Sylvère Lotringer

Sylvère Lotringer (born in 1938 in Paris, France) is a literary critic and cultural theorist. A younger contemporary of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, he is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements through his work with Semiotext(e); and for his interpretations of French theory in a 21st-century context. An influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, Lotringer invented the concept "extrapolationist" as a means of describing the hyperbolic world-views espoused by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Lotringer is a Professor of Art Theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA), where he teaches ethico-aesthetics.

Sylvère Lotringer was born to Polish-Jewish immigrants who fled Warsaw for France in 1930. His early life was marked by the Nazi occupation of Paris, which — like his contemporaries Georges Perec and Sarah Kofman — he spent as a "hidden child" with documents forged by the French Resistance.

As an interpreter of French theory, Lotringer has sought to contextualize the pre-modernist origins of "postmodern" French thought. Writing about Jean Baudrillard's childhood, Lotringer reminds us just how far his generation has traveled to reach The Matrix. He recalls the 11-year-old Jean and his grandparents riding an oxcart loaded with mattresses from Reims to Paris during the massive evacuation of the French populace that marked the onset of the War.

In 1949, Lotringer immigrated 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.

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