Sylvère Lotringer, the French literary critic, theorist, and founder of the journal that grew into Semiotext(e) Press, has died at age eighty-three. Lotringer published English translations of works by the giants of French philosophy, among them Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Jean-François Lyotard. On Twitter, Lotringer’s mentees, readers, and students offer remembrances. Artforum’s announcement of his passing leaves us with a quote: “Though the texts he published were frequently tortuous, Lotringer abided by a simple overarching principle. ‘Never give people what they want,’ he said, ‘or they’ll hate you for it.’”
For T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Gabrielle Bellot considers the popularity and power of the Black horror genre. Bellot traces recent films and TV series like Get Out, Us, and Them back to a “deep well of Black folklore,” from Anansi to Br’er Rabbit. These tales were altered in the US context, “to reflect the brutalities of slavery, Jim Crow and even the uneasy path one walked while supposedly free.” Their modern counterparts feature trickster archetypes, quick wits, and shapeshifters. As Bellot writes, “This ascendant genre shows, as Morrison wrote of rememory, that the terrors of the past still live in the present.”
For the New Yorker, Leslie Jamison writes about New Narrative legend Dodie Bellamy’s life and work. Considering Bellamy’s new collection of essays, many of which were written after the death in 2019 of her husband, the poet Kevin Killian, Jamison writes: “Bee Reaved asks us to recognize that the form of her work—frenzied association, heaping accumulation, sensual abundance—has always been driven by an awareness of mortality. There’s been a skull lurking in every cluttered still-life.”
The new issue of n+1 is online now, with an essay by Andrea Long Chu drawing on her experiences with a purported cure for depression known as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: “Her psychiatrist is literally German. Frau Doktor explains that TMS is relatively new, a bit experimental, but the idea is to provide a noninvasive alternative to electroshock for patients whose depression has resisted medication, which hers has. But the procedure sounds like something out of science fiction.”
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