Initiales / La Revue: Sylvère Lotringer
For its twelfth issue, Initiales magazine walks in the shoes of smuggler Sylvère Lotringer, who imported French theory into the United States in the 1970s.
Teaching during this period at Columbia University in New York and then on the West Coast, he introduced Americans to the writings of Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, which became indispensable theoretical tools in the development of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies and all critical theory from the 1980s onward. He also founded the magazine and publishing house Semiotext(e), which tackles all subjects relating to society, based on a radical analysis of capitalism, power, and alienation apparatuses, and on a rock-solid freedom of tone.
It is this story of transmutation — from France to the United States, from lecture halls to counterculture to a kind of propagation into the general culture — that we are telling in this issue of Initiale, which will also give prominence to a generation of American women writers (published in the Native Agent series when Chris Kraus joined Semiotext(e)).
Conceived collectively by an editorial committee made up of students and postgraduate residents from Ensba Lyon, this issue coordinated by François Aubart and François Piron is structured around an interview with Sylvère Lotringer conducted in Lyon. Among other texts, it includes contributions from the editorial committee, as well as from Chris Kraus, Moyra Davey, Elisabeth Lebovici, The Cheapest University and Benjamin Thorel, as well as many previously unpublished translations of texts by Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jason Demers and Sylvère Lotringer.
► Listen to the lecture on France Culture here.
