Gilgamesh

Composed over 2,500 years, lost in the deserts of Iraq for 2,000 more, Gilgamesh presents a palimpsest of ancient Middle Eastern cultic and courtly lyrics and lore. The story of a visionary journey beyond the limits of human experience, Gilgamesh is a tale of friendship, adventure, mortality, and loss. The legends it collects ultimately informed Greek and Egyptian myths, Hebrew Scriptures, and Islamic literature. Scholarly translations of Gilgamesh often dilute the expressive force of the material through overzealous erudition. Popular versions of the poem frequently gloss over gaps in the text with accessible and comforting, but ultimately falsely ecumenical language. In this new version, Stuart Kendall animates the latest scholarship with a contemporary poetic sensibility, inspired by the pagan worldview of the ancient work. Transcriptions of all of the available tablets and tales have been harnessed to present a fluid and holistic Gilgamesh, true to the archaic mind. This Gilgamesh is a poem of environmental encounter and, ultimately, ecological disaster. It is a contemporary poem rooted in the origins of our civilization, a record of the first break of light at the dawn of our consciousness.
 "As Gilgamesh enters the domain of the classical―as it has for several decades now―each new generation looks for a way to bring it from its ur-world into the living present. Toward this end Stuart Kendall’s is the exemplary version for our time, a reading that allows the mind to see what had been too long lost to us and what we so much need to make us fully human. This is the place to go for further sustenance.”―Jerome Rothenberg

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Contra Mundum Press

Self-Shadowing Prey, one of the final texts by the Romanian poet Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994), is clearly constructed around the sought complications of language. Embodying the surrealist operation of play with considerable exactitude and rigor, Self-Shadowing Prey is rich with neologistic stupors, nouns made verbs, and compelling repetitions and linguistic expansions. Language is not merely put into play but made to participate in an erotic act, and words become the locus of an exploding self. This linguistically-joyous text reveals the arresting syntactic creation and creative stammering which Deleuze and Guattari both saw in Luca and what led Deleuze to call him a great poet among the greatest. "If Ghérasim Luca's speech is eminently poetic," Deleuze pronounced, "it is because he makes stuttering an affect of language and not an affectation of speech. The entire language spins and varies in order to disengage a final block of sound, a single breath at the limit of the cry, JE T'AIME PASSIONNÉMENT." Transformed for the first time into English by distinguished translator Mary Ann Caws, this bi-lingual edition of Self-Shadowing Prey gives us yet one more important text by a key figure of the Romanian branch of Surrealism. In addition, it is the first book of Luca's verse ever to be translated into English. "Ghérasim Luca is a great poet among the greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own." -Deleuze "Mary Ann Caws' passionate translations render deft, delightful facets of the formidable Ghérasim Luca: virile servings of refreshment and tumult, liberating language from the yoke of Duty. This collection pairs and contrasts well with the churning self-surgery we had the pleasure of smuggling from Romanian. Self-Shadowing Prey calls for vertiginous reading, in exhilarating reflection of the sonorous scintillations of Luca's own reading performances." -Julian and Laura Semilian, translators of Ghérasim Luca's The Inventor of Love & Other Works

Self-Shadowing Prey

Luca, Gh Rasim

Uniwersytet Warszawski

Poetry

Spring 2032: an enigmatic bandleader named Triboulet arrives by helicopter in Rome, where his troupe awaits with a legion of animals and unruly kids. When performing acrobatic feats and provoking states of joyous panic through their ritualistic music, the troupe's arrival proves restorative, for the world is beset with famines, plagues, and religious conflicts, which Triboulet seeks to neutralize with freeing laughter. While they begin constructing strange edifices in the city, sacred sites around the world suffer terrible, often humorous forms of vandalism, provoking the ire of religious and political authorities, who grow suspicious of the troupe and leery of the increasing allure they exert over people. Although radical Islamic sects claim responsibility for the attacks on Catholic and Jewish sites, no one is certain who is responsible-is it the Jihadists, anarcho-atheist intellectuals, or eco-terrorists? And who really is the masked Triboulet? The very future of the world is at stake, and while touring Jerusalem during Christmas, Triboulet and his merry troupe bear witness to the world's pivotal crossing into a new reality. Albert Camus noted that 'the metaphysics of the worst' expresses itself in a literature of damnation and argued that 'we have still not yet found the exit' from such literature. With his second novel, Hanshe has found the way out, offering in fact something not only promising, but astounding, a pathway that is into a new reality, into a 'physics of the best.' The Abdication is a true ero(t)icomic epic.

The Abdication

Reference

Hanshe, Rainer J.

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Walter Jackson Bate's canonical 1939 study of Keats's concept of negative capability is a genealogical treatise that unearths the socio-political, aesthetic, and intellectual composition of Keats's most famous poetic idea. He discloses its relation to Hazlitt's idea of "gusto" and to Shakespearean notions of impersonality and intensity while also demonstrating how negative capability presages Bergson's conceptual interpretation of intellect and intuition. Bate reveals how the key elements of Keats's poetic concept are disinterestedness, sympathy, impersonality, and dramatic poetry, defining negative capability as "the ability to negate or lose one's identity in something larger than oneself - a sympathetic openness to the concrete reality without, an imaginative identification, a relishing and understanding of it." With 'negative capability,' Keats railed against the rampant egotism of his epoch and challenged the certainty of its claims to knowledge. While embracing reality, Keats urged the necessity of abiding in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. This new edition brings back into print Bate's indispensable work and features an introduction by the distinguished Italian poet, playwright, and literary critic Maura Del Serra. With its republication, Eliot's proclamation on Keats is given new force: that "there is hardly one statement of Keats about poetry which ... will not be found to be true..."

Negative Capability: On the Intuitive Approach in Keats

Bate, Walter Jackson

Del Serra, Maura

Essays & Correspondence

Marginalia on Casanova, the first volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary, is Miklos Szentkuthy's synthesis of 2,000 years of European culture. St. Orpheus is Szentkuthy's Virgil, an omniscient, poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil, an endless series of masks and personae, humanity in its protean, futural shape, an always changing function of discourse, text, myth, &amp; mentalite. Through St. Orpheus' method, disparate moments of history become synchronic, are juggled to reveal, paradoxically, their mutual difference and essential similarity. "Orpheus wandering in the infernal regions," says Szentkuthy, "is the perennial symbol of the mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is, on the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of contemplative man, the transiency of emotions and the sterility of philosophical systems." Marginalia on Casanova relives the despiritualization of the main protagonist's sensual adventures, though it is less his sex life &amp; more his intellectual mission, the sole determinant of his being, which is the focus of this mesmeric book. Through his own glittering associations and broadly spanning array of metaphors, Szentkuthy analyses and views the 18th century and its notion of homogeneity from the vantage point of the 20th century, with the full armor of someone who was, perhaps, one of the last Hungarian Europeans. While a commentary on Casanova's memoirs, it is also Szentkuthy's very own philosophy of love. Passion, playfulness, irony, and a whole gamut of protean metamorphoses are what characterize Marginalia on Casanova, a work in which readers will experience both profundity and a taking to wing of essay-writing that is intellectually radiant and which is as sensual and provocative as a gondola ride with Casanova.

Marginalia on Casanova: St. Orpheus Breviary I

Szentkuthy, Mikl S.

Classics

Italian writer/director Elio Petri (1929-1982) is of the cinematic era of Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Bellocchio, and although he is recognized by film scholars as one of the major figures of Italian cinema, his work remains largely unknown outside of Italy. Hardly a marginal figure, Petri began as an assistant to Giuseppe De Santis and his future collaborators would include many of the most renowned film artists of the 20th century: Marcello Mastroianni, Gian Maria Volonté, Dante Ferretti, Ennio Morricone, Ugo Pirro, and Tonino Guerra. Due to Petri's belief that culture is inextricable from political struggle, he was a central figure in the fervent debates of his time on both Italian cinema and culture that arose from the aftermath of World War II to the 1980s. However, while generally characterized as a political filmmaker, this view is limited and reductive, for Petri's films are polemical interrogations of social, religious, and political phenomena as well as acute analyses of moral, psychological, and existential crises. His cinema is also informed by a rich and profound understanding of and engagement with literature, philosophy, psychology, and art, evident for instance in his adaptations of Sciascia's novels, Miller's The American Clock (for the stage), and Sartre's Dirty Hands, as well as in his use of Pop and Abstract Art in The Tenth Victim, A Quiet Place in the Country, and other films. Available for the first time in English, Writings on Cinema and Life is a collection of texts Petri originally published mainly in French and Italian journals. Also included are several art reviews, as well as Petri's essay on Sartre's Dirty Hands, a text forgotten until recently. Petri's affinity for subtle analysis is evident in his clear and precise writing style, which utilizes concrete concepts and observations, cinematographic references, and ideas drawn from literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. There is as well an acute and scathing sense of humor that permeates many of the texts. Petri was the recipient of the Palme d'Or, an Academy Award, and the Edgar Allan Poe award among many others, and in 2005 he was the subject of the documentary Elio Petri: Appunti Su Un Autore. This collection of Petri's writings is an important contribution to the history of cinema and offers further insight into the work, thought, and beliefs of one of cinema's most ambitious and innovative practitioners.

Writings on Cinema and Life

Humor & Entertainment

Elio Petri

Movies

Fernando Pessoa claimed to be inhabited by “thousands of philosophies,” all of which he intended to develop in his unfinished project of English-language Philosophical Essays. The resulting fragments were never published by Pessoa himself and almost the entirety of them are presented in this edition for the very first time in history. This volume exhibits Pessoa’s musings and wild insights on the history of philosophy, the failures of subjectivity, and the structure of the universe to reveal an unexpectedly scholarly, facetious, and vigorous theoretical mind. Written under the pre-heteronyms of Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search, these texts constitute the foundation for the fabrication of Pessoa’s future heteronyms. They are the testimony of a writer who referred to himself as a “poet animated by philosophy.” Through editor Nuno Ribeiro’s careful critical efforts, a new and fundamental facet of the work of one of modernity’s most seminal geniuses has now been brought to light in a remarkably reliable and clear fashion.

Philosophical Essays: A Critical Edition

PESSOA, FERNANDO

"The Greek Music Drama" marks an intriguing moment in the development of Nietzsche's thought. Delivered in 1870 at the Basel Museum, it was the first public enunciation of the great themes that would echo throughout Nietzsche's philosophy: the importance of aesthetic experience for culture, the primacy of the body and physiological drives, and the centrality of music to Greek tragedy. Here we see Nietzsche's genealogical methodology in embryonic form alongside the anti-humanist aesthetics that will bloom in his later work. Addressing the material conditions of Greek theater in detail, Nietzsche repudiates the abstract scholarly approach to the art of classical antiquity, proposing that in its stead we cultivate different emotional and intellectual powers in order to gain greater insight into that art. This seminal lecture offers an account of tragic experience from the sole perspective of the Dionysian, presenting a reading of nature of startling and far-reaching implications. While "The Greek Music Drama" is a text written on the brink of the insights that inform The Birth of Tragedy, it stands on its own right as a singular text. This work is of considerable importance and is now made available in English for the very first time, with the translation set parallel to the original German in this elegant bilingual edition. Paul Bishop's preface and informative critical notes and Jill Marsden's illuminating introduction not only serve to make good the comparative neglect this seminal text has suffered in Nietzsche studies, they also lend the unique expertise of two Nietzsche scholars to the early thought of a philosopher who is crucial not just to philosophy scholars and aficionados, but to anyone interested in theater, performance, and the art of tragedy.

Greek Music Drama

Friedrich, Nietzsche

Dramas & Plays

Plays with Films brings together texts of the final three productions of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery: Zomboid! (2006), Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead! (2007), and Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (2008). In these three exhilarating and challenging works, Foreman turns to a meditation on the mechanical and digital reproductions of screen images within the discipline of theater, and thereby recalibrates and expands the potential relationship we can have with the live art that is theater. Extending the model of theater as a “reverberating machine,” Foreman’s use of film in these plays is intimately integrated into the complex network of impulse generators, creating an unprecedented experience of multi-dimensional scriptural space, a new kind of total theater that effectively recharges and redirects the issues of consciousness he has been exploring with indefatigable intensity since the establishment of his theater in 1968. The bodied reality of theatrical experience, and the recognition of unconsciousness within that experience, becomes more fraught with peril in today’s screened world. These plays, originally conceived as his final theater works (though he did change his mind), engage in ways that continue his ambition to upend habitual thinking and may prove transformative for the individual’s ability to interpret and understand the threats of deadening conformity and loss of identity through the new digital culture. Employing an innovative typographical presentation, Plays with Films demonstrates how America’s most daring theater artist alchemizes reproducible and non-reproducible reality into a unique contemplation of the project of self-construction in the 21st century.

Plays with Films

Richard Foreman

In a century replete with radical politics, final liberations, historical codas, and dreams of eternity, the shadowy figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the constant revolutionary, wrote Eternity by the Stars in the last months of 1871 while incarcerated in Fort du Taureau, a marine cell of the English Channel. In the midst of contemplating his confinement, Blanqui devises a simple calculation in which the infinity of time is confronted with the finite number of possible events to suggest a most radical conclusion: every chain of events is bound to repeat itself eternally in space and time. Our lives are being lived an infinity of times across the confines of the universe, and death, defeat, success and glory are never final. For the world is nothing but the play of probabilities on the great stage of time and space. By straddling the boundaries of hyperrealism and hallucinatory thinking, Blanqui's hypothesis offers a deep, tragic, and heartfelt reflection on the place of the human in the universe, the value of action, and the aching that lies at the heart of every modern soul. This first critical edition of Blanqui's incantatory text in English features an extended introduction by Frank Chouraqui. Exploring sources of Blanqui's thinking in his intellectual context, Chouraqui traces the legacy of the text in critiques of modernity devoting particular attention to the figures of Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Borges. It features copious illuminating annotations that bring out the web of connections which interlace the great marginal figure of Blanqui with more than two millennia of European culture.

Eternity by the Stars: An Astronomical Hypothesis

Politics & Social Sciences

Louis-Auguste Blanqui

Philosophy

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