Sylvère Lotringer

Lotringer was born in Paris to Doba (Borenstein) and Cudek Lotringer, Polish Jewish immigrants who left Warsaw for France in 1930, where they ran a fur shop. His early life was marked by the Nazi occupation of Paris, and like his contemporaries Georges Perec and Sarah Kofman, he spent the war as a "hidden child." In 1949, Lotringer emigrated to Israel with his family and returned to Paris the year after to join the left-wing Zionist movement Hashomer-Hatzair (The Young Garde) and became one of its leaders. He left the movement eight years later. In 1957, while still at the lycée, Lotringer joined the editorial collective of La Ligne Générale headed by Perec. Taking its name from Sergei Eisenstein's famous film The General Line, this group of young Jewish men favored Hollywood westerns, slapstick and pre-Stalinist communism. The project was praised by Henri Lefebvre but strongly criticized by Simone de Beauvoir, who found it "politically irresponsible."

Entering the Sorbonne in 1958, Lotringer created L’Étrave, a literary magazine, with Nicole Chardaire and contributed to Paris-Lettres, the journal of the French Students' Association (1959–61). As President of the UNEF freshman class at the Sorbonne, he led mobilizations against France's colonial Algerian War. In 1964, he entered the École pratique des hautes études, VIe section (sociology). He received his Ph.D. in the sociology of literature from the institution in 1967 after completing a dissertation on Virginia Woolf's novels under the supervision of Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldmann. His work was aided by his friendship with Leonard Woolf and his acquaintance with T. S. Eliot and Vita Sackville-West, with whom he conducted interviews published in Louis Aragon's journal Les Lettres Francaises during his ten years as a correspondent.

Avoiding French military service in Algeria, Lotringer spent 1962 in the United States and then taught for the French Cultural Services as a lecturer at Atatürk University in Erzurum, Turkey from 1965 to 1967. He returned to the United States via Australia (where he briefly taught at the University of New South Wales) as an assistant professor of French at Swarthmore College in 1969. Following two years as an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, he joined the faculty of Columbia University as a tenured associate professor of French and comparative literature in the autumn of 1972. He was promoted to full professor in 1985 and retired as professor emeritus in 2009. He was also known for his second marriage (1988–2014; sep. 2005) to writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus.

Lotringer died on Monday, 8 November 2021 in Baja California after a long illness.

Defining himself as a "foreign agent provocateur" in the United States, Lotringer traveled to Italy in 1979 and 1980 to document first-hand Italy's embattled post-Marxist Autonomia movement and secure their legacy. His participant-observation with the innovative political movement resulted in Italy: Autonomia – Post-Political Politics, a 1980 special publication of Semiotext(e). In 1992, he sought out former Black Panther Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad, who had just been provisionally released from prison after spending 19 years incarcerated on a charge of "sedition." Lotringer invited Dhoruba to produce a Semiotext(e) book vindicating and updating the Black Panther Party's position. The result was Still Black, Still Strong, an anthology of writings by Assata Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Bin-Wahad.

In 2001, Lotringer co-edited the ironically titled Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader. Released in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the anthology strove to clarify Semiotext(e)'s composite vision of politics, intelligence and radical humor. Summing up the Semiotext(e) self-styled mission, Lotringer used an observation made to him by filmmaker Jack Smith as an epigraph: "The world is starving for thoughts. If you can think of something, the language will fall into place, but the thought is what's going to do it".

Realizing that the Foreign Agents books of the 1980s were being absorbed within mainstream academe, Lotringer sought out new works that would address global politics from the perspective of activism. He commissioned Israeli journalist Amira Hass' award-winning Reporting From Ramallah (2003), and French military specialist Alain Joxe's Empire of Disorder (2002) for Semiotext(e). Resuming his dialogue with Paul Virilio in Crepuscular Dawn (2002), he pushed the philosopher to elaborate on the historical antecedents and repercussions of genetic engineering. His third dialogue with Virilio, Accident of Art (2006), expanded the Virilian notion of "accident" to encompass the impact of war on contemporary art. In 2006, he returned to his interest in Italian political theory, commissioning and publishing works by Paolo Virno, Franco Berardi, Christian Marazzi and Antonio Negri.