Sylvère Lotringer. Capitalism, Leisure, and Potlatch. 2011

Sylvère Lotringer, literary critic and cultural theorist talking about Jean Baudrillard's "Symbolic Exchange and Death," Throstein Veblen and the leisure class. In this lecture Sylvère Lotringer discusses the concepts of potlatch, sacrifice and exchange through the work of Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud, Marshall McLuhan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011. Sylvère Lotringer.

Sylvère Lotringer, Ph.D., born in Paris in 1938, is Jean Baudrillard Chair at the European Graduate School EGS and Professor Emeritus of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University. He is based in New York and Baja, California. Sylvère Lotringer is a literary critic and cultural theorist, and as general editor of Semiotext(e) and Foreign Agents book series was instrumental in introducing French theory to the United States. His interests range from philosophy, literature and art to architecture, anthropology, semiotics, avant-garde movements, structuralism and post-structuralism.

Sylvère Lotringer studied at the Sorbonne and received his doctorate from the École Pratique des Hautes Études VIe section, Paris (1967). As General Editor of Semiotext(e) and of the "Foreign Agents" series, Lotringer was instrumental in introducing French theory to the United States. His teaching interests include Dada and surrealism, situationism, Mallarmé, Proust, structuralism and post-structuralism, as well as anthropology, semiotics, philosophy and art in relation to 20th-century literature.

Among the books Sylvère Lotringer has published, he has co-written with Paul Virilio: Pure War (1983), Crepuscular Dawn (2002), and The Accident of Art (2005), and with Jean Baudrillard: Forget Foucault (1986), Oublier Artaud (2005), and The Conspiracy of Art (2005). Sylvère Lotringer has also written extensively on Georges Bataille, Simone Weil, L. F. Céline, Marguerite Duras, and Robert Antelme, and is the author of Antonin Artaud (1990), French Theory in America (2001), Hatred of Capitalism (2002), David Wojnarowicz (2006), and Overexposed (2007). Silvère Lotringer frequently lectures on art and has published catalogue essays for the MOMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Musee du Jeu de Paume, Modern Kunst and has edited numerous magazines and books such as Philosopher-Artist (1986), Foreign Agent: Kunst in den Zeiten der Theorie (1991), and Nancy Spero (1995).

For background reading on this lecture see "For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign" By Jean Baudrillard, Charles Levin, which includes The Ideological Genesis of Needs.