Sylvère Lotringer is a literary critic, cultural theorist, and filmmaker. 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, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault and Jean-François 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'Étrave. In 1964, Lotringer entered the École pratique des Hautes Études 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 Françaises.
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 "Schizo-Culture" conference in 1975 at Columbia University, which featured Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Ronald D. Laing, Ti-Grace Atkinson, John Cage, and William S. Burroughs. In 1978, Lotringer staged "The Nova Convention," a large downtown New York event that gathered members 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)emph>'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 the Black Panthers.
Lotringer directed several films, including The Golden Bowl, or, Repression (1984-1989) and How to Shoot a Crime, which were co-directed with Chris Kraus; Too Sensitive to Touch (1981), co-directed with Michael Oblowitz; and solo works Second Hand Hitler (unfinished, circa 1985), Violent Femmes (1998), and The Man Who Disappeared (2015).
