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Yes, magic exists!
Yes, magic exists!

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

A Sinister Assassin

Antonin Artaud’s very last work, prior to his death in March 1948, is the most extraordinary element of his entire body of work – and is the element now most enduringly inspirational, for contemporary artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, choreographers, and others inspired by Artaud – through its fiercely exploratory, extreme and combative forms, along with its dissolutions and negations of forms, focused above all on the human anatomy, as well as on sonic experimentation and on provocations for innovation in...
  • Modernism
  • literature
  • autobiography
  • avant-garde
  • poetry
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Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

Externalized memory had always proceeded by contractions, summaries, reductions, selections, breaks in flow, as well as by organization, classification, boiling down. Card catalogues reduced thousands of works to a few key notions; tables of contents contracted the hundreds of pages in a given book. The sign itself was the first abbreviation of experience. An epic stitched of words was an abbreviation of the war, the long years of which were reduced to a few nights of recitation; the written text that recorded the epic was a contraction of the oral narration which pushed aside its sensory richness, melody, life in a thousand details. In accumulating, every level of abbreviation reconstituted an infinite flow, a new dilation that would be contracted in its turn. From the plurality of pages to the index and the table of contents; from the plurality of books to card catalogues.

The abbreviated elements were further arranged, situated...

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Ann Cotten

The last philosopher. The zen-queen.

– In what way are you a communist – since we need to define this: someone who is convinced that a totally different form of organization of communal life would be good for the human race, –

 

– Isn’t that equally true of monarchists and leaders of sects?

 

– ...with a focus on justice.

 

– but the people should behave differently, right?

 

– They should be totally different.

 

– Are you not simply a misanthropist?

 

––––––––––––––––––––––

 

– No, because there are people that I like, very much even. And I understand all the less why most people feel compelled to be so nasty.

 

– Most people don’t seem to be quite as bothered by this as you are.

 

– Oh really? In my perception, most people are pretty bothered by anything that is different than themselves. That is why we need rules that define how to behave toward people we can’t stand.

 

– You have just been suffering in a...

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Artaud’s Last Unpublished Work
Artaud’s Last Unpublished Work

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

Watchfiends and Rack Screams

I had a dream last night, scrambled, yes indeed, for a scrambled dream it sure was scrambled. But so meaningful on the other hand, so meaningful. Jean Dequeker was dragging himself along the earth with short and truncated legs, and he said: Am I a beast, a pebble, a branch or a meat stall? But after all what is a tree? What is a tree? Madame Dequeker was behind a cage with her stomach pressed against the flange of this...
  • Modernism
  • poetry
  • literature
  • autobiography
  • avant-garde
Current Texts

Zoran Terzić

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the late nineteenth century Alfred Jarry created a prototype of the modern wannabe in his pot-bellied Père Ubu, a figure that raises entitlement to a high art. Ubu doesn’t want to be king; others urge him to it. But he is also the others. And when he does become king, CEO, or US president, he doesn’t know what it means, or if it means anything at all. He just states his claim. And so he shimmies from statement to power. And having obtained power, Ubu decerebrates the world, exposing the grounds for groundlessness, to paraphrase Ortega y Gasset. Ubu is a tautomaniac, that is, he can be explained in his own terms and is thus always in the right (being in the right is all he is). He needs no proof, but on the contrary wants “to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought” (Deleuze & Guattari)....

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