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.
