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Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (Hg.): Watchfiends and Rack Screams

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (Hg.)

Watchfiends and Rack Screams
Artaud’s Last Unpublished Work

Übersetzt von Stephen Barber, Paul Buck, Clayton Eshleman und Catherine Petit

Broschur, 224 Seiten

Erscheint am 10.03.2025

Artaud’s Last Unpublished Work

Drawing on texts and letters dating from 1946, some of them written while he was still confined at the Rodez psychiatric hospital, Artaud devoted the months of November 1946 to February 1947 to completing his book through a long series of vocal improvisations titled Interjections, dictated at his pavilion on the edge of Paris. He cursed the assassins he believed were on their way there to steal his semen, to make his brain go “up in smoke as under the action of one of those machines created to suck up filth from the floor,” and finally to erase him. The publisher who had commissioned the book, Louis Broder, was horrified at reading its incandescent, fiercely obscene, and anti-religious manuscript and refused to publish it. Ambitious and experimental in scale, fragmentary and ferocious in intent, it was not published until 1978, in an edition prepared by Artaud’s close friend Paule Thévenin. Artaud commented that it was an “impossible” book, and that “nobody has ever read it from end to end, not even its own author.”

Clayton Eshleman, together with his translation collaborators such as David Rattray, began to work soon after 1978 on an English-language edition, with extracts appearing especially in Eshleman’s poetry magazine, Sulfur. This volume presents his translations with additional ones by Stephen
Barber, Paul Buck, and Catherine Petit it in its complete form in English for the first time.

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Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud

(1896–1948) is one of the seminal figures of twentieth century writing, art and sound experimentation, known especially for his work with the Surrealist movement, his performance theories, his asylum incarcerations, and his artworks which have been exhibited in major exhibitions, at New York’s MOMA and many other art-museums.

Stephen Barber

Stephen Barber ist derzeit Fellow am Käte Hamburger Kolleg für Apokalyptische und Postapokalyptische Studien an der Universität Heidelberg. Ansonsten ist er Professor für Kunst und Film und Co-Direktor des Visual Culture Research Centre an der Kingston University in London. Er ist Autor von drei bereits bei Diaphanes erschienenen Büchern - White Noise Ballrooms (2018) Film's Ghosts (2019) und The Projectionists (2020) - und mehreren in Vorbereitung befindlichen Büchern, darunter Wasteland/Apocalypse. Außerdem hat er für Diaphanes zwei Bücher mit Schriften von Antonin Artaud – Artaud 1937 Apocalypse (2018) und A Sinister Assassin (2023) – übersetzt. Seine Bücher wurden von der britischen Zeitung The Times als „brillant, tiefgründig und provokativ“ beschrieben.
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