Hedi El Kholti

RM

While organizing my notes yesterday, I accidentally stumbled upon the realization it was Hervé Guibert’s birthday—he would have turned 67 this year. In the spirit of that realization, I thought we might start by talking about him a bit, if that’s alright? Specifically, I’m interested in talking about what inspired you to revisit his work through Semiotext(e) in such a deep manner over the past several years—part of me wants to describe it as an archival project, but also that term seems to lack a certain sense of charm or sincerity. Obviously, and perhaps most notably, Semiotext(e) republished his magnum opus To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life in 2020. You also concurrently published a collection of his short stories in English under the title Written in Invisible Ink. Both of those books are very important to me. That said, I almost find the secondary works that you’ve published since then to be even more fascinating, in a certain way—I’m thinking here of Letters to Eugène, of course, which collects a decade’s worth of correspondences between Guibert and Eugène Savitzkaya, but also Hervelino by Mathieu Lindon, which charts the deep friendship and intellectual intimacy that flourished between Lindon and Guibert over the final years of Guibert’s life. Instead of simply striving to make Guibert more available English-speaking audience—a worthwhile pursuit within itself—it feels to me as if you are engaged in this larger practice of apprehending a specific lost moment in time, or of capturing the ambiance that permeated this very particular slice of romantic and intellectual companionships. Correct me if this feels off the mark, but it’s almost as if Guibert primarily functions as a cultural entry point into the actual topic at hand, which has to do with this complex web of intimacies and ways of living that feel both deeply resonant and curiously alien to our contemporary American context, in some sense. How did your interest in working with Guibert’s legacy develop? Did these various works and threads accrue organically throughout the process of working on Written in Invisible Ink, or did you know from the outset that you were interested in producing a larger mosaic of works orbiting Guibert’s legacy?

HEK

When I became an editor at Semiotext(e), my focus was to bring more French literature to the press. Of course, Semiotext(e)’s interest in French literature precedes me. Sylvère had already published Pierre Guyotat in Polysexuality, for instance, and Guy Hocquenghem in Schizo Culture. When I came to LA thirty years ago, I continued reading the French magazines I was reading in Paris, like Le Magazine Littéraire or Les Inrockuptibles. I remember when Guibert’s Mausoleum of Lovers came out in France and how there was a renewed interest in his work. And I kind of put aside the idea of doing something like that with Guibert’s work in English through Semiotext(e). I wasn’t really aware of Guibert until his TV appearances—especially the one on Apostrophes in 1990, the famous one he made right when To the Friend became a best-seller. Guibert was an entry point for me into a certain kind of "transgressive" literature in that moment. I mean, I was already aware of Jean Genet and all of that, but Guibert bridged that type of literature for me in a much more direct way to the present. This was when I was still living in Paris, in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Until To the Friend came out, I was more likely to be reading books like Less Than Zero than something like Guibert's Crazy for Vincent—so that cultural moment strongly shifted my literary interests.

Christine Pichini, who works for us as a translator—I mean, I actually don’t know what the best word for describing Christine’s relationship to Semiotext(e) would be. She is a companion, perhaps, in the French sense of the word—someone who journeys with you. Christine had translated Crazy for Vincent by Guibert and Bruce Hainley was going to publish parts for some curatorial project, I think. When Bruce told me, I was like, “that's amazing—can we publish it?” We ended up publishing Christine’s translation, and then Bruce wrote the introduction. That project is theirs, we just happened to publish it. Letters to Eugène was a similar story. Christine started translating Guibert’s correspondences with Eugène Savitzkaya on her own, and then she asked if we wanted to publish it. And then Jeffrey Zuckerman, who translated and edited the story collection Written in Invisible Ink, basically brought the project to me fully finished. I might have added one or two stories. If I’d done my own version of that book, there are certain stories I might have chosen to include instead, but I didn’t make any changes to Jeffrey’s collection. So that book is really Jeffrey’s project. We try to create a space for people to realize projects that are dear to them, so long as they fit within our general interests. Of course, that only applies to the books I bring to the press. Chris and I collaborate, but she also has her own projects. I’m more or less completely responsible for bringing new French literary projects in.

RM

That makes perfect sense. The idea of moving with and through these various companions’ desires is fascinating. Forgive me if this is a bit of a detour, but I just reread Robert Glück’s novel Jack the Modernist a month or two ago, and there was a certain passage that I’ve been caught up on that feels resonant here. Glück, or Glück’s narrator, essentially makes the case for gossip as a distinct literary form. He attempts to revalorize it as a form of storytelling—one which is perhaps particularly valuable in the context of our current moment, in which there has been a collective loss of faith in the idea of master narratives for making sense of the world. Gossip communicates a complete, self-contained narrative, but it is only capable of doing so within the particular confines of a certain friend group or subset of people who share a certain unspoken sensibility towards the world—people who can pick up on the particular significance and subtext of the gossip, in other words. If you have to backtrack and explain why the gossip matters, or why it constitutes a story, you’ve already emptied it of its salacious quality, or of its primary social purpose. Over-explanation debases gossip—it reveals the gossip to be merely an inconsequential and mundane exchange between people who don’t particularly matter. You can’t really explain why a certain piece of gossip matters, or why it qualifies as a story. You either already get it or you probably never will.

But now I’m getting off track. To maybe try to reconnect these two threads, I found myself thinking a lot about gossip, or about this type of unspoken intimacy, while reading Hervelino. For instance, Lindon spends the first couple pages basically just describing different restaurants he and Guibert frequented while living in Rome—this one because it was chic, that one because it’s the only spot within walking distance that is open on Sundays, and on and on. On face value, there’s absolutely nothing interesting about this, at least not from a reader’s perspective. None of the restaurants are particularly remarkable; many of them probably don’t exist anymore; I, as a reader, will almost certainly never go to any of them; they’re pretty much all just variations on Roman-style pasta spots, which is a rather ubiquitous and mundane style of cuisine for most people; and so on. But the point isn’t about the details of the restaurants, or even the details of Lindon and Guibert’s particular reasons for frequenting each one. Rather, Lindon seems to be relaying this incredibly touching, almost overwhelmingly intense sense of intimacy that comes out of the disclosure of what are ostensibly boring details of a shared life—the point is that Lindon and Guibert shared them together, that these restaurants became a space for them to explore and define the contours of their friendship and intellectual companionship. I have no connection to those restaurants, but, as a reader, I can connect the depth of their love for one another to the particularities of my own unspoken rituals and habits I’ve developed with certain friends and loved ones. You feel the intimacy, but only as a type of social function—the details are not important within themselves.

HEK

I think that within the group of people I work with and publish books for, there’s a shared interest in a very specific type of cultural history. I’m talking about the “first layer” of accomplices. If there’s a book that comes out through Semiotext(e), I’m going to send manuscripts or galleys to Bruce, Christine, Wayne Koestenbaum, Noura Wedell, Janique Vigier, Gary Indiana, because I’m curious to know what they think. There’s an intimate cultural exchange that travels both ways. We have a shared interest in Minuit and the nouveau roman, for instance. Guibert was first published in Minuit; Tony Duvert was the editor of the monthly or bi-monthly journal attached to the press; Mathieu Lindon became the second editor after Duvert left and he published Eugène Savitzkaya and Guibert. These friendships and cultural histories might seem minor to some people, but they’re deeply interesting to me and my friends.

And anyway, what is a minor book? I love that book Letters From Egypt, for instance, which is comprised of letters that Guibert wrote while he was in Egypt to various people but never sent. He was in Egypt with Hans Georg Berger, who took all of these beautiful photos, and they compiled the photos and letters into a book. It’s a very small book, maybe 15,000 or 20,000 words in total, and it is such a beautiful project. The letters, the style—it’s all an exercise, on some level, on how to be a traveler. It is absolutely beautiful travel writing—it’s as moving as it is "minor." There’s obviously To the Friend and this other handful of major books from Guibert, but then what do you do with all of the other little ones? I find them to be so pleasurable.

And this connects to another Mathieu Lindon books, Learning What Love Means. I read that when it came out and absolutely loved it, so I commissioned a translation. It’s a book about friendship—it could have been called To the Friend who Saved My Life. It’s about the friendship Lindon developed with Michel Foucault, but he also reflects upon his difficult relationship with his father. There are all these beautiful anecdotes about small details from Lindon’s life, such as growing up with Samuel Beckett as a close family friend—Jérôme Lindon, Mathieu’s father and Beckett's publisher, was the one who went and picked up Beckett’s Nobel Prize on his behalf. All of these little details weave together to create a much larger portrait. It’s the same thing with Hervelino, of course. I think it’s interesting to have this portrait of Guibert and his friendship with Lindon, which exists in the background of Learning What Love Means. That book is ostensibly about Foucault, but it’s equally about Guibert in a way, and how they met for the first time at Foucault’s apartment—you could say it’s actually the story of that apartment. Lindon would often housesit at Foucault’s apartment while he was away at Berkeley, or other parts of America. You begin to understand Lindon and Guibert’s friendship through all of these little juvenile adventures they undertook in the apartment while Foucault was away. It’s very, very charming.

AIDS also figures in Learning What Love Means. Lindon survived it, but he had to experience his two closest friends, Foucault and Guibert, die. I read that book for the second time after my partner of twenty years died of cancer—it took a tremendously long time to translate, and we had just gotten around to publishing the English edition around the time that he passed. Rereading Learning What Love Means allowed me to retrospectively understand so much about my own relationship to my partner, who was twenty-two years older than me. All of these interconnections are very personal. It’s the same with Hervelino. I’m dating a writer now who is often seen as very serious, but can be very funny privately. I see pieces of that in Hervelino. That book depicts Guibert publicly facing what was basically a death sentence, but it also manages to be very charming and personal. So much of that book is just an account of these little silly adventures Lindon and Guibert had while in Rome. Maybe it’s because of the photographs taken of him during his life, but Guibert has the aura of a beautiful, angelic figure.

RM

He’s kind of the walking definition of “cherub-like,” physically speaking at least.

HEK

Exactly. Hervelino is an amazing portrait of Guibert. I like to imagine that it’s very similar to what he must have been like as a person. To me, these books are interesting, they're manuals in a way—manuals for writing about friendship. Lindon has another book that I want to publish eventually called A Pornographic Life, which is almost a sequel to Learning What Love Means. It takes place in the years after Guibert and Foucault died, and largely recounts the main character’s heroin addiction. It’s a PTSD survival novel of sorts. It’s really incredible. I’ve never read a book that addresses addiction in that way, or that provides such a funny and ordinary account of someone’s relationship to drugs and the sociality that drugs create. But first I want to publish the book that Lindon just wrote, An Archive, which is about his father and the history of Minuit. I feel that it forms a perfect trilogy with Learning What Love Means and Hervelino, and while reading it I started to get a sense of Lindon's stylistic prowess, how he's able to mimic the way one remembers, through digressions, accretions, in circular motions sometimes, but while writing it all in a very casual way. Lindon's books are heartbreakingly beautiful.

RM

It’s a question of form, right? It’s interesting to hear you bring up the nouveau roman and the history surrounding Minuit, because I found myself repeatedly returning to that slice of literary history in preparation for this conversation. I’ve been thinking a lot about the guiding formal impulses behind the nouveau roman, and particularly this style writing which seeks to describe a moment in time, or a feeling, or a concept, by talking around an object or event. Rather than relying upon character or plot in order to push a narrative forward, the nouveau roman assembles all of these little fragments and details and anecdotes surrounding a single object or concept and, through a sort of careful assemblage, produces a type of kaleidoscopic framework through which the narrative arc is felt more so than described.

HEK

Yes, definitely.

RM

That type of kaleidoscopic approach to form has always struck me as being integral to Semiotext(e)’s overall sensibility. I often see it, for instance, in the press’s strong commitment to conversationality. Many of the books in your list consist either primarily of, or at least heavily feature, extended dialogues and interviews—there are the correspondences of famous theorists like Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze and the tome-like oral histories of artists like David Wojnarowicz, of course, but also these appended afterwords you’ve added to books like Derek McCormack’s Castle Faggot, which features an extended conversation about the book between Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley.

Perhaps to connect it back to Guibert and Lindon a little more explicitly, there is this sort of charming intimacy that gets played out through the act of sequential conversation between texts—there is a certain interplay between different temporal and spatial accounts of a single unifying moment in cultural history, or of a single friendship. The reader does not merely experience To the Friend as a hermetic object of literary history. Rather, the reader gets Guibert’s particular account of mourning Foucault, as well as his personal experience with encountering mortality through his own AIDS diagnosis. This then leads the reader to Learning What Love Means, which provides a secondary perspective on the same small milieu of intimacies and grievances from Lindon’s perspective. Then, with Hervelino, we apprehend the same dynamic from a third angle—it is still Lindon’s perspective, and it still concerns the same slice of time, since much of that book recounts the same stories that appear in To the Friend, yet we are now able to witness how the passage of several decades has further inflected the tapestry of their friendship. In reading these books sequentially, one arrives at a certain argument for the extended conversation as a distinct type of literary form within itself.

HEK

It’s a constellation. The texts reflect off one another, excavating a certain moment in French letters that I find very interesting. Jérôme Lindon and Alain Robbe-Grillet's collaboration editing Minuit is a beautiful fruitful collaboration. And their discovery of Beckett afforded them complete financial freedom, since Beckett—as I learned reading Mathieu Lindon's book—gave Minuit the publishing rights of his books, and kept only the theatrical rights. Plus, they worked with all of these other fascinating authors, like Duras, Deleuze and Guattari, Bourdieu, and so on. Jérôme Lindon published Guibert up until To the Friend, which he did not want to publish—and Mathieu Lindon writes about this a bit in Learning What Love Means. I imagine he didn’t want to publish To the Friend because Guibert discloses the cause of Foucault’s death. Because, at the time, the revelation that Foucault died of AIDS was a huge scandal …

RM

The book had a very culturally loaded background context—one might misread it as a type of cheap betrayal on Guibert’s part, done for the purpose of cashing in on a salacious bit of gossip.

HEK

Yes, exactly. I found it upsetting that To the Friend was out of print in America.

RM

Yeah, I found that surprising, to be honest. I know Guibert isn’t perhaps on the same level in America as, say, Jean Genet or Arthur Rimbaud, but he’s quite an influential figure in French literature, and To the Friend is undeniably his landmark work.

HEK

When we were working on Written in Invisible Ink, I realized that would be the perfect time to republish To the Friend. And my interest in Guillaume Dustan comes through the same lineage. Of course, Dustan is post-Guibert. He wrote about Guibert, but he wanted to do something different, grounded in reality, and inspired by Marguerite Duras, especially the era when she was a “bad writer,” when she didn’t care anymore—the Practicalities era, which spans the last years of her writing. I feel like all these French writers absorbed something from the nouveau roman—they all employ that elliptical kind of writing. It’s very unsentimental and suspended. I mean, yes, there are some moments where an epiphany occurs while reading them, but it is never underlined by the prose. Have you read Love Me Tender, the Constance Debré book?

RM

I haven’t, but I’ve been meaning to—Gracie Hadland just published that wonderful review about it in the LA Review of Books, which piqued my interest in Debré’s work.

HEK

When it came out in France, I made a mental note to order it and read it, but then the pandemic happened and I kind of forgot about it. But Constance wrote this incredible piece on Dustan, and I believe also something about Guibert, which brought me back to her work. Constance used to be a defense attorney… Dustan was a judge. I remember being struck by this whole notion of her connecting with his work through the context of the law.

RM

I feel like one of the underlying threads that connects all these writers, but which we have yet to directly address, is their homosexuality, or their queerness. I don’t point this out for identitarian reasons, as if to say they should be read solely in terms of how their sexual biographies inform the subject matter they choose to write about—rather, sexuality seems to play an integral role in each of Guibert, Lindon, Dustan, and Debré’s work on the level of form itself. In a sense, sexuality has always been a major thread within Semiotext(e)’s list, from its early days as a para-academic journal onwards. Obviously, the Polysexuality issue is the landmark moment where sexuality first comes to the fore in a prominent way. At the same time, this fascination with unsentimental, conceptual, and, at times, aesthetically challenging depictions of sexual desires and sexual cultures seems to persist throughout each consecutive iteration of the press. There’s Dustan, whose novels attempted to revalorize the image of a certain type of pro-drug, pro-promiscuity gay lifestyle during the height of post-AIDS-antiretrovirals assimilation; Tony Duvert, whose protagonists openly explore pederasty and pedophilia; Derek McCormack’s Castle Faggot, which riffs upon the idea of a gay Disneyland built out of shit and the dead bodies of suicided gay men; Guibert, whose writing in To the Friend performs an almost 180-degree inversion of the mainstream American AIDS-novel, trading in moral outrage and political indignation for a type of “woe is me” obsession with his own misery and pettiness towards his loved ones; and on and on. In each case, these are works that engage with sexuality, yet they refuse to dwell in naked moralism or sentimentality—they don’t attempt to link sexuality to a larger political or moral cause. In that way, they seem to fly in the face of how sexuality is often taken up in contemporary American political and cultural discourses. At the same time, it feels incorrect to call any of these books “gay novels,” or to call Semiotext(e) a “gay press”—or at least in the sense that those terms have been openly taken up and embraced by other novelists and presses.

HEK

I think all those books are about freedom. They’re about writing life. They are aesthetic experiences, about literature and the experience of desire. What even constitutes mainstream queer literature now?

RM

I would probably place Garth Greenwell and Ocean Vuong in that cannon. That school of writing, if it is fair to call it a school, seems to take an internal identification with queerness—and I think the use of “queerness” here, as opposed to “gayness” or “homosexuality” or “sodomy,” is probably important on an operative level—or some sort of conception of queerness as a non-negotiable, partially defining fact of one’s internal experience, as a driving force around which one can construct a larger narrative arc. That’s certainly not the case with, say—

HEK

Dustan?

RM

Yes, Dustan for sure. But even someone like Derek McCormack—who is, at least out of the names I just listed, the most interested in openly centering “homosexuality” as a plot device—doesn’t seem to ascribe homosexuality with any inherent internal essence or narrative value within itself.Sexual desire seems to function in these works as a formal device, not a narrative device—it’s an operative shorthand for approaching larger questions of freedom, or of how to exist within a cultural space. Does that seem fair to say?

HEK

Yes, definitely. I was working on the layout of Derek's book, Castle Faggot, at the beginning of the pandemic, and it was the most fucked-up, joyous read. I kept cracking up. I love that book so much. I find it poignant how he distills all of his obsessions with pop culture, French decadent literature, and the sadness of queer American childhood, into this pure poisonous essence. We've been playing whack-a-mole with Amazon to keep it on their site. The book keeps being censored. I think it fucks with their algorithm, showing it alongside Disney castles and children books, which couldn't be more appropriate. The collection of Derek's essays that Pilot Press put out is really amazing. And his tribute to Vivienne Westwood in a recent issue of Artforum was perfection. Castle Faggot is one of these books that keep selling more copies each year, which means that there's a kind of word-of-mouth thing happening. People are discovering it and giving it to their friends. That happens so rarely these days.

For me, what stands out with someone like Dustan is this intense sort of precision used to describe a certain milieu. Take his book Stronger Than Me, for instance, which was the last of the three books of his we published in 2021 as a collected volume. It mostly describes his experiences with S&M sex, but it also recounts his whole sexual trajectory. There’s a scene about the first time he went into a backroom, for instance, and how terrifying that was for him. A lot of that book is about mastering sex as a technique. It’s a really funny and moving piece of literature. When I first read it I was like, “Well, that’s certainly not the sort of queer person I aspire to be.” But it’s really fascinating how anthropologically precise those books are about that period. That period starts with AIDS, with a death sentence. And then the middle book, I’m Going Out Tonight, takes place chronologically after Stronger Than Me, in an era where treatment therapies exist. Dustan’s character has a conversation about a friend at the club who seems to have come back from the brink of death, who’s now all of the sudden healthy again. There’s this very precise level of detail exercised to describe certain historical moment, which spans from death to a kind of new hope. I find that really fascinating. Did you read that essay by Lili Owen Rowlands on Dustan that came out recently in the London Review of Books?

RM

No, I haven’t—I wasn’t aware there was one.

HEK

It’s really amazing. Everything in it is like, exactly right. It dispels a lot of half-truths surrounding his legacy, parsing very carefully the many problems he had with ACT UP France, which are well documented. When I decided to publish Dustan, all of his books were out of print. Tristan Garcia had written that book—

RM

Hate, right?

HEK

Yes, Hate: A Love Story. One of the main characters in that book is modeled largely after Dustan.

RM

Garcia’s character is way more of a Rimbaudian bad boy than the real Dustan though.

HEK

Yes, definitely. Dustan was the first in his class, the youngest person to enter the Ecole nationale d’administration, which is the highest school you can attend in France if you’re studying to become a judge. And he became one at the age of 23 or 24. But in Hate: A Love Story—and I know it’s a novel, and that details are fictionalized—Garcia makes him so much more, I don’t know…

RM

Degenerate?

HEK

Exactly—he’s not a thinker. Garcia makes him into a cartoon who’s into barebacking, but it's superficial, almost as a plot device—barebacking becomes his sole point of contention with ACT UP. Condoms do operate as a character of sorts in Dustan’s novels, but never in that sense. That London Review of Books piece is very clear on setting the record straight about that. All Dustan said, essentially, was that sometimes people who are HIV positive have unprotected sex with one another. That’s just him reporting on the life of the community he was a part of. It’s true that that was happening, but he certainly wasn’t an apologist for unprotected sex. He makes that distinction quite clear in his books.

RM

I want to return to something you said a second ago, which is that, while you find immense value in Dustan’s ability to anthropologically render a certain slice of gay social life, you don’t necessarily find Dustan’s particular iteration of queerness to be aspirational for you on an individual level. When you said that, it reminded me of a tidbit I picked up on while I was researching for this interview. Earlier this week, I was relistening to the podcast episode you recorded with McKenzie Wark as part of her publisher-as-artist interview series for MOSTYN Gallery. During the interview, you mention in passing that you came to Los Angeles, in part, to live as an out gay man. I was hoping you could maybe expand upon what you meant by that? I’ve been thinking a lot about how certain geographies and cultural moments either enable or obfuscate the possibility of articulating certain desires, or of articulating certain ways of living in relation to one’s sexuality. This was on my mind, in part, because I moved to New York earlier this year—among more pressing concerns, of course—partially because it felt untenable for me to live as a gay man in Los Angeles, or at least in a way that corresponded with my particular aspirations and desires. I’m still not sure whether this is a matter of age, or sensibility, or something else entirely. At any rate, I found it interesting to hear that you had almost the exact inverse experience with LA during the ’90s.

HEK

What do you mean by untenable?

RM

I just felt psychologically fragmented, if that makes sense. I mean, there are obviously a lot of gay people in LA. There’s the whole West Hollywood, quasi-Peter Pan syndrome, assimilated party scene, of course, which never personally appealed to me. There is definitely a Downtown rave scene that exists too, which is perhaps a little bit closer to the type of world Dustan describes in his books. But I always felt as if gay social life was cleaved off from the larger world of art and culture happening in LA, or at least it is right now—many people inhabit both spaces, of course, but it felt as if openings and shows and bars were a space for desexualized socializing, or for observing intensely straight socializing, and then clubs and raves were these spaces where you could engage with others in an explicitly “gay” manner. I suppose some part of that code-switching is inherent wherever you are. I don’t know if it’s a matter of geographic distance, or of isolation between social worlds and spaces, but it just never felt as if these various pieces were able to coalesce for me in a singular locale, or with any sort of enjoyable fluidity or continuity. The type of aesthetic and psychological discontinuity that LA impresses upon you felt out of line with my interests in, or attachments to, homosexuality, I suppose. I don’t know if that makes much sense or not.

HEK

No, it does. And you don’t think it’s the same in New York?

RM

I mean, I’ve only lived here for a couple months, so I might be totally wrong in my estimation of the city. Cultural spaces just feel more condensed here. They feel like they are, at least somewhat, open-ended public goods, in a way that they didn’t in LA, for me at least—everything out there felt much more privatized, or as if it was explicitly catering to an a priori notion of who and what it had been built to serve. I think the fact that this sense of cultural mutability or possibility is baked into spaces from the ground floor up in New York allows for a less rigid sense of code-switching—I’ve found that you aren’t exposed to the same level of psychological whiplash and isolation.

HEK

For me it was a bit different. I grew up in Morocco, where being gay is basically criminal. There were no gay people, essentially. I mean, there were maybe a couple that I knew of—a few older people, including a friend of my mom’s who was a painter and who tried to commit suicide. But there was no one to talk to. Or it felt like that, at least. I moved to Paris when I was 19, along with a lot of my friends from back home. So, even in France, I was still living in this little bubble of people from Morocco who had moved to Paris. It wasn’t until I moved to LA that I found the space to think about things outside of that community. I've been working on the Sean DeLear teenage diaries from 1979 that we're publishing in May, and I am really astonished by Sean's complete lack of shame. He grew up in Simi Valley, a very conservative Los Angeles suburb, and yet, there's all the atmosphere of the ’70s, the gay porn magazines he steals or buys at the liquor store, the disco records, all the permissiveness in the culture… that obviously did not exist where I grew up. I wonder what sort of experiences I would have had if I hadn't had so much repression growing up. Also, I’ve only lived my homosexuality in English. Or, I’ve only lived my sex life in English—I mean, I’ve only lived my gay sex life in English. So, this is also an issue of language.

RM

Right. How has language augment your relationship to homosexuality?

HEK

I just don’t have the same type of connection to English. An insult like “faggot,” for instance, doesn’t mean as much to me because it’s happening in a different language. Didier Eribon writes about this in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. He talks about how language is what gives you an identity. There was just something slightly less proscribing about hearing these words spoken to you in a different language. It almost felt like I was in a movie.

RM

I want to follow the Morocco thread a bit deeper. You recently wrote a piece for This Long Century, which loosely assembles a series of personal anecdotes pertaining to Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. There’s this really evocative scene where you describe the state of Morocco during your late teens, which is when you first encountered the sounds of post-punk. You paint quite a vivid picture of the sights and sounds you were inundated with at the same, only to finish by saying that none of it belongs to you. Do you feel at home in Los Angeles, or as if there is a sense of belonging for you there? Does a sense of home, or belonging, feel pertinent to your life and work?

HEK

I really don’t know. I feel like I’ve made a home for myself in culture, from an early age. Not in an intellectual sense, or through school, but just through a type of self-taught fascination with fragments of information. One thing leads to another, you follow threads in a very associative manner. There’s something naïve about it sometimes. I have a bit of a strange trajectory. Even now, as an editor at a press that has a certain kind of legacy surrounding it, it would be easy for me to feel like a complete imposter, but I’ve made it work. I had the luck of meeting Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer, who sort of irresponsibly put me in charge of things and always said yes to the projects I wanted to do.

My home, if I have one, is my experience with culture. My home is watching Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun when it first came out, or discovering Genet through Fassbinder—it’s digging through all of these books and movies and becoming obsessed with them. I can take that anywhere with me, you know? LA is such a different city now than when I first moved here. It’s kind of heartbreaking. When I talk to my friend Dodie Bellamy, she’ll say the same thing about San Francisco. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore has written similar stories about Seattle in The Freezer Door. When I read Gary Indiana writing about New York in Do Everything in the Dark, I think about how much LA has changed, even though it’s a book about New York. But, for the time being, LA is where I live.

RM

This tension between uprootedness and belonging feels somewhat integral to Semiotext(e)’s history. The press has always seemed to operate within the absence of a clearly defined center—I can’t remember if it was you or Chris who said this in your recent conversation about Sylvere in Artforum, but the term “a collective that doesn’t exist” came up, which I think perfectly describes the ethos of Semiotext(e) as a publishing project. For instance, the press has been based out of LA for almost three decades now, which is where you entered the picture, and yet also feels so inextricably bound up with this certain fantasy for a moment in New York which no longer exists, and yet also is so distinctly linked to this history of interplay between the American art world and French theory and letters. There are these multiple intertwining threads, each of which ties Semiotext(e) inextricably to a certain temporally and geographically defined cultural lineage, and yet each of which also seems to fail to accurately describe the actual sensibility, or spiritual core, of the press itself. Perhaps this dovetails with what you were just saying about LA, but I always found it interesting that, on the one hand, this concept of “the American underground” or “American avant-garde” feels so essential to Semiotext(e)’s aesthetic orientation, and yet, on the other, all three of you, Chris, and Sylvère either grew up abroad, in the case of you and Sylvère, or otherwise spent a significant part of your childhood outside of the States, in Chris’ case. Would it be fair to describe Semiotext(e) as being, in part, an attempt to create a new sense of home through culture?

HEK

I think I might have lost the real question you were trying to ask somewhere in there.

RM

Sorry, I think I rambled and accidentally threw a couple different questions at you [laughs.]. What I’m trying to drive at is this idea of melancholia—specifically as an identification with and through a figure or cultural moment that has been irrevocably lost to the past, or which perhaps never really existed the way you imagine it to. This could be either an untimely death, as in the case of some of the writers you’ve posthumously engaged with like David Wojnarowicz and Cookie Mueller, or it can be these sorts of intensely mythologized but ultimately ephemeral events like the Schizo-Culture Conference or Jean Baudrillard reading in Las Vegas. Does melancholia, or this sense of interfacing with moments of lost time, inform your work as an editor?

HEK

It’s not exactly a nostalgic thing, you know? I mean, Chris engaged with Cookie Mueller while she was still alive to conceptualize the original collection. When I edited the new collection I was hoping that reviewers would consider the brilliance of Mueller 's writing and place her alongside Eve Babitz. It was a trip to see the book reviewed in places like the New Yorker and the NYRB.

Sylvere's in depth, lengthy video interview of David Wojnarowicz, facilitated and shot by Marion Scemama, which became the basis of our book, David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side, theoretically could have come out in the ’90s. So, even though it might look like it’s dedicated to certain period of time, that isn’t necessarily the intent, you know? Shortly after Wojnarowicz's death, Sylvere conducted interviews with most of his collaborators, to attempt an oral history whose aim was to document an artistic milieu as well as the individual artists who participated in it, before it gets mythologized. My interest in these things has nothing to do with this sentiment of like, “Wow, what an amazing moment that was.” There’s probably something equally interesting that's happening somewhere else right now that I’m not aware of. I’m also 55, so I’m operating from the perspective of someone who came of age in that period between the ’60s, with all of its revolutionary energy, and the New World Order of the ’80s. I saw all of those transitions happen, so yes, in a sense it’s interesting to me insofar as I remember certain things and events. This is why Ian Penman's book about Fassbinder, which is coming out in May, resonated so much with me, with its mix of personal history, and cultural history, grounded in that particular moment.

But how does that connect to LA? I’m not always able to articulate my life in terms of a continuous narrative. I can only really see it in terms of moving from one job to the next, from one book to the next, from one experience to the next. There’s not really a clean narrative there. I worked for a couple publishers, and then I met Sylvère when I was at ArtCenter, and then I started working at Semiotext(e). Little by little, they started giving me more responsibilities. When I started, we had zero money in the account—we were doing maybe one or two books a year. And then, little by little, it was relaunched—two books became five books, and then ten books, and then fourteen books a year.

There’s also this question of how books like that function in the present. When I read Gary Indiana's Vile Days, for instance, which we put out right around when Trump got elected, I was initially just struck by how it was essentially a manual for how to write a great review. The Village Voice gave Gary a platform to say what he wanted to say, and the resulting book is a laboratory for all of these strategies for how to write. It’s so attentive, and rereading it today you’re kind of stunned by the fact that Gary was, well, basically right about everything.

RM

I love that book. I actually think that the relatively unedited aspect of it is part of its charm. You kind of get to see Gary’s emotional trajectory go through all of these different peaks and valleys over the course of a couple years in real time, which I find fascinating. There will be a stretch of pretty serious and concisely written single-show reviews, and then a couple weeks of him basically shitting on New York art-scene social politics, and then he seems to give up for a second and produces three or four reviews in a row that are just lists of quotes from like, Edward Said and Marx and Oscar Wilde that he's been into, thrown together as a loose collage. As a reader, there’s a certain joy and fascination in watching him figure out his contentious relationship to working as a critic in real time.

Perhaps to tie several threads together and move us towards some sort of end point, I thought we could talk a bit about intentional amateurism. Semiotext(e) has never really professionalized, or at least not to the same extent that pretty much every other legacy press of similar stature has at one point or another. Everything is kept very close and in-house, as you’ve pointed to several times throughout this conversation. Correct me if I’m misattributing this, but I believe in that same interview with McKenzie, you describe Sylvère’s approach to publishing theory as a type of “theory-brut.” There’s a certain intentionally deprofessionalized streak that seems to course through the press’s history, or a certain receptive tolerance for some level of messiness, sense of wonder, or self-deprecating good humor. It’s always somewhat surprised me to hear certain people characterize Semiotext(e) as if it were this like, very capital-S Serious critical theory project—obviously theory constitutes a major part of the press’s list, but aloofness and self-seriousness have always struck me as being clearly antithetical to the spirit of Semiotext(e). If anything, to me Semiotext(e) has always seemed to shun the type of navel-gazing, power-grubby stuffiness of theory-for-theory’s-sake that constitutes so much of contemporary intellectualism and academic culture. Do you ever feel as if there’s any sort of disconnect with the approach you take to editorial work at Semiotext(e) and the way the press gets disseminated into a broader intellectual culture? If so, does this disconnect shift the way you conceptually approach publishing in any way?

HEK

What do you mean? Like, how the books are received?

RM

Yeah. I guess I’m thinking mostly in terms of social media and digital culture. The press seems to have experienced a bit of a rebirth in online public consciousness as this sort of shorthand signifier for intellectual rigor, if that makes sense? I’m thinking, for instance, of something like I Love Dick. That book cover seems to show up all over the place as a type of aspirational signifier for what it feels like to be a self-proclaimed damaged-yet-serious twenty-something today—it’s seemed to have had a second life as a flippantly circulated image, which sits somewhat at odds with the spirit of the book itself.

HEK

I’m not particularly invested in how people receive the books, at least in that capacity. Chris and I, and everyone else that works with us, are very invested in the projects we put out. It’s a hassle to make these books, you know? We don’t have a lot of means at our disposal. It’s extremely hard to operate as an independent press these days. That’s why the demise of Bookforum felt so terrible. The first thing I read when I woke up that day was that Bookforum was folding, and I ended up tweeting something stupid on Semiotext(e)’s Twitter account because in my head I was just like, “fuck that.” Take Boyd McDonald’s Cruising the Movies, for instance. It’s this really amazing book of film criticism. It’s funny, and McDonald is an incredible writer. But it’s not going to be reviewed anywhere—except Bookforum, where Melissa Anderson wrote this great piece about it. I guess now that sort of review could happen in 4Columns, but it’s not going to happen in the New York Review of Books or anywhere like that. When we publish a book, I have a very serious investment in it—it’s the same with Chris and the books she brings in. It was the same story with Sylvère—the books he championed were very important to him.

Take the Dustan book, for instance. I’m thrilled that there was one piece that took that book seriously, or that understood how it operates and why it is serious literature. But I never doubted that it was an important book. Sometimes it takes twenty years for people to take certain books seriously. That was the case with Shulamith Firestone—how long did that take? It took a piece in the New Yorker after she died for people to come around to her book Airless Spaces. It took Chris what, like, fifteen years to “happen” as a writer. I first read an early draft of Torpor, before I read I Love Dick, and I was struck by how amazing it was. I never doubted that any of those books were significant pieces of literature.

Really, I think the NYRB should have republished Boyd McDonald as part of their Classics series. It was out of print, after all.

RM

Right. That book seems like a bit of a shoo-in for their project. They’ve done other works of film criticism too, like Robert Bresson’s essays.

HEK

A lot of these books take so much time. Serge Daney’s The Cinema House and the World took ten years. We had people lined up who were supposed to translate it but then didn’t, or they started on it and then gave up. Other things started to pile up and that book kind of drifted to the backburner. Eventually, after a decade or so, Christine Pichini translated it. After the translation was done, I reread it, wondering if I would still find it relevant, or if I would still feel the same sort of fascination for it. I was completely blown away once again. A lot of the concerns he had were incredibly relevant to today, even though he was writing in the 1970s. He has a whole piece on Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Black representation, for instance, or another on the function of documentaries in the ’70s and ’80s, all of which still feels exceedingly relevant. Just like Indiana’s book teaches you how to write a review, the Daney book teaches you how to think about movies.

RM

Let’s end with one last question about legacy. Sylvère starts the journal in 1973—

HEK

I think it was ’74.

RM

Oh, right, ’74. So, we’re a few years away from Semiotext(e)’s 50th anniversary. In 1990, Chris comes in with the Native Agents series, and things take a bit of a shift. There is a wavering moment during the late ’90s, which you’ve described, and then you join in the early 2000’s. Where do you see the future of Semiotext(e) headed? Do you ever think about what a next “wave” or moment for the press might look like?

HEK

I really don’t know. I’ve wanted things to slow down a bit for a couple years now, so I could have more time to read and finish some personal projects. We pay translators and editors very well—or, I pay them pretty much the same rate they would expect from any other independent press or university press. Semiotext(e) doesn’t run on a favor model the same way it did when Sylvère was running it, when he would conscript students to help him put publications together. The economics of the entire project have changed. My first place in LA was $400 a month, you know? That doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not the same world as New York was in the ’80s. We do sell books, and the press pays for itself, but it's not enough money to ever consider implementing a bigger structure that could make things easier on me. MIT recently moved to Penguin Random House in 2020, which should tell you something about the state of things [laughs.]. It feels like this whole world is collapsing. A lot of book review outlets have closed. It’s all very precarious right now. Maybe in a couple years we’ll put out less books. It’s also a question of what will add to the overall story of Semiotext(e). Maybe that story will end, I don’t know. It would be fine by me if it ended. I don’t know how its legacy will be preserved after that, which is something I’m also kind of interested in thinking about. How will these books stay in print? It’s really a struggle. Penguin Random House charges a storage fee, which the previous incarnation of MIT didn’t, or maybe MIT absorbed the fees then. So, what do you do with books that don’t sell right away? Everything is so orchestrated now. If it’s a “really important” book it will get reviewed everywhere for a short period of time. What do you do with books like ours, which often take years to find their ultimate audience? I’m really invested in this idea of keeping things in print. I’m still hoping that Learning What Love Means will find more of an audience, for instance. I think it slowly is. But it wasn’t majorly reviewed when it came out. Andrew Durbin wrote a beautiful piece about it for Bomb, and that was about the only major attention it got. It takes time. I’m still waiting for that book to find its way.

Working with a low budget gives us the freedom to publish what we want to publish. We don’t operate the same way as most other presses, which I think has allowed us to make things work for as long as we have. But as far as the future? I don’t know. I’m only ever thinking a season or two ahead. I announced the Fall 2023 season in September, because it takes about a year at this point—the lead time between announcing and publishing is getting longer and longer. I have a sketch for what Spring 2024 will look like, more or less. Maybe something else will come in or get done on time or get translated ahead of that. But beyond that I don’t know. I don’t feel like I have this whole wealth of projects I want to do right now, you know? I mean, there are projects I want to do, but they’re not all necessarily feasible. I'm obsessed with Alain Guiraudie's new book, Rabalaïre. I would love to publish it, but it's a thousand pages long and I'm not sure who would translate it or how we could afford it. We published Now the Night Begins, which took place in the same universe as his movie, Stranger by the Lake, with the same characters but different outcomes. Sadly the book didn't find a readership and was barely reviewed. Guiraudie didn't want us to graphically connect the book to the film, which didn't help. Still, I am hoping that I'll find a way to make it exist in English. Hopefully I can manage to raise the money.