The Missing Pieces

Author(s): Henri Lefebvre

Art

* A boarder for two years following a national funeral, Mirabeau is removed from the Pantheon and transferred to the cemetery of Clamart when his pornographic novels are discovered * A photograph taken by Hessling on Christmas night, 1943, of a young woman nailed alive to the village gate of Novimgorod; Hessling asks his friend Wolfgang Borchert to develop the film, look at the photograph, and destroy it * The Beautiful Gardener, a picture by Max Ernst, burned by the Nazis -- from The Missing Pieces The Missing Pieces is an incantatory text, a catalog of what has been lost over time and what in some cases never existed. Through a lengthy chain of brief, laconic citations, Henri Lefebvre evokes the history of what is no more and what never was: the artworks, films, screenplays, negatives, poems, symphonies, buildings, letters, concepts, and lives that cannot be seen, heard, read, inhabited, or known about. It is a literary vanitas of sorts, but one that confers an almost mythical quality on the enigmatic creations it recounts -- rather than reminding us of the death that inhabits everything humans create. Lefebvre's list includes Marcel Duchamp's (accdidentally destroyed) film of Man Ray shaving off the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's pubic hair; the page written by Balzac on his deathbed (lost); Spinoza's Treatise on the Rainbow (thrown into a fire); the final seven meters of Kerouac's original typescript for On the Road (eaten by a dog); the chalk drawings of Francis Picabia (erased before an audience); and the one moment in Andre Malraux's life in which he exclaimed "I believe, for a minute, I was thinking nothing." The Missing Pieces offers a treasure trove of cultural and artistic detail and will entertain even those readers not enamored of the void.

This book is one long list of works of literature and art that do not exist, either because they have been lost or destroyed (either by the writer or artist or by external intention or by misadventure or natural disaster) or because they were never completed, or, in some cases, never started. Lefebvre provides a catalogue of holes (and these are just the identifiable holes – the list of things that do not exist is, I suppose, infinite), an incantation of absence, and we are left wondering, How would the cultural landscape be different if these works existed? What sort of cultural force is exerted by absence? Is disappearance the universal primary force against which we all struggle? Human endeavour, even at its most ‘exalted’, appears as a ragged, tentative and highly vulnerable thing. This is perhaps where its value lies.


{THOMAS}


Product Information

The Missing Pieces is a list not only to be read an item at a time, but, as the very cover of the book itself might imply, to be viewed as a mishmash of things forgotten, and of things we need to dutifully remember. -- Micah McCrary Bookslut

Henri Lefebvre, born in 1959 in Salon-de-Provence, lives and works in Paris. He founded and directs Les Cahiers de la Seine, a publishing house devoted to contemporary poetry.

General Fields

  • : 9781584351597
  • : MIT Press
  • : MIT Press
  • : 0.113
  • : September 2014
  • : 203mm X 136mm X 6mm
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Henri Lefebvre
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 700.1
  • : 88