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An engaging and challenging introduction to Jean Genet, this concise biography of the French writer and his work cuts directly to the intersection of thought and life that was essential to Genet's creativity. Arguing that Genet's life was an extraordinary spectacle in which the themes of his most revolutionary works were played out, Stephen Barber gives both the work and its singular inspiration in Genet's life their full due. Abandoned, arrested, and repeatedly incarcerated, Genet, who died in 1986, led a life that could best be described as a tour of the underworld of the twentieth century. Similarly, Genet's work is recognized by its nearly obsessive and often savage treatment of certain ...
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This is the first English translation of two famous texts on Antonin Artaud's drawings and portraits. The book includes a series of haunting photographs of Artaud by Georges Pastier.
Philosophical and biographical accounts of Antonin Artaud's late visual work, all reproduced in color. Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)—stage and film actor, director, writer, and visual artist—was a man of rage and genius. Expelled from the Surrealist movement for his refusal to renounce the theatre, he founded the Theater of Cruelty and wrote The Theater and Its Double, one of the key twentieth-century texts on the topic. Artaud spent nine years at the end of his life in asylums, undergoing electroshock treatments. Released to the care of his friends in 1946, he began to draw again.This book presents drawings and portraits from this late resurgence, all in color. Accompanying the images ar...
The life of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was tormented by physical and mental illnesses. Already in his earlier works, Artaud tried to express his physical and mental suffering, but perceived, in describing his feelings, the obstructive and illness-inducing role of language. This is the first book written in English that analyses the role of a healing language with which Artaud engaged in his later writings. Joeri Visser guides us through the years in which Artaud suffered increasingly from mental instability and considered the act of writing his only means of survival. In doing so, Visser unfolds a literary and a philosophical analysis of how language and life work together and how a creative play with language can help us to reengage sustainably with the joyous as well as the terrible forces of life.
A penetrating exploration of poetic life by a veteran poet, translator, and editor.
Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon analyzes the limits of the applicability of psychoanalytic theory to aesthetic discourse, and in doing so expands the range of non-normative paradigms of spectatorial identification and sexual identity. These considerations are based on the epistemological premises that the ideal seldom coincides with the empirical, and that identification is always partial, fragmented, heterogeneous, mixed, such that total identification would be tantamount to delirium. The imagination is but the ephemera of partial objects torn from culture and history, the transgression by fragmentation of a contemporary cosmos all too unified and all too controlled to admit the most singular, and idiosyncratic, phantasms of our desires. Thus we must posit an aesthetics where theory and interpretation are juxtaposed to, or traced above, the effects of the passions, where a muscular contraction or spasm is worth as much as a concept. It is here, at the fragile limit between iconophilia and iconoclasm, that the ironies and exigencies of poetic justice reside.
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A collection of previously published essays.