he eventually became Professor Emeritus. In 1973, Lotringer founded the journal Semiotext(e) with a group of Columbia University graduate students. After three scholarly, bilingual issues on semiotics, Lotringer and his group organized the controversial "Schizo-Culture" conference in 1975 at Columbia University, which featured Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Ronald D. Laing, Ti-Grace Atkinson, John Cage and William Burroughs, among others. In 1978, Lotringer staged "The Nova Convention", a large event that gathered in downtown New York most of the American counter-culture (from Patti Smith and Timothy Leary to Franz Zappa, Laurie Anderson and Allen Ginsberg) as an homage to William S. Burroughs.

Subsequent issues of Semiotext(e) moved away from the original scholarly format, enlisting a crew of artists and featuring experimental typographics, controversial topics and an ever-expanding cast of French theorists. In 1983, Lotringer founded Semiotext(e)'s Foreign Agents series to present their work in a portable book format stripped of the usual academic introductions and afterwords. In 1990, as "French Theory" became established in America, Chris Kraus added the Native Agents book series -- meant to present home-grown fiction writers as American counterparts to the French theorists -- to Semiotext(e)'s output. Later, Lotringer expanded Semiotext(e)’s roster to include an Active Agents series featuring, among others, the Black Panthers.

From the guide to the Sylvere Lotringer Papers and Semiotext(e) Archive, Bulk, 1973-2000, 1960-2000, (© 2012 Fales Library and Special Collections)