Asclepias: The Milkweeds

The talks gathered in Asclepias: The Milkweeds are all concerned with discrepancy and extinction. Polylingual and transdisciplinary, each essay addresses translation as a form of disagreement and photography as its mis-fitting corollary. Calling up an indiscriminate range of thinkers and artists--philosophers, composers, photographers, filmmakers, poets--including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Dmitri Shostakovich, Galina Ustvolskaya, Sergio Larrain, Gunther Anders, Alejandra Pizarnik, Antonin Artaud, and Friedrich Holderlin, among many others, the resultant montage repeatedly abandons the reader to an empty, incriminating, theatre.

NATHANAEL is the author of a score of books written in English or in French, including Sisyphus, Outdone., Theatres of the Catastrophal, and Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book). Nathanael has translated books by Edouard Glissant, Danielle Collobert, Catherine Mavrikakis, Hilda Hilst (in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araujo) and Herve Guibert into English. Nathanael lives in Chicago.