To Write As If Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno's failed
attempts to write a study of Herve Guibert's To the Friend Who Did
Not Save My Life. In this diaristic, transgressive work, the first
in a cycle written in the years preceding his death, Guibert
documents with speed and intensity his diagnosis and disintegration
from AIDS and elegizes a character based on Michel Foucault. The
first half of To Write As If Already Dead is a novella in the mode
of a detective story, searching after the mysterious disappearance
of an online friendship after an intense dialogue on anonymity,
names, language, and connection. The second half, a notebook
documenting the doubled history of two bodies amid another
historical plague, continues the meditation on friendship,
solitude, time, mortality, precarity, art, and literature.
Throughout this rigorous, mischievous, thrilling not-quite study,
Guibert lingers as a ghost companion. Zambreno, who has been
pushing the boundaries of literary form for a decade, investigates
his methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy
and confessional force of Guibert's work, an ode to his slippery,
scarcely classifiable genre. The book asks, as Foucault once did,
"What is an author?" Zambreno infuses this question with new
urgency, exploring it through the anxieties of the internet age,
the ethics of friendship, and "the facts of the body": illness,
pregnancy, and death.
General
Imprint: |
Columbia University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
Rereadings |
Release date: |
June 2021 |
First published: |
2021 |
Authors: |
Kate Zambreno
|
Dimensions: |
198 x 129mm (L x W) |
Format: |
Hardcover - Trade binding
|
Pages: |
176 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-231-18844-9 |
Categories: |
Books >
Social sciences >
Education >
General
Promotions
|
LSN: |
0-231-18844-7 |
Barcode: |
9780231188449 |
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