Her work includes the novels I Love Dick, Aliens and Anorexia, and Torpor, which form a loose trilogy that navigates between autobiography, fiction, philosophy, and art criticism.
She met critical theory professor Sylvère Lotringer in 1984 and began collaborating with him on creative projects, including working as co-editor at his independent publishing house Semiotext(e).
Kraus’ subsequent novels have continued to develop this style, employing autobiographical loops,[22] as in Aliens and Anorexia, and combining contemporary life writing with classical third-person prose, as in Torpor.
[21] By equalizing the base and the theoretical and blending theory with an effortless, colloquial style that contrasts with academic conventions,[24] Kraus’ use of autobiography challenges expectations of how a female writer should write.
[25] As Kraus explained in an interview with the Brooklyn Rail, ‘What really fucks with everyone's heads is when women, gay men, combine graphic first-person sex stuff with quote-unquote objective, analytic cultural thought.
There's a deep pity and horror of female sexuality behind this, as if it's this mushy botanical subordinate thing at total variance with the dynamic integrity, the ‘masculinity’ of analytical thought [...] In I Love Dick, I consciously set out to see if I could say ‘cunt’ and ‘Kierkegaard’ in the same sentence.
[33] El Kholti adopted the Native Agent's ethos of refusing to identify with any particular genre, going on to publish writers such as Marie Darrieussecq, Mathieu Lindon, Abdellah Taïa, Michel Leiris, and Hervé Guibert.
[35] The books are printed in a pocket-sized, simple format, featuring manifestos, essays, and critiques from a range of writers specializing in a variety of political and cultural topics, including Maurizio Lazzarato, Jackie Wang,[36] and Paul D. Preciado.
With the book, Kraus introduced her ‘Lonely Girl Phenomenology’[39] as a new genre, embracing insecurities and a fascination with failure[38] as a means to frame the narrator's relentless romantic pursuit as a generative and creative act.
[39] The book quickly gained a cult following among art communities upon its release in 1997 and found mainstream success in 2006, when a new edition introduced by Eileen Myles connected with a new generation of readers.
Joanna Walsh, writing for the Guardian, stated: ‘Without her challenge to what [Kraus] called “the ‘serious’ contemporary hetero-male novel... a thinly veiled Story of Me”, Sheila Heti might never have asked How Should a Person Be?, and Ben Lerner might never have written Leaving the Atocha Station.
[39] John Douglas Miller, in The White Review, described it as ‘clear prose capable of theoretical clarity, descriptive delicacy, articulate rage and melancholic longing’.
[40] It interweaves threads about Simone Weil, Ulrike Meinhof, and Paul Thek with S&M phone chats and her own experiences of failing to find a distributor for her feature film, Gravity & Grace.
[41] Reclaiming the personal ‘I’ as ‘universal and transparent’,[25] Kraus presents her subjects as case studies of sadness, failure, and hope, echoing and projecting her own experiences to address the human condition, creating an autobiographical feedback loop[22] as she documents her struggle to make art from her life.
She travels to Albuquerque to reinvest windfall real-estate gains and reengage with something approximating ‘real life.’ There, she becomes romantically involved with Paul Garcia, a recently sober ex-con who has served sixteen months in state prison for defrauding Halliburton Industries, his former employer.
[51] While the book uses pacing to build tension and release during action scenes, it does not conform to conventional thriller structures such as a straightforward plot, instead blurring memoir and fiction with theoretical discursions.
Wendy Vogel wrote in the Brooklyn Rail: ‘Summer of Hate is commendable for not only taking up the mantle of sexualized female subjectivity, but for its narrative of exploration the real psychic underbelly of the elite art world: the experience of the disenfranchised and the incarcerated, and the limits of a social system that imposes ever greater disparities between classes’.
Kraus approached her subject as a writer and member of the artistic communities from which they both emerged, drawing on extensive archival research, personal interviews and ongoing conversations with mutual friends and acquaintances.
[53] Having known Acker personally and been part of the same circles, including relationships with Sylvère Lotringer at different times, Kraus sought to establish a critical distance from her subject[23] and to write from an objective standpoint.
[56] Olivia Laing noted in her Guardian review that ‘Kraus’ interest in making hidden structures visible made it surprising that in the book itself she didn't acknowledge her relationship to the subject’.
Kraus examines the uses of boredom, poetry, privatized prisons, community art, corporate philanthropy, vertically integrated manufacturing, and discarded utopias, highlighting the enduring role of microcultures within the matrix.
[26] Janine Armin, reviewing for BookForum, wrote ‘Kraus is searingly aware of the discourse in which she functions, and transforms it into something redolent of Simone Weil's poeticism and its daunting theoretical undercurrents’.
[16] The late poet David Rattray reads from his translations of Artaud while the abjectness is literalized[69] in scenes that explore the emotional and intellectual complexity of power exchange and its inherently theatrical nature, sometimes to the point of comedic absurdity.
[22] Midway through, a character depicted by Kraus delivers a monologue about her relationship to sadomasochism[22] while wearing a ridiculously oversized wig, lending a farcical element that offsets the serious nature of the work.
[71] The footage features crime photographer Johnny Santiago giving a tour of New York homicide scenes, and Lotringer interviewing dominatrixes Mademoiselle Victoire and Terence Sellars about sadomasochism.
At one point, Terence, a seasoned dominatrix with control and intimacy issues,[22] states, ‘You have to be sensitive to people in order to be shitty to them’,[69] unwittingly illustrating the duality of logic and emotion.
The repetitiveness and banality of Susie and Joe's concerns with money and their boredom underscored Kraus's commentary on the commodity of sex in society as their interactions were laden with imagery of sexual control.
Flanking her were two tables with four 'panellists' who took turns reading selections from the diary: Daryl Chin on politics, Phil Auslander on theater, Danny Krakauer on being German and shy, and Susie Timmons.
[77] This performance was derived from material gathered by Lotringer during an interview with Dr. Jacques Latrémolière, the assistant psychiatrist who administered shock therapy to Antonin Artaud and talked about God with him at the asylum in Rodez, in the South of France, in the mid-1940s.
[72] In November 1996, a year after leaving New York for Los Angeles, Kraus produced and curated Chance: Three Days in the Desert, a three-day ‘philosophy rave’ at Whiskey Pete's Casino on the border of Nevada and California.