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The Missing Pieces

In brief, laconic evocations, Henri Lefebvre lists a series of works that are either unfinished, lost, forgotten, destroyed, or that were never even made. This inventory of lacks becomes an incantation: if only for an instant, it transmits a presence to these "units" that had previously been lost to the history of human creativity and thought.

- 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."

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 84
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781584351597
  • Genres
  • poetry, art, history, france, philosophy
  • Release date
  • 2014