The Missing Pieces

Author:Henri Lefebvre, David L. Sweet

Paperback: 88 pages

Publisher: Semiotexte; 1 edition (14 Nov. 2014)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1584351594

ISBN-13: 978-1584351597

Product Dimensions: 13.7 x 0.6 x 20.3 cm

內容簡介

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 type* for On the Road (eaten by a dog); 

the chalk drawings of Francis Picabia (erased before an audience); 

and the one moment in Andre 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.