The Missing Pieces

Lefebvre, Henri, Sweet, David L.

  • 出版商: Semiotext(e)
  • 出版日期: 2014-10-24
  • 售價: $750
  • 貴賓價: 9.5$713
  • 語言: 英文
  • 頁數: 88
  • 裝訂: Quality Paper - also called trade paper
  • ISBN: 1584351594
  • ISBN-13: 9781584351597
  • 無法訂購

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商品描述

An incantatory catalog of cultural artifacts either lost to time or never realized.

- A boarder for two years following a national funeral, Mirabeau is removed from the Pantheon and transferred to the cemetery of Clamart when his pornographic novels are discovered - A photograph taken by Hessling on Christmas night, 1943, of a young woman nailed alive to the village gate of Novimgorod; Hessling asks his friend Wolfgang Borchert to develop the film, look at the photograph, and destroy it - The Beautiful Gardener, a picture by Max Ernst, burned by the Nazis
--from The Missing Pieces

The Missing Pieces is an incantatory text, a catalog of what has been lost over time and what in some cases never existed. Through a lengthy chain of brief, laconic citations, Henri Lefebvre evokes the history of what is no more and what never was: the artworks, films, screenplays, negatives, poems, symphonies, buildings, letters, concepts, and lives that cannot be seen, heard, read, inhabited, or known about. It is a literary vanitas of sorts, but one that confers an almost mythical quality on the enigmatic creations it recounts--rather than reminding us of the death that inhabits everything humans create.

Lefebvre's list includes Marcel Duchamp's (accdidentally destroyed) film of Man Ray shaving off the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's pubic hair; the page written by Balzac on his deathbed (lost); Spinoza's Treatise on the Rainbow (thrown into a fire); the final seven meters of Kerouac's original typescript for On the Road (eaten by a dog); the chalk drawings of Francis Picabia (erased before an audience); and the one moment in Andr Malraux's life in which he exclaimed "I believe, for a minute, I was thinking nothing." The Missing Pieces offers a treasure trove of cultural and artistic detail and will entertain even those readers not enamored of the void.

作者簡介

Henri Lefebvre, born in 1959 in Salon-de-Provence, lives and works in Paris. He founded and directs Les Cahiers de la Seine, a publishing house devoted to contemporary poetry.

Kate Zambreno, the author of two novels, O Fallen Angel and Green Girl and the work Heroines (Semiotext(e)), teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. She is at work on a series of books about time, memory, and the persistence of art, which includes Book of Mutter and the forthcoming Drifts.