Professor Emeritus of French Philosophy at Columbia University in New York, he has largely contributed to the North American influence of French thought, particularly the “French Theory”, which he published and edit. He died on November 8, at the age of 83 years.
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A real passer always disappears before what it is passing; It connects and converges while being itself on the edge of disappearing. With Sylvère Lotringer – who thought about these terms, and died on November 8 in his residence of Baja California, in Mexico – it’s a real smaller who disappeared. And which smuggler! The North American Radiation of French Thought for half a century (including this “French Theory” that it brought together, published and baptized itself) owes it a lot, as well as popularity, in some French circles, avant-gardes. American cultural of the end of the XX e century. And beyond, it favored the astonishing diffusion of the most subversive philosophical theories, or the most unwanted, in related – artistic, activists, academic, counter-cultural environments, which it has helped to inspire and bring together one of the others.
Sylvère Lotringer was born in Paris on October 15, 1938, of Polish Jewish parents emigrated from Warsaw in 1930. entrusted by his mother to relatives, he spent the Second World War in the East Parisian in “child hidden” – Like many others of its generation, including the philosopher Sarah Kofman and the writer Georges Perec, with whom he will share the traumatic memory of this childhood recluse.
In 1949, his family and emigrate to Israel but come back a year later; It incorporates 12-year-old Zionist youth movement from left Hashomer-Hatzair, of which it becomes one of the Parisian officials. Still high school student, he participates, with Georges Perec, the newspaper project the general line. Entered the Sorbonne In 1958, there follows letter studies, created the Journal The Etrave, joined the UNEF, leading student mobilizations against the Algerian war – it is to escape the mandatory conscription that He flees in the United States for the first time, in 1962, or he started, between 1965 and 1967, at the French Alliance of Erzurum, Turkey.
A brand in life Intellectual
It fits in Ph.D. in 1964 at VI E Practical School of Studies, where he will support his doctoral thesis, codirigated by Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldmann, on the Romanesque work of Virginia Woolf, first-handed by its proximity to Leonard Woolf (the husband of the L’Autiver) but also the writer Vita Sackville-West and the poet Ts Eliot, with whom he will publish long interviews in the letters French.
After a teaching year in Australia and Swarthmore College (a Progressive University of Pennsylvania), he was recruited in 1972 by the French and Comparative Literature Department of Columbia University in New York, where it will be tenured. and teach all his life – before, much later, regular seminars in California Institute for the Arts, in Los Angeles, or the European Graduate School of Saas-Fee, Switzerland. His courses of French philosophy in Columbia, very followed, could have a decisive influence over the generations of students, including the Future Kathryn Bigelow filmmaker, Critics Tim Griffin and John Kelsey or the poet Ariana Queens.
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