A Sinister Assassin

- Blurb -

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.