dreaming of one thing [subversive chronicle]

  i said endurance has its limits people are made of flesh and bone / i spoke about the stalinists and the method of executing the very best as traitors / who died screaming long live the party! / sifis said / the statement is only the beginning. then they will ask who are your friends. / then where do they live.    katerina gogou   i believe at heart that one must not be an accomplice to lies and compromise, the contemporary artist must scream out their revolt and make understood that we live in an unbearable, cruel, and…

Boussole. Entretien avec Nathalie Quintane. Par Marius Loris et Lise Wajeman

  Nathalie Quintane discusses her experience as a writer, the relationship between literature and action, changing forms and changing society.   Avec Tomates (2010), Nathalie Quintane a planté d’incomparables fruits : un livre qui parvenait à réunir les militants de poésie contemporaine et les amateurs d’action politique. Ce n’est pourtant pas le premier livre de son auteure, évidemment pas le premier livre de son genre : mais il s’est manifesté là une intelligence du présent – le réel et la langue pour le dire – qui a fait date. Depuis, Nathalie Quintane est devenue un genre de boussole. Le contraire d’une figure de proue,…

Comte de Lautréamont | Poésies

  I replace melancholy with courage, doubt with certainty, despair with hope, evil with good, lamentations with duty, scepticism with faith, sophistry with the indifference of calm, and pride with modesty.     I THE POETIC whimperings of this century are nothing but sophistry. First principles should be beyond argument. I accept Euripides and Sophocles; but I do not accept Aeschylus. Do not manifest toward the Creator a lack of the most elementary conventions and good taste. Cast aside disbelief: you will make me happy. Only two kinds of poetry exist; there is only one. A far from tacit convention…

Juan Gelman | Poetry Forever

    THE POEMS OF JULIO GRECO POETRY FOREVER to juan carlos onetti poetry ought to be created by all and not just by one / he said such things can only be said by a frenchman / a cripple / who was implicated in the paris commune who knows how / and no one knows whether he died or couldn’t / everyone remembers when he would play the piano until the wee hours of the soul / bothering the neighbors who had to go to work the next day / who’d leave their homes badly rested / reflecting on…

Raoul Vaneigem | Isidore Ducasse and the Count of Lautréamont in the “Poésies”

  Lautréamont entered literary history by means of Maldoror, and, with the mastery of Isidore Ducasse, the author of the Poésies, he is almost indebted to it for not being excluded from that history.1 Of the judgments made by critics, how many manage to prove their innocence – through embarrassment or the casualness with which they open the “Préface à un livre futur” with a tacit disavowal – an unconfessed disapproval of the Poésies? None, no doubt, as it is true that their disaffection still appears in their will to subject the delicate processes by which multiple aspects of a…

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers | What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death?

FIRST PUBLISHED: DIAPHANES How could Dante be avant-garde? Mehdi Belhaj Kacem: Mr. Sollers, for 23 years you were the editor of Tel Quel, doubtless the very last important literary review that can be considered “avant-garde.” It published some of the biggest “avant-garde” writers of its time, like Pierre Guyotat, Maurice Roche, Jean-Jacques Schuhl and yourself, as well as still-unknown academics like Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette. You also published Pierre Boulez and Jean-Luc Godard, who, like the writers and thinkers I just mentioned, were the leading avant-garde figures in their respective fields. In 1983 you left Les Éditions du Seuil,…

Pasolini on de Sade: An Interview during the Filming of ‘Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom’

  by Gideon Bachmann It is reputed that Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, spent only 37 days, writing from seven to ten every evening, in composing his masterpiece, the unsurpassed 120 Days of Sodom, the first psychopathia sexualis ever written, and preserved only in fragmentary form. More than half of what has been left are just lists of perversions, lacking that deep sociological and political insight which characterizes most of the Marquis’s other work, and which assured him his ranking place in prerevolutionary French literature. Nobody has ever used a de Sade book as material for a film. It is therefore all…

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem | Tomb for Guy Debord

Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ. Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ. He was immolated by his own ideology, which he more than anyone (Tzara, Duchamp, Artaud, the Viennese Actionists…) had pushed to its extremes. He covered all of its possibilities, all of its impasses. His extreme attempts were neither successes, nor failures. Today, his path should be evaluated through other methods: the ones left to us in the wake of the avant-garde’s disappearance. To put it as Reiner Schürmann does: truth is a “conflictuality without agreements.” It is within Debord’s insurmountable contradictions, whose political, aesthetic, and existential preoccupations were…

César Vallejo | From “Art and Revolution”

    THE REVOLUTIONARY FUNCTION OF THOUGHT Confusion is a phenomenon with a permanent, organic character in bourgeois society. Confusion grows ever thicker when it is addressed as already confusing problems by the very historical terms of its utterance. The latter occurs with the brand new and, at once, very old problem of the intellectual’s obligations with regard to revolution. As posed by historical materialists, this problem is already a tangle. When formulated or simply outlined by bourgeois intellectuals, it acquires the aspect of insoluble chaos. *** “The philosophers,” Marx says, “have only interpreted the world in various ways. The…

Guy Debord | All the King’s Men

What is poetry if not the revolutionary moment of language, inseparable as such from the revolutionary moments of history and from the history of personal life? […] The point is not to put poetry at the service of revolution, but to put revolution at the service of poetry. […] Every revolution has been born in poetry, has first of all been made with the force of poetry. This phenomenon continues to escape theorists of revolution — indeed, it cannot be understood if one still clings to the old conception of revolution or of poetry . . .

Sean Bonney | COMETS & BARRICADES: INSURRECTIONARY IMAGINATION IN EXILE

  Sean Bonney | COMETS & BARRICADES: INSURRECTIONARY IMAGINATION IN EXILE Let every word indicate the most frightening of distances, it would still take billions of centuries, talking at one word per second, to express a distance which is only an insignificance when it comes to infinity. ¹ Louis Auguste Blanqui; Eternity by the Stars Imprisoned on the day before the declaration of the Paris Commune, in a cell in the Fort du Taureau, ‘an ellipse-shaped fortified island lying half a mile outside of the rock shores of Morlaix at a place where, after briefly morphing into the English Channel, the…

Aimé Césaire; Discourse on Colonialism

Aimé Césaire; Discours on Colonialism (Full book)   A Poetics of Anticolonialism; by Robin D.G. Kelly Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism might be best described as a declaration of war. I would almost call it a “third world manifesto,” but hesitate because it is primarily a polemic against the old order bereft of the kind of propositions and proposals that generally accompany manifestos. Yet, Discourse speaks in revolutionary cadences, capturing the spirit of its age just as Marx and Engels did 102 years earlier in their little manifesto. First published in 1950 as Discours sur le colonialisme1, it appeared just…

[[das Phantom Lautréamonts]]

                    »Da gab es keinen Zwang mehr. Wenn ich töten wollte, tötete ich; das passierte mir sogar oft, und niemand hinderte mich daran. Die menschlichen Gesetze verfolgten mich noch mit ihrer Rache, obwohl ich die Rasse, die ich so ruhig verlassen hatte, nicht angriff; aber mein Gewissen machte mir keinen Vorwurf…« Die Gesänge des Maldoror   ich hatte angenommen dass wir am 10. die Paläste der Hochfinanz & des Inneren auf den Kopf stellen / du weisst schon : die Rechnung für entlauste, desinfizierte Randbezirke / verarscht & geknüppelt wie wir…