A Sinister Assassin contains original translations of
Antonin Artaud’s last writings and interviews, most never
previously available in English.
A
Sinister Assassin
presents translations of Antonin Artaud’s largely unknown final
work of 1947–48, revealing new insights into his obsessions with
human anatomy, sexuality, societal power, creativity, and
ill-will—notably, preoccupations of the contemporary world.
Artaud’s
last conception of performance is that of a dance-propelled act of
autopsy, generating a ”body without organs” which negates
malevolent microbial epidemics. This book assembles Artaud’s
crucial writings and press interviews from September 1947 to March
1948, undertaken at a decrepit pavilion in the grounds of a
convalescence clinic in Ivry-sur-Seine, on the southern edge of
Paris, as well as in-transit through Paris’s streets. It also draws
extensively on Artaud’s manuscripts and original interviews with
his friends, collaborators, and doctors throughout the 1940s,
illuminating the many manifestations of Artaud’s final writings:
the contents of his last, death-interrupted notebook; his letters;
his two final key texts; his glossolalia; the magazine issue which
collected his last fragments; and the two extraordinary interviews he
gave to national newspaper journalists in the final days of his life,
in which he denounces and refuses both his work’s recent censorship
and his imminent death.
Edited,
translated, and with an introduction by Stephen Barber, A
Sinister Assassin
illuminates Artaud’s last, most intensive, and terminal work for
the first time.
