Taking its name from Sergei Eisenstein's famous film The General Line, this group of young Jewish men favored Hollywood westerns, slapstick and pre-Stalinist communism.

[9][8] Playing chess in the West Village with John Cage, he sensed similarities between Thoreau and the "chance operations" being practiced by Fluxus, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and others, and the Nietzsche-inspired post-structuralist theorists.

[18][17][21] Uninspired by the doctrinaire post-Frankfurt School Marxism of the American Left, he sought to introduce independently the more fluid and rhizomatic ideas of power and desire developed by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.

"[22] A few years later Lotringer discovered Paul Virilio's theory of speed and technology and Baudrillard's analysis of consumer culture's infinite exchangeability, introducing them in turn into American political discourse.

[16][13] A younger contemporary of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Baudrillard, Virilio and Michel Foucault, Lotringer invited a small group of graduate students to study these thinkers, who were not yet on the curriculum.

In 1975, they staged the provocative Schizo-Culture conference on Madness and Prisons at Columbia University, where more than 2,000 attendees witnessed "show-downs" between Foucault, conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, Guattari, feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, Ronald D. Laing, and others.

[24][25][26] The event helped define a new mode of cultural discourse over the coming decade, and set the stage for future issues of Semiotext(e), which abandoned its scholarly format in favor of collaged images and texts by Deleuze, Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Guy Hocquenghem, Jacques Derrida, Heiner Müller and their (as Lotringer saw it) American counterparts: Cage, Burroughs, Richard Foreman, Jack Smith, Kathy Acker, and others.

[29][14][11][30] Determining that the collectivity that marked New York's cultural life was disappearing in the 1980s, Lotringer ceased regular publication of the Semiotext(e) journal in 1985, though book-length issues appeared into the 1990s.

[31][2][8][32] As a scholar of the 20th century, he emphasized the experiential, "pre-modern" political roots of French theories that are often misread as cavalier orgies of cruelty, envisaging them as an attempt to create symbolic antidotes to both fascism and consumerism.

[31] Lotringer influenced the work of former students including filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow,[33][21] semiotician Marshall Blonsky, art critics Tim Griffin and John Kelsey,[34][22] actor Jim Fletcher,[9] and poet Ariana Reines.

[5][35] He appears as a quasi-fictional character in Kathy Acker's Great Expectations and My Mother: Demonology,[36][37] in Chris Kraus' I Love Dick, Alien & Anorexia and Torpor,[38][39][40] and in Eileen Myles' Inferno.

He commissioned Israeli journalist Amira Hass' award-winning Reporting From Ramallah (2003), and French military specialist Alain Joxe's Empire of Disorder (2002) for Semiotext(e).