S Y L V É R E   L O T R I N G E R

I became interested in this topic through the media and its glamorization of violence. Until the end of the '70s artists had somehow resisted popular culture, and even when they reappropriated it, it had always been on their own terms. We were among the first to welcome the monster and work with it from the in-side. Inside capitalism and against it, this was in keeping with the analysis of Deleuze and Guattari, whose sensibility I share entirely. Maintaining a critical distance, for me, is a luxury. It's an institutional gesture which has little consequence, except in terms of academic career. From the start I had a different readership in mind for Semiotext(e) - the magazine was produced for a younger audience steeped in popular culture, sophisticated, capable of using signs in a playful and conceptual way. There was a wealth of material out there, and no one seemed to pay much attention to it then - sex, money, S&M, terrorism, things from the real world. They were crying to be used and redirected. I began ransacking medical magazines.

I collected sex pictures, crimes scenes, police documents. They were politically loaded, and more exciting as material.

I was teaching a class on "death" at Columbia University, and instead of simply reading or reflecting about it, I interviewed people actually involved in sex or crime to get firsthand accounts of what it was all about.

Some of these experiences just came my way. I was involved in anti-psychiatry at the time, and sadomasochism seemed a more hands-on alternative to traditional therapy. It was also becoming a major American phenomenon, as Foucault recognized, and although I deal with French theories, America - and New York - has always been my main subject of investigation. It was also through the anti-psychiatric network in Europe that I discovered the "Autonomia" movement in Italy, which many confused with the dogmatic terro-rism - the Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction - that was raging at the time, and looked very glamorous from downtown New York. "Autonomists" were trying to devise other ways of being political. They used "technical intelligence" to wage a more inventive war of signs - tinkering with traffic signs instead of building barricades, etc. It confirmed my idea that "semiotics" could be a creative tool, not just a field of study. The "Autonomia" issue of Semiotext(e) was followed a few years later by the "German Issue," which explored the work of a number of artists gathered around the Colab. It was only much later, just a few years ago actually, that I became aware of an even more compelling reason for my interest in violence. It had to do with being a Jewish child in France during the German occupation. It is for the same reason that I got involved with writers like Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Simone Weil or Céline who kept plumbing the collective madness that led to the Nazi atrocities.