The Passive Vampire [Paperback]

Originally published in 1945 by Les ?ditions de l'Oubli in Bucharest, The Passive Vampire caught the attention of the French Surrealists when an excerpt appeared in 1947 in the magazine La part du sable. Luca, whose work was admired by Gilles Deleuze, attempts here to transmit the "shudder" evoked by some Surrealist texts, such as Andr? Breton's Nadja and Mad Love, probing with acerbic humor the fragile boundary between "objective chance" and delirium.Impossible to define, The Passive Vampire is a mixture of theoretical treatise and breathless poetic prose, personal confession and scientific investigation it is 18 photographs of "objectively offered objects," a category created by Luca to occupy the space opened up by Breton. At times taking shape as assemblages, these objects are meant to capture chance in its dynamic and dramatic forms by externalizing the ambivalence of our drives and bringing to light the nearly continual equivalence between our love-hate tendencies and the world of things.The book ... is chimerical and delirious yet remarkably concrete in its lewdness. Blending personal confession, prose poetry, meditation, verbal games, catalogues, and hymns to desire, this hybrid book is a Surrealist carnival that taps satanic and psychic rituals. Bawdy and bizarre, it also evokes the era's dark history, including anti-Semitic pogroms. --Irene Gammel, BookforumThat auto-destruction, typical of Luca, was also the essence of the Surrealist project in its Eastern iteration. The artful fracturing of bourgeois French reality became, in a much more politically volatile and sexually repressive milieu, the frantic Othering of the creative self. In Bucharest, especially after the war, there was nothing else left to corrupt. --ForwardTo hear and to see Gh?rasim Luca read is like rediscovering the primordial power of poetry, its prophetic force and subversive effect. --Le Monde