The Passive Vampire - Gherasim Luca

The Passive Vampire by Gherasim Luca, translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski / ISBN 9788086264318 / 140-page paperback with flaps from Twisted Spoon Press

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“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.”—Bookforum

Originally published in 1945 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, whom Gilles Deleuze referred to as one of the greatest poets, attempts here to transmit the “shudder” evoked by some Surrealist texts, such as André 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 while illuminating the nearly continual equivalence between our love-hate tendencies and the world of things.