Semiotext
| Founded | 1974 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Sylvère Lotringer |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Los Angeles |
| Distribution | MIT Press |
| Key people | Hedi El Kholti, Chris Kraus, Sylvère Lotringer |
| Publication types | Books, Magazines, Pamphlets |
| Imprints | Active Agents, Foreign Agents, Intervention Series, Native Agents and Animal Shelter |
| Official website | semiotexte |
Semiotext(e) is an independent publisher of critical theory, fiction, philosophy, art criticism, activist texts and non-fiction.
Founded in 1974, Semiotext(e) began as a journal that emerged from a semiotics reading group led by Sylvère Lotringer at Columbia University. Initially, the magazine was devoted to readings of seminal thinkers like Nietzsche and Saussure. In 1978, Lotringer and his collaborators published a special issue, Schizo-Culture, in the wake of a conference of the same name he’d organized two years before at Columbia University. The magazine brought together artists and thinkers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat and Lee Breuer. Schizo-Culture brilliantly brought out connections between high theory and underground culture that had not yet been made, and forged the “high/low” aesthetic that remains central to the Semiotext(e) project.
As the group dispersed over time, issues appeared less frequently. In 1980, Lotringer began to assemble the Foreign Agents series, a group of "little black books", often culled from longer texts, to polemically debut the work of French theorists to US readers. He was aided in this by Jim Fleming, whose collective press Autonomedia would be Semiotext(e)'s distributor for the next twenty-one years. Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations was the first of these books to appear, followed by titles by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Paul Virilio, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault, among others. Spin magazine cited the little black books as "Objects of Desire" in a 19XX design feature.
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