Marco Roth on Sylvère Lotringer

.



What I’m trying to say about Sylvère was that he attracted and maintained an aura of possibility, and that this allowed me to begin to be myself in a way that I’d never imagined I could be. He didn’t care if I was his best student that year, or if I went to graduate school, or if I became a habitué of whatever was then left of the downtown arts world. It was an education in indiscipline, or liberation, which, if taken seriously, also became a kind of discipline. In other words, Sylvère offered his students exactly what he also, as an interviewer, interlocutor, and then publisher, offered philosophers like Paul Virilio, Black Panther activists, S&M performance artists, and eventually writers such as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus: the opportunity to further articulate and refine a liberating or liberationist practice, sometimes in the form of resistance, sometimes in creation, or in the synthesis of the two. This was a kind of dignity most of us were unused to being treated with.

What his colleagues and his critics, and possibly many of his students, never could forgive him for was that he made it too easy to take advantage of his largesse—everyone pretty much got an A, and the arbitrary focus of the massive syllabi and his penchant to digress made it easy not to do the reading. He was treated like a mad uncle or a clown. But to use Sylvère to game the system was our failing, not his. Sylvère allowed himself to be exploited, but that was also his way of offering a reproach, against us, against the university, also against himself. “It’s so easy to be a masochist,” he said once, in the Proust class, “almost everyone is. To be a sadist requires hard work.”

Total freedom is also a total ethical demand. If you took Sylvère seriously, as I did, he could make you feel incredibly guilty. And many refused to take him seriously just to avoid feeling that way. There’s a moment in Chris Kraus’s novel Torpor that captures the more intimate and more intense form that guilt could take on in a couple: “Sylvie knew her fate would be linked forever to Jerome’s unhappiness, and so she longed to simply make it disappear,” she writes, “As if she could make it go away through will, or empathy—some act of magical transference. But to think that was as grandiose and futile as believing she could travel back in time and stop the Nazi troops from marching into Austria or invading Paris.”

The unhappiness Kraus writes of is that of Sylvere’s childhood, lost to the war, the years of hiding and deprivation when he was scarcely more than a toddler. That trauma—always beneath the beach beneath the street—was incurable, for him, as for so many who “survived.” But as his student, one sensed that he wanted to give to others that ultimate possibility—not of making unhappiness “disappear,” not of exiting history, but of making it less determinative—that he could not find for himself despite all his playfulness and experimentation.

- Marco Roth, On Sylvère Lotringer (1938–2021)



.