Underskog

VELKOMMEN TIL ESTETISK SEMINAR MED SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER (Columbia University): ON A CULTURE OF CRUELTY
FREDAG 25 MAI, kl 14:15 – 16:00, AUD 3 HELGA ENGS HUS, UNIVERSITETET BLINDERN

A Culture of Cruelty: In the 30s and 40s, a number of writers and thinkers obsessed by the decline of religion, the deterritorialization of the culture and the rise of fascism set out to go to the root of the cultural malaise and of the pervasive sense of doom. They turned themselves in living laboratories studying at their own expense the possibility of restoring symbolic bonds strong enough to keep society together. Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, Georges Bataille’s sacrificial rituals, Simone Weil’s willing misfortune and their emphasis on collective experience were so many attempts to pre-empt the coming hecatomb.

Sylvère Lotringer 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 Emeritus at Columbia University and a Professor of Foreign Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He has also published extensively on the French “high modernists,” Antonin Artaud, Simone Weil and Georges Bataille.