Search results for ""Author René Daumal""

You’ve Always Been Wrong is a collection of prose and poetic works by the French writer René Daumal (1908–1944). A fitful interloper among the Surrealists, Daumal rejected all forms of dogmatic thought, whether religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political. Much like the Surrealists (and French theorists of more recent decades), Daumal saw in the strict forms and certainties of traditional metaphysics a type of thought that enslaves people even as it pretends to liberate them. These “cadavers of thought,” Daumal wrote with youthful bravado, “must be met with storms of doubt, blasphemes, and kerosene for the temples.” Daumal tied Surrealism with mystical traditions. A devoted student of Eastern religions, philosophy, and literature, he combined his skepticism about Western metaphysics with a mystic’s effort to maintain intense wakefulness to the present moment and to the irreducible particularity of all objects and experience. Such wakefulness, according to Daumal, leads inevitably to an overwhelming (and redemptive) “vision of the absurd.” Daumal’s important place in French culture of the late 1920s and 1930s has been assured by both his writings and his role as cofounder of the avant-garde journal Le Grand Jeu. Written between 1928 and 1930, You’ve Always Been Wrong reveals Daumal’s thought as it was coalescing around the rejection of Western metaphysics and the countervailing allure of Eastern mysticism. Thomas Vosteen’s nuanced translation provides English-language readers with a provocative introduction to this iconoclastic author.

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Essays reflecting on the science of imaginary solutions, from an influential figure in pataphysical thought Pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws describing the universe supplementary to this one. Alfred Jarry’s posthumous novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, his pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found the College of ’Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal was the first to elaborate upon Jarry’s unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician. Pataphysical Essays collects Daumal’s overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, “The Pataphysics of Ghosts.” Daumal’s “Treatise on Patagrams” offers the reader everything from a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer to instructions on how to drill a fount of knowledge in a public urinal. This volume also includes Daumal’s column for the Nouvelle Revue Française, “Pataphysics This Month.” Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, “Pataphysics This Month” describes a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrates that the twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.

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At once poetry, art and activism, Vicuña’s playful multimedia works "open up minds by opening up words" This beautifully designed clothbound book brings together the Palabrarmas series by the Chilean-born artist, poet and activist Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948). Images of these works—each a powerful juxtaposition of color, poetry and politics—appear alongside new essays and historical references chosen with the artist. Palabrarmas, a neologism that translates to "word weapons" or "word arms," imagine new ways of seeing language. Taking the form of collages, silkscreens, drawings, poems, fabric banners, cutouts, mixed-media installations and street actions, Vicuña’s Palabarmas bring together her work in poetry, activism and visual art. Each one unpacks and deconstructs single words to reveal other words hiding within them, allowing new meanings to emerge. The artist began making these visual anagrams while in exile in London and Bogotá after the Pinochet-led coup of 1973 in Chile, and has always seen them as a form of liberation—as a way to "open up minds by opening up words," as she puts it. The Palabarmas have taken on new relevance in today’s political climate, and appeared on the streets during Chile’s 2019 revolution as protest signs. This book presents a range of Palabrarmas in color for the first time, with new essays by Mónica de la Torre, Carla Macchiavello, Cecilia Vicuña and Jeanne Gerrity, and reprinted texts by René Daumal, Robert Randall and Simón Rodríguez.

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A beloved cult classic of Surrealism, Pataphysics and Gurdjieffian mysticism, Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue is the allegorical tale of an expedition to a mountain whose existence can only be deduced, not observed. As its numerous editions (most now rare) over the decades attest, the book has been highly influential: Alejandro Jodorowsky's visionary 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation of the book, and John Zorn based an eponymous album on it. This edition, brings the original 1959 English translation by Roger Shattuck - widely considered the best - back into print.

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