Hadland: I think the first section and last section are untitled, whereas others are titled with the name of the narrator for that section, as if to suggest the central character could be any of them. When I first read it as a PDF there were no page numbers, so I would get confused about which narrator was speaking.
There weren’t always distinct styles that made them easy to tell apart rather, there was more overlap, as if they were interchangeable. LaCava: Yeah, it’s this kind of thing where it could have started at the end. Some people would say that’s not a good thing, but I think if it has a purpose, and even when it’s disorienting, that can be really interesting. What drew you to this story and how did you see it fitting in with the Semiotext(e) publishing record, particularly the Native Agents series? Could you talk a little bit about the series’ inception?Ĭhris Kraus: I just think Stephanie is a wonderful writer. The Superrationals unfolds through a brisk narrative, but Stephanie makes all of these shrewd and knowing observations along the way. There’s such a dramatic contrast between the sophisticated, light art world Mathilde moves in and the gaping hole left in her life by the loss of her mother. I immediately associated the book with a certain lineage that began (at least for us) with Michèle Bernstein’s All the King’s Horses, but that’s not why I wanted to publish it.
The Native Agents series has changed a great deal since its inception in 1990. Initially, I felt like I had to create an intellectual justification for publishing, basically, my friends - and so I presented the series as a mirror world of French theory, of subjectivity-in-practice. Hadland: Stephanie, were these characters people you’ve been revisiting and exploring in other things you’ve written? Since Hedi El Kholti joined Semiotext(e) in 2004, we’ve co-edited the imprint and it’s a lot harder now to define. In a way, my first book, An Extraordinary Theory of Objects, makes more sense in this context. Memoir in the publishing world is like the cookbook: it’s what sells. It can be seen as a joke in a way: coming of age, expatriate in Paris, etc. It’s like a conceptual project in reverse. Now, maybe I’ve been able to write the book that investigates the shaping of this girl on a psychoanalytic level. And where she ended up in a system, in the world, at a certain moment in time. Hadland: I believe that’s the case with Bernstein’s book All the King’s Horses.
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