Semiotext(e): The Press That Rewrote the Rules

In the introduction to Hatred of Capitalism (2002) – a collection of Semiotext(e)’s foremost writings – editor Sylvère Lotringer remarked that, when he launched the press in 1974, Western society was ‘in the last gasp of Marxism’ – a final surge of radical thought amidst the waning tides of revolutionary fervour. This oral history delves into the press’s past 30 years, focusing on its transformative journey through the early 2000s and its migration to Los Angeles, yet never losing sight of its roots as an experimental journal and imprint championing French theory and post-Marxist ideology. Through the voices of key figures, we explore how Semiotext(e) evolved from a provocative outpost for intellectual rebellion to a cornerstone of contemporary radical thought. — Terence Trouillot

Marxism’s Last Gasp

Chris Kraus By the time we were compiling Hatred of Capitalism, Sylvère and I were not living together anymore. I was in LA; he was in New York – but we’d still spend time together. We both were really burnt out on the idea of critical introductions and one of his premises for the ‘Foreign Agents’ series [1983–ongoing] was that it would be ‘theory brut’ without any critical introductions to any of the books.

So, it was in that spirit that we did the introduction to Hatred of Capitalism lying in bed together, talking about our dreams. On one level, it was a joke but, on another, it wasn’t, because that’s how the whole Semiotext(e) publishing project emerged – from personal, deep, late-night conversations. It’s become different throughout the years, but I think the press continues to be forged by community.

McKenzie Wark Semiotext(e) changed my life. My whole trajectory was founded in Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations [1983] and in Pure War [1998], Sylvère’s conversation with Paul Virilio. As someone raised in a Marxist background, encountering Semiotext(e) in the 1980s offered a fresh perspective, after the series of historic defeats of social movements connected to critical theory.

The press continues to be forged by community. Chris Kraus

Wayne Koestenbaum Semiotext(e) came into my life in the mid-1980s, when I was living in New York, and I’d frequent St. Mark’s Bookshop – an emporium for the sexiest and smartest writing. Those early Semiotext(e) titles were the stars on the front tables, and I think they even had a spinning rack with the ‘Foreign Agents’ series. I remember admiring, at a magazine shop in the West Village in 1981, the ‘Polysexuality’ issue.

Lynne Tillman My first memory of Semiotext(e) must be from November 1975, when I went to a fascinating conference that the editors had organized at Columbia University called ‘Schizo-Culture’, where I heard John Cage speak.

Eileen Myles In the mid-to-late 1970s, when I was in my 20s, I would just go to any party I heard of. And one night there was a party at the Maison Française at Columbia University for Semiotext(e). I knew Chris from the mid-1970s – we were cohorts of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church – so, my friendship with her precedes Sylvère. Chris was always a theory girl: I have memories of her spouting theory in a G-string during a performance at St. Mark’s Church. I remember Chris and Sylvère getting together, and then, within a few years, she was introducing the ‘Native Agents’ series.

Native Agents

CK When the first set of books in the ‘Foreign Agents’ series came out in 1983, Sylvère and I were living together in New York. The ‘Foreign Agents’ writers were getting all of this cultural currency and prestige. But the people I was friends with who I thought were the most important thinkers and writers – like Eileen Myles, Cookie Mueller, David Rattray and Ann Rower – were hardly, at that time, getting any attention at all.

I thought: well, why not try and import some of that prestige to my friends? So, in 1990, I made up a story for Sylvère about how the ‘Native Agents’ series would be an analogue to ‘Foreign Agents’ and it would be the practice of the radical subjectivity that some French theory was talking about. Sylvère went along with it, to his great credit, since he didn’t immediately know those writers. I think he came to know them better and to respect and appreciate them, but that was not his impulse. In general, the French had really bad taste in American literature. They really didn’t have a clue.

I love Semiotext(e)’s indifference to certain constructs of taste. McKenzie Wark

LT Chris started ‘Native Agents’ to publish fiction and more women, and she said she wanted to do a book with me. The Madame Realism Complex [1992] was quite an unusual bunch of stories, but I think it probably alerted some writers to this combination of fiction and art writing I was doing, which wasn’t done at all really at that time.

Veronica Gonzalez Peña ‘Native Agents’ was transformative for me. After reading I Love Dick [1997], I wrote to Chris, and she kindly responded immediately. In the early 1990s, my book was being rejected by agents for not being ‘Mexican enough’ – despite my immigrant background from Mexico City. But, from that correspondence with Chris, my book Twin Time was eventually published by Semiotext(e) in 2007, just after Hedi joined.

Hedi El Kholti Our original distributor, Autonomedia, was a radical, small press distributor. Later, when we switched to MIT Press, they took the ‘Native Agents’ series as a package deal, but I don’t think they necessarily wanted it at the time.

CK Sylvère was very insistent that MIT had to take the whole of Semiotext(e), including ‘Native Agents’.

HEK I remember when certain titles were going out of print, including Chris’s I Love Dick, that MIT wouldn’t want to reprint them. We did a new edition, which relaunched the book, but MIT published it begrudgingly.

Bruce Hainley Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black [1990] and Myles’s Not Me [1991] led me to Semiotext(e), and eventually to Chris, who was making sure, with ‘Native Agents’, that Semiotext(e) wasn’t the boys’ club some mistakenly thought it to be.

WK The ‘Native Agents’ series stood for a necessary form of avant-garde, literary experimentation. It might have been underground, but you would really have had to be dead not to catch the vibrancy of what Semiotext(e) was doing for literature at the time. Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, Myles’s Not Me – which remains one of my favourite books of poetry of all time – and Tillman’s The Madame Realism Complex influenced my development as a writer.

EM I was director of the Poetry Project at the time and Chris was like, ‘We should do your book of poetry.’ It seemed mind-boggling to me that my poems would wind up in such a setting. It was a great boon because, as the first book of poetry Semiotext(e) published, Not Me put my writing in a completely other framework. It was such a gift.

Christine Pichini I first came to Semiotext(e) as a reader in the early 1990s, when I was still in college. Myles’s Not Me and The New Fuck You [1995] were major books for me. I loved her quicksilver voice; it opened up longed-for worlds. The New Fuck You nodded to Ed Sanders’s magazine, Fuck You [1962–65], but was a dyke version. I wanted to live in those poems: I was young, I had just come out and those works were ideal.

MW When I first read I Love Dick, I didn’t know what to make of it – particularly since I knew the real Dick. I was just like: ‘OK, this is something different.’ And that got clearer the more I read Chris’s books. Ultimately, my own writing took a turn in that direction. My first book with Semiotext(e), I’m Very into You [2015], which collated my email exchanges with [former lover] Kathy Acker, is an accidental piece of autofiction that I didn’t particularly want to publish, but Chris saw the book in it.

When I wrote Reverse Cowgirl [2020], I only sent it to Hedi and Chris because I thought no one else would get it. Fortunately, they said yes. The thing I love about Semiotext(e) is that indifference to certain constructs of taste and authority. Chris and Hedi are just going to publish the books that matter in their world. I love being a part of that.

On Sylvère

CK I remember when we did Amira Hass’s book, Reporting from Ramallah [2003], it was really a watershed moment for Sylvère, because he had always resisted learning about Zionism and Israel. He had a reflex loyalty to Israel because of his Jewish Holocaust background. When he opened himself up to reconsidering the Israeli occupation of Palestine through Amira’s work and became alert to the whole situation, that was a huge moment for him. It was a lot more than a topical political project: it was a transformation for him personally.

LT Everybody in the New York downtown scene knew who Sylvère was. He wore black leather and cut a dashing, dangerous-looking figure. His family had been deeply affected by the Holocaust. In the early 1990s, a group of us – Chris, Eileen, Kathy, Richard [Hell], Sylvère and myself – did a crazy tour of Germany to promote the ‘Native Agents’ series. Sylvère wanted to read a piece he had written relating to the Holocaust, but he was anxious about doing it for a German audience. Every night, beforehand, he’d say, ‘You think it’s all right?’ And I’d say, ‘Just do it!’ He had such a strong French accent that I don’t know what people understood. It was hard even for me to understand.

He’d come to class in red cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, no hair on top, bushy on the sides. Noura Wedell

EM I remember the German men we met on the ‘Native Agents’ book tour were furious. They thought, ‘This is what Sylvère brought us, a bunch of women talking about feminism and sex?’ People didn’t quite accept that ideas about the body and gender and sexuality were part of theory, even though they were.

François Cusset I first met Sylvère in 1993, when I was working as a young cultural attaché to the French Embassy in New York. I was in charge of giving stipends to American publishers for translating French titles, and it’s in this context that Sylvère approached me. We immediately got along so well that we became friends. That’s how I discovered Semiotext(e).

MW After I emigrated from Australia to the US, I got to meet Sylvère a few times in New York during the 1990s. He had a droll sense of humour. He turned down my book A Hacker Manifesto [2004], but he took me to lunch and was very encouraging.

WK I reviewed Sylvère’s book about sex offenders, Overexposed [1988], for the now-defunct gay newspaper New York Native [1980–97]. Later, in the 1990s, I met Sylvère at a conference at Columbia University and he remembered my review. Sylvère and I had an amazing conversation in the 2000s, while we were riding the Metro-North train together back to New York from New Haven. I wish we’d had more conversations.

Noura Wedell I came to Semiotext(e) through Sylvère, who I met in the early 1990s when I was an undergrad at Barnard College. I took a class with him on Stéphane Mallarmé. He’d come to class in red cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, no hair on top but bushy on the sides.

Relaunch

HEK In 1999, after living and working in LA for a few years, I decided to go back to school at Art Center. That’s where I met Sylvère when I got involved in a school publication that he was co-editing with Giovanni Intra, who started the gallery China Art Objects. Initially, I was doing other projects for Sylvère, like finishing the book BURROUGHS LIVE: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1997 [2001]. Then, around 2004, Chris put some money into the business. She hired me and got us an office, which I think was Vaginal Davis’s old apartment before she moved to Berlin. At this point, they were planning on a relaunch. I think, prior to that, there was no money. Between 2000 and 2005, maybe four or five books came out.

CK Sylvère was seriously considering dropping the whole thing. He was coming up on retirement and thinking, ‘Maybe the press has taken enough of my life and I want to have more personal time and do something else now.’ I felt very strongly that he shouldn’t because Semiotext(e) was such an important part of his legacy. I also felt that, if it was going to continue, we needed to bring in more people and take it a step up.

HEK For the relaunch, we acquired Maurice Dantec’s Babylon Babies [1999/2005], which Noura translated. The book also became a somewhat unremarkable movie starring Vin Diesel [Babylon A.D., 2008]. The other publications were Baudrillard’s The Conspiracy of Art, Bernadette Corporation’s novel Reena Spaulings and Mark von Schlegell’s sci-fi Venusia [all 2005]. We also changed the design of the books slightly to look more current.

Many of the books Hedi publishes opt for a radical lucidity. Wayne Koestenbaum

WK I love the bigger format that Hedi introduced in 2005. And I love his designs. I did some blurbs for him, and he would start sending me books he knew I’d appreciate. I understood and admired the way that Hedi was keeping alive the French sexual-transgressors channel. He understands that, in Francophone literature, there remains a vibrant attentiveness to the relation between formal experimentation and sex/gender polyphony. Experimentation doesn’t always mean opacity: many of the books Hedi publishes opt for a radical lucidity.

CK Hedi started bringing in other writers at that time – legacy French gay fiction writers from the 1970s and ’80s, like Tony Duvert and Guy Hocquenghem – that we would never have thought of, which changed the character of the list a lot.

HEK I thought, if we’re going to republish these texts from the 1970s and early ’80s, we might as well add other titles that had never previously been translated to the ‘Foreign Agents’ series.

Los Angeles

FC There are three phases in the history of Semiotext(e): the journal, the New York imprints – ‘Native Agents’ and ‘Foreign Agents’ – and LA, which is now the site of the press.

HEK There was a moment around the time of the relaunch when we became aware that we didn’t really have a presence in LA. People thought of Semiotext(e) as being in New York, so we did a lot of events to make ourselves known. In 2006, I launched this film-screening series called ‘Deleuze from A to Z’ at the Mandrake bar in Culver City. We showed a lot of stuff – even an interview Sylvère filmed with Paul Virilio about the financial crash in 2008 – and started to generate a little bit of a scene in LA.

I was at the very first event and I was at the very last event. Bruce Hainley

Lauren Mackler Hedi, on top of being a great designer and editor, is also a phenomenal programmer. He organized these screenings at the artist-run Mandrake bar which were inspired by L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze [Gilles Deleuze’s Alphabet Book, 1988] – an invaluable documentary in which Deleuze, in conversation with his lover, journalist Claire Parnet, riffs on philosophical concepts evoked by letters of the alphabet. Hedi would pair each letter with a couple of striking and pretty obscure films, basically applying his editorial flair, encyclopaedic knowledge of subcultural material and genius for subtext to film programming. 

BH I was at the very first event and I was at the very last event. I can’t say I was at every single event because their calendar was packed! Semiotext(e) runs parallel to the art world and it sometimes functions like an alternative art school when too many MFA programmes sway toward market forces. Remember the MFA as the new MBA? Sylvère’s incredible intellectual élan – from his tenure at Columbia University, where his students included members of Bernadette Corporation, John Kelsey and Ariana Reines, to his time teaching at ArtCenter from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s – coordinated ways to activate theory as inherent to art and living, as well as a hatred of capitalism.

CP My introduction to Hedi was through Bruce Hainley in 2016. My first contribution was a translation I had done in the early 2000s of Michel Leiris’s Journal 1922–1989 [1992] – a text I return to time and again. Soon after, we started working on Hervé Guibert’s Crazy for Vincent [1989], which was another project I had begun on my own, so I was very happy to take that on for Semiotext(e).

The art world descended on the casino; by most accounts, it was chaos. Lauren Mackler

WK I first met Hedi at some event I did in LA in the late 1990s or early 2000s. I instantly liked him. He was either with Dennis Cooper, Bruce Hainley or Michael Silverblatt. The nice thing about LA is that everyone comes to the literary events there.

NW In 2011, Hedi got invited by the University of Southern California to teach a theory class for the MFA programme. Hedi didn’t want to do it, so he suggested I interview for it. I got the gig and stayed in LA with that job until 2018. LA at that time with Semiotext(e) was a lot of fun. I lived with Veronica on Sea View Lane, which was beautiful.

VGP Yes, Noura lived with me for a while in the house that Jorge [Pardo] designed for the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. The whole bottom section used to be his studio. After we split up and he moved out, I started renting it out to people, mostly with Semiotext(e) connections, inexpensively, just as a kind of communal thing.

LM I started working with Semiotext(e) in 2017 on Reynaldo Rivera’s Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City [2020]. It was a profound excavation of an archive; this was 40 years of Rey’s work that had hardly been shown. Clubs, parties, the backstage scenes of LA in the 1980s and ’90s. The book was seeded by a long friendship between Chris and Rey. Chris is like that: she champions. They had met in 1996, and she asked Rey to be the photographer of her ‘Chance Event’ – a three-day ‘philosophical rave’ at Whiskey Pete’s casino in the Nevada Desert. It was meant to be her irreverent follow up to Sylvère’s ‘Nova Convention’. She invited Baudrillard to be the headliner almost as click-bait, but other speakers included the poet Diane di Prima and artist Shirley Tse. The art world descended on the casino; there were installations in bedrooms; by most accounts, it was chaos.

FC Semiotext(e) is likely remembered as much for its wild events as its books. Three stand out: the 1975 ‘Schizo-Culture’ symposium on Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault that turned into a downtown party; the 1978 ‘Nova Convention’, focused on Burroughs, which became a madhouse with performances from the B-52s, the Sex Pistols and Patti Smith; and the 1995 ‘Chance Event’ in the Nevada Desert – which I attended – featuring conferences, music, Butoh dance and Baudrillard singing in a spiked jacket. It was all quite crazy.

Dynamics

CK Hedi and I will bicker and contradict each other, which can be very productive in helping us think of new projects. Semiotext(e) is such an amateur enterprise in the sense that everyone does it for love. It’s gotten more efficient over the years – more books are being published that reach a lot more people and sell more copies – but the process is still very much the same. There have been junctures where we’ve talked about whether we should change things, but then we look at what it would mean to professionalize the press further, and none of us really wants that.

HEK We have the means, now more than ever, to continue to be experimental. From the outset, it’s always been a very fragile economic proposition: publish a lot of books that are going to lose money and some that mysteriously sell copies.

BH Semiotext(e) is fortunate to have such a vital group of translators: Noura is a crucial interlocutor and member of Semiotext(e); Christine has the same kind of vivid force. Both are billed as translators, but they bring so much to bear intellectually to what they’re doing, in addition to excelling as electric writers.

MW Semiotext(e) is just that right level of cowboy operation: you’re not dealing with massive editorial bureaucracies to get something done, but they’re professional and have great distribution. They really hit the sweet spot. I’d love to do another book for them.

WK Hedi seems to like to work in person rather than via email so, with both the books I’ve done for them – The Cheerful Scapegoat: Fables [2021] and Stubble Archipelago [2024] – we talked on the phone to finalize the editing, copyediting, typesetting and designing: a pleasingly old-fashioned approach.

FC From the start, it was mostly Sylvère and Chris, although there were times with large, spread-out teams in New York, LA and Paris. Some groups, as Sylvère put it, ‘took the journal hostage’, taking over the office to produce an issue after he approved the theme, but without his control over the content. The result was often an issue that came out despite his efforts, but he always celebrated it, saying, ‘It’s great; it’s fun. It belongs to everyone.’

VGP Mark von Schlegell once said to me that being part of Semiotext(e) was like being part of a dysfunctional family. But it sustained us, and it still does.

The Tipping Point

HEK The Coming Insurrection [2009] by The Invisible Committee was huge for us financially. It ended up on the Glenn Beck show on FOX News. We had bought the rights to the book and it was in the process of being translated when the Tarnac Nine – a group of people living in a commune – were arrested by a SWAT team in France and accused of sabotage and conspiracy. During the trial, it was suggested that the group allegedly wrote The Coming Insurrection.

CK A year or so later, some of our friends in New York who were involved with the book, including John Kelsey and other members of Bernadette Corporation, decided to hold an impromptu and unofficial launch at Barnes & Noble in Union Square.

We have the means, now more than ever, to continue to be experimental. Hedi El Kholti

HEK People started reading aloud excerpts from the book. Eventually, they got kicked out of Barnes & Noble and went to a nearby Sephora store. Ultimately, they ended up in a park. That fiasco was written up in The New York Times and I think that’s how Beck got wind of the book. He featured it on his show, describing it as ‘quite possibly the most evil book I have ever read’. It became the number one bestseller on Amazon overnight. With that money, we published the Peter Sloterdijk trilogy.

BH There are so many books that wouldn’t have been printed without that strange, unpredictable occurrence. It was a very important moment for Semiotext(e), despite being completely unplanned – albeit, of course, exactly the kind of work they have long been doing and precisely the sort of book they alone would publish. Who else in the US is going to release a title like The Coming Insurrection? No one but Semiotext(e), which was founded when being smart was sexy and everybody wanted to be a theoretical girl.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 249 with the headline ‘Then Came a Stranger’

With thanks to Lucinda Dayhew, Andrew Durbin, Chloe Stead, Christopher Wierling and Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin

^{Main image: Event poster, ‘Nietzsche Returns’ (detail),1978. Courtesy: Semiotext(e), Los Angeles}