Chris Kraus

In "I Love Dick", published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers. I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world - and it's a book you won't put down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.

I Love Dick

As the rope was tightening around my neck, an Alien made love to me. Belief is atechnology for softening the landscape. The world becomes more beautiful when God is in it. Here iswhat happens inside a person's body when they starve.Written in the shadow of Georg Buchner's Lenzat razor pitch, Aliens & Anorexia, first published in 2000, defines a female form of chance thatis both emotional and radical. The book unfolds like a set of Chinese boxes, using stories andpolemics to travel through a maze that spirals back into itself. Its characters include Simone Weil,the first radical philosopher of sadness, the artist Paul Thek, Kraus herself, and "Africa," hervirtual S&M partner who's shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes upin the Northwest Woods for the winter to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her ownlow-budget independent film.In Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus argues for empathy as the ultimateperceptive tool, and reclaims anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor "self-esteem."Anorexia, Kraus writes, could be an attempt to leave the body altogether: a rejection of thecynicism this culture hands us through its food.

Aliens & Anorexia

Sylvie wanted to believe that misery could simply be replaced with happiness. Timewas a straight line, stretching out before you. If you could create a golden kind of time and lay itright beside the other time, the time of horror, Bad History could just recede into the distancewithout ever having to be resolved.--from TorporSet at the dawn of the New World Order, ChrisKraus's third novel, Torpor loops back to the beginning of the decade that was the basis of I LoveDick, her pseudo-confessional cult-classic debut. It's summer, 1991, post-MTV, pre-AOL. JeromeShafir and Sylvie Green, two former New Yorkers who can no longer afford an East Village apartment,set off on a journey across the entire former Soviet Bloc with the specious aim of adopting aRomanian orphan. Nirvana's on the radio everywhere, and wars are erupting acrossYugoslavia.Unhappily married to Jerome, a 53-year-old Columbia University professor who loathesacademe, Sylvie thinks only of happiness. At 35, she dreams of stuffed bears and wonders why theirlives lack the tremulous sincerity that pervades thirtysomething, that season's hot new TV show.There are only two things, Sylvie thinks, that will save them: a child of their own, and the successof The Anthropology of Unhappiness, her husband's long-postponed book on the Holocaust. But as theymove forward toward impoverished Romania, Jerome's memories of his father's extermination atAuschwitz and his own childhood survival impede them.Savagely ironic and deeply lyrical, Torporexplores the swirling mix of nationalisms, capital flows and negative entropy that define thepresent, haunted by the persistence of historical memory. Written in the third person, it is hermost personal novel to date.

Torpor

Rich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon ... scholar, stripper, victim and media-whore- The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself. The media storm that surrounded Kathy Acker's books was unprecedented- her books were condemned by the mainstream media, but eventually the controversy, and attention, faded away. Twenty years after her untimely death aged just 50, Acker's legend has faded, making her writing more legible. In this first, fully authorized biography, Kraus approaches Acker both as a writer, and as a member of the artistic communities from which she emerged. At once forensic and intimate, After Kathy Ackertraces the extreme discipline and literary strategies Acker used to develop her work, and the contradictions she longed to embody. Using exhaustive archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and friends, Kraus charts Acker's movement through some of the late twentieth century's most significant artistic enterprises.

After Kathy Acker

Sylvère Lotringer

Jean Baudrillard meets Cookie Mueller in this gathering of French theory and new American fiction. Compiled in 2001 to commemorate the passing of an era, Hatred of Capitalism brings together highlights of Semiotext(e)'s most beloved and prescient works. Semiotext(e)'s three-decade history mirrors the history of American thought. Founded by French theorist and critic Sylvere Lotringer as a scholarly journal in 1974, Semiotext(e) quickly took on the mission of melding French theory with the American art world and punk underground. Its Foreign Agents, Native Agents, Active Agents and Double Agents imprints have brought together thinkers and writers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Assata Shakur, Bob Flanagan, Paul Virillio, Kate Millet, Jean Baudrillard, Michelle Tea, William S. Burroughs, Eileen Myles, Ulrike Meinhof, and Fanny Howe. In Hatred of Capitalism, editors Kraus and Lotringer bring these people together in the same volume for the first time.

A Reader

Hatred of Capitalism

Contains some previously published essays.

Where Art Belongs

"In his journal, Paul liked to make lists: What he ordered from Commissary (shaving cream, toothpaste, deodorant, the transistor radio he had for a week before the guards took it away). The books he picked off the cart (The Bible, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Codependent No More.) What phone calls he made and received; also, Bible Study certificates, letters and cards, his workout routines and his moods (Anxious, Nervous, Trusting in God, but mostly Depressed). Paul has a record of every push-up he did while he was in prison but he cannot remember shit about what happened before his arrest."--from Summer of Hate Waking up from the chilling high of a near-death sex game, Catt Dunlop travels to Albuquerque in 2005 to reinvest some windfall real-estate gains and reengage with something approximating "real life." Aware that the critical discourse she has used to build her career as a visiting professor and art critic is really a cipher for something else, she hopes that buying and fixing slum buildings will bring her more closely in touch with American life than the essays she writes. In Albuquerque, she becomes romantically involved with Paul Garcia, a recently sober ex-con who has just served sixteen months in state prison for defrauding Halliburton Industries, his former employer, of $873. Almost forty years old, Paul is highly intelligent but has only been out of New Mexico twice. He has no information. With Catt's help, he makes plans to attend UCLA, only to be arrested on a ten-year-old bench warrant en route. Caught in the nightmarish Byzantine world of the legal system, Catt and Paul's empathic attempts to save each other's lives seems doomed to dissolve. Summer of Hate is a novel about flawed reciprocity and American justice, recording recent events through the prism of a beleaguered romance. As lucid and trenchant as ever, Kraus in her newest novel reminds us that the writer can be a first responder of sorts when power becomes invisible, or merely banal.

Summer of Hate

Essays on and around art and art practices by the author of I Love Dick. A border isn't a metaphor. Knowing each other for over a decade makes us witnesses to each other's lives. My escape is his prison. We meet in a bar and smoke Marlboros. —from Social Practices Mixing biography, autobiography, fiction, criticism, and conversations among friends, with Social Practices Chris Kraus continues the anthropological exploration of artistic lives and the art world begun in 2004 with Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. Social Practices includes writings from and around the legendary “Chance Event—Three Days in the Desert with Jean Baudrillard” (1996), and “Radical Localism,” an exhibition of art and media from Puerto Nuevo's Mexicali Rose that Kraus co-organized with Marco Vera and Richard Birkett in 2012. Attuned to the odd and the anomalous, Kraus profiles Elias Fontes, an Imperial Valley hay merchant who has become an important collector of contemporary Mexican art, and chronicles the demise of a rural convenience store in northern Minnesota. She considers the work of such major contemporary artists as Jason Rhoades, Channa Horowitz, Simon Denny, Yayoi Kusama, Henry Taylor, Julie Becker, Ryan McGinley, and Leigh Ledare. Although Kraus casts a skeptical eye at the genre that's come to be known as “social practice,” her book is less a critique than a proposition as to how art might be read through desire and circumstance, delirium, gossip, coincidence, and revenge. All art, she implies, is a social practice.

Social Practices

On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, depressed town, on the fringes of the so-called “meth community,” the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned.

At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they’d bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Locked into a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota—between the art world and the urban poverty of Paul’s addiction therapist jobs, the rural poverty of the icy, depressed Iron Range—Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the brutality and despair surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers’ lives, Catt is led back to the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut.

Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the tensions of unclaimed futures and unchosen circumstances in the age of social media, paralyzing interconnectedness, and the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor.

The Four Spent the Day Together

A self-described failed filmmaker falls obsessively in love with her theorist-husband's colleague: a manifesto for a new kind of feminism and the power of first-person narration. In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers. The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America and away from her husband and far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative. I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world and it's a book you won't put down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.

Zwei Brüder aus Riga machen Karriere: erst in Nazideutschland, dann als Spione der jungen BRD. Die Jüdin Ev ist mal des einen, mal des anderen Geliebte. In der leidenschaftlichen Ménage à trois tun sich moralische Abgründe auf, die zu abenteuerlichen politischen Verwicklungen führen. Chris Kraus erzählt die jüngere Geschichte Deutschlands aus einem aufregend neuen Blickwinkel.

Das kalte Blut

"Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s art produced by high-profile graduate programs that catapulted Los Angeles into the epicenter of the international art world. Probing the programs' own art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus asks how LA art came to be so completely divorced from the city's other realities. Radicalized beyond belief, Video Green does for contemporary art what Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces did for the 20th century, mapping the persistence of peripheral culture."--BOOK JACKET.

Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness

Video Green

Lost properties

Eu Amo Dick

La fabrique des salauds

Sommerfrauen, Winterfrauen

Baiser ou faire des films

Roman

Scherbentanz

Basato su fatti reali, "Figli della furia" è la drammatica storia di due fratelli baltico-tedeschi nel gorgo del XX secolo. Un’epopea d’inganni e tradimenti che partendo da Riga arriva fino a Tel Aviv, passando da Mosca, Berlino, Monaco. Hub e Koja Solm sono inseparabili. Hub, il fratello maggiore, è carismatico ed estroverso. Koja invece vorrebbe una vita da artista, come quella del padre, ma i mutamenti politici e i problemi finanziari gli mettono i bastoni tra le ruote. Così, negli anni Trenta, si fa trascinare dal fratello nel movimento nazionalsocialista, prima in Lettonia poi a Berlino. Entrambi nutrono un amore sconfinato per Ev, la sorella adottiva. E quando vengono alla luce le origini ebraiche della ragazza, Koja, che nel frattempo è diventato tenente delle SS, fa di tutto per salvarla da morte certa. Dopo la guerra, di ritorno dalle carceri sovietiche, Koja è costretto a reinventarsi agente tuttofare per i servizi d’intelligence. E così s’immerge sempre di più nei segreti della nuova Germania. Nemmeno a Ev può dire la verità, ma è con lei che si trasferisce in Israele per aiutarla a esaudire il suo più grande desiderio: farla pagare ai criminali nazisti. "Figli della furia" è il formidabile romanzo che racconta come sono andate davvero le cose alla fine del secondo conflitto mondiale. Nel 1948, mentre s’inasprisce la guerra fredda, Monaco di Baviera è il centro europeo delle operazioni dei servizi segreti occidentali. Lo spionaggio americano non riesce a penetra­re nella sfera d’influenza russa al di là della cortina di ferro. Per questo, con l’obiettivo di disinnescare la minaccia comunista in Europa, ricorre agli agenti che avevano militato nei servizi segreti del Terzo Reich contro i russi, servendosi dell’organizzazione di Reinhard Gehlen, l’agenzia di spionaggio formata da ex componenti della Wehrmacht e delle SS. Quando nel 1956 nasce ufficialmente il servizio segreto tedesco, il tentativo della CIA di orien­tare la nomina del capo dell’organizzazione sull’ex generale nazista Gehlen viene accolto da una forte resistenza da parte dei vertici dello Stato. Tale conflitto fornisce al romanzo il suo arco di tensione naturale e il terreno su cui si muovono i suoi personaggi principali. Con questo romanzo Chris Kraus si dimostra un grande narratore, capace di portare i lettori tra le macerie del regime nazista.

Figli della furia

Filmmaker sperimentale di trentanove anni, Chris è sposata con Sylvère, docente universitario di cinquantasei anni. Appassionata d’arte di cattiva qualità, che secondo lei rende molto piú attivo chi la osserva, Chris, diversamente da Sylvère, non si esprime in un linguaggio teorico. È abituata perciò ad attenersi a un perfetto silenzio quando Sylvère si avventura nei suoi discorsi sulla teoria critica postmoderna. Non facendo piú sesso, i due però non evitano affatto di parlare. Praticano anzi una rigorosa «decostruzione» a modo loro. In altre parole, si raccontano tutto. Dopo aver trascorso l’intero anno sabbatico di Sylvère in un cottage sperduto tra le montagne a un’ora e mezza da Los Angeles, una sera i due cenano in un sushi bar di Pasadena con Dick, critico culturale inglese e buon conoscente di Sylvère. Durante la cena, mentre i due uomini discettano sulle ultime tendenze del postmoderno, Chris si accorge che Dick cerca di continuo il suo sguardo, e non può fare a meno di sentirsi eccitata da quell’inaspettata attenzione. Eccitazione che si accresce quando, dopo aver raggiunto casa di Dick nel deserto di Antelope Valley, per trascorrervi la notte ed evitare cosí di avventurarsi sulle strade innevate, Chris si rende conto che l’inglese flirta apertamente con lei. Lo sogna perciò tutta la notte. Ma la mattina dopo, quando si sveglia sul divano letto offerto dal loro generoso ospite, Dick non c’è piú. Quella scomparsa le sembra il perfetto compimento di un’intensa storia non vissuta, anzi, come confessa a Sylvère, di una «Scopata Concettuale ». Una volta tornati nel cottage, Sylvère – per un gioco perverso o forse perché per la prima volta dall’estate scorsa Chris gli appare animata e viva – le suggerisce di scrivere a Dick e di esprimergli i suoi sentimenti. Pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1997 e tornato prepotentemente a far parlare di sé, I love Dick è un romanzo di culto considerato «uno dei piú importanti libri femministi degli ultimi due decenni» (Observer) oltre che «un formidabile romanzo di idee» (New Statesman). «Questo è il libro piú importante sugli uomini e sulle donne che l’ultimo secolo ci ha lasciato». Guardian «I Love Dick è uno dei più importanti libri mai scritti sull’essere donna». Observer Magazine «Uno dei piú esplosivi, rivelatori, laceranti e insoliti memoir mai portati sulla pagina». Rick Moody «Per anni, prima di leggerlo, ho continuato a sentir parlare di I love Dick. Sono in ritardo di due decenni, ma ho capito subito di avere tra le mani un testo incandescente». Leslie Jamison, New Yorker

Chris Kraus

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