Mack Lecture: Sylvère Lotringer on Antonin Artaud

Wednesday, April 29, 7 pm

Walker Cinema

Free, tickets available one hour before event

The black hole of his identity, from which he suffered so much also became an irresistible invitation for his readers to become Artaud clones. Sylvère Lotringer

Cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer will speak on Antonin Artaud, one of the most influential thinkers of the modernist period. He will discuss his forthcoming book, Mad Like Artaud, and will screen a selection from his new film project, The Man Who Disappeared.

As Lotringer describes, Actor, dramaturge, poet, art critic, playwright and theorist, Antonin Artaud suffered early on from intense mental and physical dissociations. Arriving in Paris in 1922, he complained that something was destroying his thoughts and robbing him of the words that he had found. Through controlling his mental symptoms as best as he could with opiates, Artaud investigated the important names of historyPaolo Uccello, Baudelaire, Edgar Allen Poe, and Vincent Van Gogh, to name a fewtaking on their works and predicaments as his own. Lotringer investigates the double lives of Artaud and their impact on his works and literary history.

Copresented with Midway Contemporary Art and Univocal Publishing.

About the Speaker

Sylvère Lotringer, a literary critic and cultural theorist, is professor emeritus of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University and Jean Baudrillard Chair at the European Graduate School. As the founder of the independent press Semiotext(e), he was instrumental in introducing French theory to the United States. Lotringers contributions range from philosophy, literature, and art to architecture, anthropology, and avant-garde movements. His publications include Antonin Artaud (Scribners & Sons, 1990), Nancy Spero (Phaidon Press, 1996); French Theory in America (Routledge, 2001); The Miserables (Semiotext(e), 2014); and Mad Like Artaud (Univocal, 2015), among many others. He has made three films: How to Shoot a Crime, with Chris Kraus (1985); Violent Femmes (1999); and The Man Who Disappeared (2015).