The magazine brought together artists and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat and Lee Breuer.
In 1980, Lotringer began to assemble the Foreign Agents series, a group of "little black books", often culled from longer texts, to polemically debut the work of French theorists to US readers.
Designed to promote an anti-memoiristic "public I", the series published Kathy Acker, Barbara Barg, Cookie Mueller, Eileen Myles, David Rattray, Ann Rower, Lynne Tillman and many others.
A third series, Active Agents, began in 1993 with the publication of Still Black Still Strong by Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal, with the goal of presenting explicitly political, topical material.
[citation needed] The purview of Native Agents expanded to include science fiction books by Maurice Dantec and Mark von Schlegell and works by writers like Tony Duvert, Pierre Guyotat, Travis Jeppesen, Grisélidis Real, Bruce Benderson, and Abdellah Taïa.
Aware that the theorists he introduced in the 1980s had by now been absorbed into the academic mainstream, Sylvère Lotringer turned his attention to Italy's post-Autonomia critical theory, commissioning and publishing works by Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, Christian Marazzi [fr], Maurizio Lazzarato and others.
[4] These included "new, commissioned works by Franco “Bifo" Berardi, John Kelsey, Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles, Ariana Reines, and Abdellah Taïa, among others, and previously unpublished texts by such influential twentieth-century figures as Simone Weil, Julio Cortazar, and Jean Baudrillard.
Major topics of the series include French anarchism (The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun), Italian Marxist economic criticism (Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco Berardi, Christian Marazzi[a]) and violence in the context of the Mexican Drug War (Sergio González Rodríguez, Sayak Valencia).
Other topics discussed include art history (Gerald Raunig, Chris Kraus), racism and the criminal justice system (Houria Bouteldja, Jackie Wang), continental philosophy (Jean Baudrillard, Peter Sloterdijk), and contemporary culture (François Cusset, Jennifer Doyle, Paul Virilio).