The Missing Pieces (Paperback)

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 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.

General

Imprint:	Semiotext(e)
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Semiotext(e) / Native Agents
Release date:	November 2014
First published:	2014
Authors:	Henri Lefebvre
Translators:	David L. Sweet
Contributors:	Hedi El Kholti
Dimensions:	203 x 137 x 6mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	88
ISBN-13:	978-1-58435-159-7
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > The arts: general issues > Theory of art Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > General Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > General
LSN:	1-58435-159-4
Barcode:	9781584351597

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