The Passive Vampire

by Ghérasim Luca, Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Translator)

To hear and to see Ghérasim Luca read is like rediscovering the primordial power of poetry, its prophetic force and subversive effect.
— Le Monde

Originally published in 1945 by Les Éditions de l'Oubli in Bucharest, The Passive Vampire caught the attention of the French Surrealists when an excerpt appeared in 1947 alongside texts by Jabès and Michaux in Georges Henein's magazine La part du sable. Luca, whose work was admired by Gilles Deleuze, attempts here to transmit the "shudder" evoked by some Surrealist texts, such as André Breton's Nadja and Mad Love, probing with acerbic humor the fragile boundary between "objective chance" and delirium.

Impossible to define, The Passive Vampire is a mixture of theoretical treatise and breathless poetic prose, personal confession and scientific investigation - it is 18 photographs of "objectively offered objects," a category created by Luca to occupy the space opened up by Breton. At times taking shape as assemblages, these objects are meant to capture chance in its dynamic and dramatic forms by externalizing the ambivalence of our drives and bringing to light the nearly continual equivalence between our love-hate tendencies and the world of things.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Romania, France, Philosophy, Gothic, Romanian Literature

139 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1945

About the author

Born in Bucharest the son of a Jewish tailor, he spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German, and French. During 1938, he traveled frequently to Paris where he was introduced to the Surrealist circles. World War II and the official antisemitism in Romania forced him into local exile. During the short pre-Communist period of Romanian independence, he founded a Surrealist artists group, together with Gellu Naum, Paul Păun, Virgil Teodorescu and Dolfi Trost.

His first publications, including poems in French followed. He was the inventor of cubomania and, with Dolfi Trost, the author of the statement "Dialetic of Dialectic" in 1945. Harassed in Romania and caught while trying to flee the country, the self-called étran-juif ("StranJew") finally left Romania in 1952, and moved to Paris through Israel.

There he worked among others with Jean Arp, Paul Celan, François Di Dio and Max Ernst, producing numerous collages, drawings, objects, and text-installations. From 1967, his reading sessions took him to places like Stockholm, Oslo, Geneva, New York City, and San Francisco. The 1988 TV-portrait by Raoul Sanglas, Comment s'en sortir sans sortir, made him famous for a larger readership.

In 1994, he was expelled from his apartment officially for "hygiene reasons." Luca had spent forty years in France without papers and could not cope. On February 9, at the age of 80, he committed suicide by jumping into the Seine.[1:]

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fine surrealist text by the Romanian Ghérasim Luca. Not easily classified, it is divided into two sections: (1) The Objectively Offered Object, which introduces said concept as a practical application of surrealism—detailing methods of construction and transference, and the symbolism within said methods; and (2) The Passive Vampire, which unfurls a poetic narrative of sorts, weaving and binding the objects (as depicted in interleaved photos) through and to the text. This second section condemns 'straight' society, depicting instead a kind of surrealist utopia in which dreams are of equal value to diurnal thought and experience.

We approach the world of phantoms as we would a reality lying outside this world at odds with itself, a world with no valid correspondence within ourselves. In the world in which I like to breathe, a box can take on the same psychic content of a beloved woman; the delirious and fetishistic love between a man and a box thus casts a prophetic, thaumaturgic light onto the outer world.

Luca is possessed of a unique vision in which dark imagery coincides elegantly with a sly twist of subtle humor—an approach rarely attempted, and even less frequently successful in its execution, but one that fully engages me as a reader.

Since I've started living out my dreams, since I've become the contemporary of the centuries to come, I no longer know death under the annihilating guise it has maintained in today's society. Only in my moments of deepest depression do I realise that in that world of swine into which I was born I shall be forced to die, just as out in the street I'm obliged to rub shoulders with priests and cops.

[Eadweard · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The artificial flowers carried artificially in a lover’s arms are laid at the feet of the beloved so that the artificial society in which we live might prolong its death throes."
----




“Since I've started living out my dreams, since I've become the contemporary of the centuries to come, I no longer know death under the annihilating guise it has maintained in today's society. Only in my moments of deepest depression do I realise that in that world of swine into which I was born I shall be forced to die, just as out in the street I'm obliged to rub shoulders with priests and cops.”
----





“Objects, these mysterious suits of armour beneath which desire awaits us, nocturnal and laid bare, these snares made of velvet, of bronze, of gossamer that we throw at ourselves with each step we take; hunter and prey in the shadows of forests, at once forest, poacher, and woodcutter, that woodcutter killed at the foot of a tree and covered with his own beard smelling of incense, well-being, and of the that’s-not-possible; free at last, alone at last with ourselves and with everyone else, advancing in the darkness with feline eyes, with jackals’ teeth, with hair in lyrical, tousled ringlets, beneath a shirt of veins and arteries through which the blood flows for the first time, we’re lit up inside ourselves by the giant spotlights of the very first gesture, saying what must be said, doing what must be done, led among the lianas, butterflies, and bats, like the black and white on a chessboard; no one would dream of forbidding the black squares and the bishop—the ants vanish, the king and queen vanish, the alarm clocks vanish in turn, we reintroduce the walking stick, the bicycle with odd wheels, the timepiece, the airship, keeping the siphon, the telephone receiver, the shower head, the lift, the syringe, the automatic mechanisms that deliver chocolate when numbered buttons are pressed; objects, this catalepsy, this steady spasm, this “stream one never steps in twice,” and into which we plunge as into a photograph; objects, those philosopher’s stones that dis- cover, transform, hallucinate, communicate our screaming, those stone-screams that break the waves, through which the rainbow, living images, images of the image will pass, I dream of you because I dream of myself, hypnotically I aim at the diamond contained within you, before falling asleep, before you fall asleep, we pass through each other like two ghosts in a marble room whose walls are hung with life-sized portraits of our ancestors, with the portrait of a mediaeval knight next to the portrait of a chair gazing at the two fossils of ghosts on the walls of this spectral museum, and if it is true that we are shadows, then the people and the objects all around us here are nothing but the bones of shadows, the shadows of shadows..”

[Ronald Morton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ghérasim Luca was "born in Bucharest the son of a Jewish tailor, Berl Locker (died 1914), he spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German, and French. During 1938, he traveled frequently to Paris where he was introduced to the Surrealist circles. World War IIand the official antisemitism in Romania forced him into local exile. During the short pre-Communist period of Romanian independence, he founded a Surrealist artists group, together with Gellu Naum, Paul Păun, Virgil Teodorescu and Dolfi Trost."

Super depressingly he survived WW2, moved to France where we lived for 40 years; at the age of 80 (in 1994) he was evicted from his apartment and, unable to cope, committed suicide by throwing himself into the Seine.

Apparently he was a big influence on Deleuze and Guattari, and wrote anti-Oedipal fiction decades prior to the two of them composing Anti-Oedipus.

The Passive Vampire is broken into two distinct sections. The first section - The Objectively Offered Object - is a mostly theory driven essay where Luca introduces an additional Surrealistic Object. It's actual distinction from the originally proposed objects went a bit over my head; I was worried this would effect my understanding of the second section - The Passive Vampire - especially as the objectively offered object is referenced almost immediately. I needn't have worried, as the second section almost entirely surrealistic prose poetry and my lack of understanding of the introductory theory was only a portion of my general lack of understanding.

That said (and I tend to not expect an overall understanding when approaching surrealist texts) the second section is a solid - if entirely too brief - slice of surrealism. For a long while this was only available in the insanely scarce first printing; it took basically 60 years for any sort of reprint, and then another 20 for this edition to come about. All surrealism is welcome surrealism, though this should mostly be considered second tier, and approached only after the major works have been tackled.

[Monica Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sur - re - al - ism (n.) -(often l.c.) a style of art and literature developed principally in the 20th century, stressing the subconscious or nonrational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions, etc.




The Passive Vampire is not what you think. It's not a book about vampires. It's not a book about passivity. It's not science fiction and it's not a horror story. What it is is challenging, semi-autobiographical, surrealist dissertation, erotic in a removed, intellectual George Bataille sort of way, and a book with a lot to offer but only to those who are open to understanding it (subtext=THIS IS NOT A BEACH READ! Not even a rocky beach read). It is not a novel, even though there is narrative, it is not a poem, but it is poetic, it is not a memoir, although it is revealing-it is, my friends, a book to reckon with with all your might.

Gherasim Luca, a prominent force of the Romanian Surrealist movement, was mainly a poet but has created a genuine artifact of the genre bending kind. When I began reading this book, which was originally published in 1945, I couldn't quite figure out what I was reading. Soon I realized that it was better that I didn't; I just experienced it without qualifying it as I would with a piece of art. The books is divided into two parts: The Objectively Offered Object and The Passive Vampire. The first part being more philosophical and intellectual while the second part is more lyrical and personal. Luca introduces us to the idea of offering objects and what it takes to give and receive them:

For a found or made object to be transformed into an offered object, and for it to be able to change its nature in line with the new relationships established in the interior life of the individual seeking a new balance between the internal and external, the pretext to this transformation must have an interpretive value that is, if not always negligible, at least very limited. The offering of an object might have as its setting the pretext of decoration, or a celebration, or some other external and circumstantial accident, just as the manifest life of a dream uses diurnal remnants and random internal and external stimuli to provide the sleeper a framework of no interpretational value within which the action of the dream can unfold.

Not only does he use diurnal remnants in an offhand manner, he applies the same type of processing with objects. And like any good surrealist, he questions why objects aren't what they used to be and blames this on the bourgeoisie:

In today's society, the offered object bears no qualitative relation to the gift. The gift is an object that is bestowed only after having been stripped of its objective erotic character. Its emotive force is neutralised by its standardisations, which has allowed the bourgeoisie to thwart the differentiation of individual tendencies and thus offer one more argument in support of contemporary morality, which is presented as the only all-encompassing morality possible.*

*Bourgeoisie love, practised within defined forms, runs from the useless engagement present to the useful and costly wedding gift via the two quantitative phases of the same sentimentalism.

I thought this particularly insightful, even if a tad bitter. Adding to the intermittent bitterness, there are pictures of objects Luca has made that are disturbing, engaging, erotic and banal. I don't want to get into their significance because doing so would ruin the reader's experience with the book which by no means should be marred by my thoughts. I wish I could easily categorize much of what Luca writes, but I can't. Some of it are dream experiences he conveys through a blurry, delusive lens for us to determine its value. Some of it is sexual and primal. Some of it is passionate and beautiful. I connected more so with The Passive Vampire and its fluid musings:

Objects, these mysterious suits of armour beneath which desire awaits us, nocturnal and laid bare, these snares made of velvet, of bronze, of gossamer that we throw at ourselves with each step we take; hunter and prey int he shadows of forests, at once forest, poacher, and woodcutter, that woodcutter killed at the foot of a tree and covered with his own beard smelling of incense, well-being, and of the that's -not-possible; free at last, alone at last with ourselves and with everyone else, advancing in the darkness with feline eyes, with jackals' teeth, with hair in lyrical, tousled ringlets, beneath a shirt of veins and arteries through which the blood flows for the first time, we're lit up inside ourselves bu the giant spotlights of the very first gesture, saying what must be said, doing what must be done, led among the lianas, butterflies, and bats, like the black and white on a chessboard; no one would dream of forbidding the black squares and the bishop--the ants vanish, the king and queen vanish, the alarm clocks vanish in turn, we reintroduce the walking stick, the bicycle with odd wheels, the timepiece, the airship, keeping the siphon, the telephone receiver, the shower head, the lift, the syringe, the automatic mechanisms that deliver chocolate when numbered buttons are pressed;

That's the impressive opening to The Passive Vampire, one long, vivid sentence replete with associations and emotions that continues for another page and half. I found this part of the book most mesmerizing and less challenging because Luca threads together his powerful prose with emotional substance and intellect. This book incites confusion and offers no facile answers. Instead it asks you to look at objects, their significance and their manifestation of ourselves and society. Even if some would consider this art criticism, there is a philosophical element that urges us to examine our relationships to the objects in our life and what they say about us.

This may not typify Romanians, but its a rediscovered work of merit that reflects the Romanian Surrealist movement and the importance it held for not just for Romanian Surrealists, but for Surrealists everywhere.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great little book of surrealism with some excellent poetic dreamlike writing and some interesting accompanying photographs. It's beyond my understanding on many levels - a bonus! - and the best way to illustrate the appeal is to quote from it:

"The fibres of a watch stopped at midnight and the fibres of a whale drowned in the Pacific spin in the dark an aluminium net for trawling for cathedrals."

If that floats your boat, read the book. If it doesn't then you're unlikely to enjoy it.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Passive Vampire is the title
Gherasim LUCA is the Author
Krzysztof Fijalkowski is the translator

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm reading The Passive Vampire: Fascinating personal account of readymade-making and artistic gift-giving by an overlooked Romanian Dadaist.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 1945, Gherasim Luca’s The Passive Vampire is a provocative and erotically charged love letter to the French surrealist group. A french letter one might say, given that the Rumanian Luca (real name Salman Locker) wrote not in his native tongue but that of André Breton and the surrealists he had recently met in Paris; it is a prophylactic act of love disseminating and inseminating the ‘red threat of Reality’ - a singular erotic gesture in a time of darkness and absence.

The book is divided into two distinct sections. The first in a remarkable account of a surrealist ‘game’, the Objectively Offered Object (OOO), not unlike Dali’s ‘Symbolically Functioning Object’ whereby everyday objects are transformed in some kind of manic/erotic state before being ‘offered’ to another and subjected to radical psychoanalytical analysis. The aim of this ‘game’, Luca states, is nothing less than ‘to discover a new object of knowledge [...] a new objective possibility of resolving dialectically the conflict between interior and exterior worlds...’ This echoes one of the central tenets of the Rumanian Surrealists’ manifesto, Dialectics of the Dialectic written by Luca and Dolfi Trost in 1945, that surrealists, in their adherence to dialectical materialism, must continue ‘to envisage the possibility of these permanent confrontations between interior reality and exterior reality’.

Through the OOO game we see the development of a distinct methodology of dialectical investigation through the operation of desire and objective chance, prising apart the binary configurations of bourgeois ‘reality’: inner/outer, self/other, chance/necessity, man/woman, day/night, dream/reality, death and its negation. The transformed objects are themselves quite startling. The Letter L, for instance, offered to André Breton, is an old wooden doll covered in riddles taken from the pages of an almanac with the head of another doll attached to its groin which itself is covered in razor blades with one – à la Un Chien Andalou – sliced into an eye. But what is more remarkable than even the Nadja-like photographic evidence of these objects, is Luca’s honest and lucid analysis of their making. Through the offered object, a lover’s triangle is formed through an association with Breton’s Nadja, Luca’s wife and Luca’s desire to form a rapport with Breton, replete with infidelities and jealousies.

I could satisfy my desire towards B. while avoiding painful consequences and at the same time have the means to take revenge on the double infidelity committed by my wife and B. I mutilated the head (the sex) using several razor blades and, as a supreme ejaculation, with the last one I sliced the doll’s eye. This convulsive-sadistic action thus took on a concrete, bewitching value. (pp 47-8)

This ‘supreme ejaculation’ reminds me very much of the delirious erotic language used by Georges Bataille (e.g. Histoire de l’oeil, Ma Mère, La Morte) denoting an ‘inner experience’ which forces or exceeds a given limit within being. The pitch of Luca’s prose is often at a similar frequency. For example, attaching a spoon to a starfish on another object is an ‘all-too directly pederastic operation’; he sees in objects the revelation of his ‘bisexual tendencies’ which are ‘permanently indissoluble’. The object objectively offered and subjected to rigorous documentation and analysis, thus become a hugely erotic and talismanic portal (like a dream) into the very nature of intersubjectivity This subject, however, is not whole or, indeed, wholesome but radically and erotically divided in itself, one might even say ‘schizoid’ (pre-figuring the academic post-modern concern for the ‘divided self’). But this delirious schizophrenia is not abandoned to sheer lunacy. What we also see in the game are also the mechanics and machinations of objective chance which, according to Luca and Trost: 'constitutes for us the most awesome means to locate the relative-absolute aspects of reality... Objective chance leads us to see in love the general revolutionary method that is unsullied by idealistic remnants'.

What objective chance reveals between subject and object is a third, ‘phantom’ object. We might this ‘love’ but, like all phantoms, it eludes true definition. Certainly the final pages of part two’s include a paean to an elusive lover, Déline, and an extended meditation on the concept and nature of love.

...there also emerged LOVE, mad and lucid, real and virtual, living and dead like Déline’s hair. As Déline, the indecipherable ghost of love, fell asleep on my shoulder she darkened the darkness. (p. 134)

Neither object nor subject this amour fou is a ghost which functions, at a textual level, not unlike Roland Barthes’ ‘third meaning’ (i.e. a signifier without a signified’) becoming a field of operation whereby the traditional binary opposites subject/object, exterior/interior dissolve deliriously in a poetic prose of constant metaphorical exchange, verbal collage and assemblage (or de-assemblage).

I close my eyes, as active as a vampire, I open them within myself, as passive as a vampire, and between the blood that arrives, the blood that leaves, and the blood already inside me there occurs an exchange of images like an engagement of daggers. Now I could eat a piano, shoot a table, inhale a staircase. (p. 83)

The book’s second half, The Passive Vampire is thus more lyrical and linguistically searching. Luca plays with various registers from straight biography, hysterical Post-Romantic poetical flourishes and satanic litanies to pseudo-scientific formulae; its vocabulary includes the language of psychoanalysis, the language of flowers, even the signification of individual letters (L, D, X, OOO, R). What Luca objectively offers the reader is the constant transformation - or ghost - of an indecipherable discourse (is this book, for instance: poetry/prose/novel/psychological case study/documentary/grimoire...? (again, one is put in mind of the genre-defying Bataille as described in Barthes’ essay ‘From Work to Text’)). The Passive Vampire, in other words, is itself an Objectively Offered Object in the form of an extended love letter in which the text, with the complicity of the reader, is the object undergoing an exhilarating erotic revolution. It is the gift of poetry as a dark, waking dream-state, one of those ‘fortuitous encounters’ leading to a knowledge and transformation of relationships between individuals that ‘becomes the somnambulistic manifestation of the collective unconsciousness in its waking state, thus consummating its nocturnal dream form.’

The Passive Vampire is excellently translated and introduced by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and is what the broadsheets would call ‘essential reading’. It is undoubtedly a ‘classic’ of the surrealist tradition while at the same time the kind of text that puts into question the very notions of classic and tradition. Offer yourself to it.

[Jim Ivy · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first read about this book and the Bucharest Surrealists, I assumed their work would contain too much reverence to the French Surrealists to really stand apart, and true enough, the introduction by Krzysztof Fijalkowski, who provided the translation, somewhat overemphasizes Luca's obsession with Andre Breton. In fact, it so resembles the French Surrealist form and structure that it prevented me from giving it the fifth star. But I must say that I personally believe Luca's writing to be much more clever and witty than Breton's work. Where Breton made sure everything adhered to Surrealist doctrine, Luca lets the imagery fly; provocative, absurd, hyper-concentrated, sometimes awkward, but always interesting. Don't get me wrong, I am not criticizing Breton, who's work I admire, I just found The Passive Vampire to be a more interesting read than anything Breton wrote that was non-linear. Yes, The Passive Vampire is not a vampire story, not is it allegorical, in fact it's not a story at all. It is, however, one of the best examples I've read of Surrealist automatism and juxtaposition. A bold statement, but if you are skeptical, just read Luca's own introduction; The Objectively Offered Object, and try not to have a good time. The writing is so dry-witted and extremely funny that it more resembles Absurdist humor than Surrealism. You know what, screw it! I'm giving it the fifth star.

[RJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's funny because a lot is made in the introduction and actual text of Luca's obsession with and reverence for Andre Breton, but so far I've found this to be a superior text to anything of Breton's I've read. I find Luca to be an infinitely more sympathetic human being than Breton, as well, which isn't surprising.

There is a strange objective distance in the writing sometimes that, combined with the pseudo-Freudian sexually-obsessed analysis that's going on, almost reminds me of writing by social shut-ins or outsider artists like Ulillillia or something. The descriptions of the objects are fantastic, and the episode after the earthquake in particular is extremely haunting - there are some great, dreamlike images conjured up and ruthlessly dissected with honesty not many people could achieve (it's great to see Luca openly admitting bisexuality over and over again in this text, considering the time and place it was written!).

This book should certainly be considered a major classic of Surrealism and ought to be at least as widely read as Nadja or Story of the Eye.

[Heypelin]

Pierwsze spotkanie z rumuńskim surrealizmem. Ciekawe doświadczenie, pewnie sięgnę po kolejne teksty Luki oraz innych rumuńskich autorów, choć muszę przyznać, że wolę surrealizm malarski niż literacki

[Marga Benavides · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gherasim Luca fue un poeta rumano vinculado con el surrealismo. Se suicidó en 1994 lanzándose al Sena. 

El vampiro pasivo es un Ensayo filosófico compuesto entre 1940-1941 en Bucarest y publicado en 1945. Alterna texto con imágenes y por todos lados rezuma el sexo. Habla del sexo con dureza, con dulzura pero sobre todo con la certeza de que todo gira alrededor del sexo. 

🔹

"Conflicto entre el mundo interior y el mundo exterior". 

No siempre lo que pensamos está en consonancia con lo que ocurre a nuestro alrededor. Ni nos convence su formalismo porque nuestro interior es más visceral. 

🔹

"Objetos que proyectan el deseo". 

Quizas sea mi mente la que al dar un vistazo alrededor solo ve objetos relacionados con formas relacionadas con el sexo. Algo que parece le ocurría también al autor. 

 🔹

 "El placer de adornar y ser adornados" 

 Acicalarse y disfrutar de aquellos que están acicalados. 

 🔹

 "El regalo de la sociedad actual es un objeto que se ofrece tras habérsele exprimido todos sus caracteres eróticos objetivos".

 La intolerancia hacia todo aquello que tiene que ver con el sexo, despojando a los objetos de ese valor sexual. 

 🔹

 "Las flores  y los bombones se han convertido casi en la tarjeta de visita del amor desinteresado y del homenaje".

 Parece mentira que haya sido escrito en 1945, porque ahora mismo yo creo que tanto las flores como los bombones son regalos ofrecidos solicitando un perdón, un acercamiento, pero poco o nada sexual. 

 🔹

" Es demasiado común ofrecer pendientes a una mujer, se los ofreceré a un hombre para diferenciarme".

Y aquí lo he visto como un hombre adelantado a su tiempo, en el que no es el objeto lo importante si no el regalo, sea para quien sea. 

 🔹

" Por lo general, cuando me piden objetos coleccionados me niego a darlos, porque casi siempre entre ellos y yo se ha establecido una ligazón que sería inútil explicar aquí, por ser un aspecto demasiado conocido". 

Esto me pasa a mi con los libros. Me produce desazón prestarlos, aunque los haya leído mil veces. 

 🔹

 La masturbación, las pulsiones sexuales o el erotismo se entrelazan con una ciudad víctima de los estragos de la guerra. Donde el autor hace de mero espectador que no interviene en la guerra y simplemente se autocomplace para olvidar el horror de lo visto. 

 🔹

 "Un final revolucionario del mundo era y es a mis ojos inseparable de una revolución de la psique." 

 Hay una clara división del libro. Una parte primera más caótica y dirigida a explicarnos esas imágenes raras y parece que construidas por el. Y una segunda parte que se perfila más poética, con una prosa excepcional, donde nos narra de forma más coherente la relación entre personas y el sexo y más sexo. 

 🔹

 He utilizado frases del propio libro para ir centrando mis comentarios y facilitar el entendimiento del ensayo. Espero que os sea de utilidad. Reconozco que a mi me ha costado iniciar su lectura y es en la segunda parte donde he volado entre sus páginas. 

[Nick Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book by the Romanian surrealist, Luca (his pen-name was chosen from a list of obituaries), is like a breath of fresh air in a world of vapid hypocrisy. It's magical, liberating, disturbing, fiercely beautiful. There's plot, no characters, no resolution just a stream of consciousness monologue touching on the writer's obsessions with sex, death, morality and art. It contains seventeen illustrations of Luca's found or partially constructed objects. Reading it is like floating through a dream world that, in the manner of dreams, only half makes sense but it has a hypnotic fascination.

[Dylan Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange but brilliant dark book is a study of power and sexual. An modernist or possible post-modern surrealist nightmare as if Comte de Lautréamont had lived to see the many horrors of the modern age and they had informed his visions or nightmares.

[Gabrielle Danoux · Rating 3 out of 5]

Il s'agit ici du premier livre écrit par l'auteur directement en français et publié clandestinement à Bucarest en 1945. Cette troisième édition des chez José Corti a été revue et « mise au point » par Nadèjda et Thierry Garrel.
De quoi s'agit-il ? Difficile à dire (en peu de mots). le sous-titre indique « avec une introduction sur l'objet objectivement offert, un portrait trouvé et dix-sept illustrations ».
Dans un article des Inrockuptibles, Fabrice Gabriel écrit : « Le Vampire passif témoigne de ce que fut Luca en ses années de formation révoltée : lire aujourd'hui cet ouvrage illustré de 18 photographies d'objets objectivement offerts c'est éprouver d'abord le frisson d'une époque révolue ».
Désarmée face à ce texte difficile à appréhender, aux accents philosophiques et qui invoque souvent la sexualité, j'ai ressorti l'essai de Dominique Carlat, Gherasim Luca l'intempestif, pour quelques considérations éclairantes. On peut y lire : « la réflexion consacrée à l'offre objective de l'objet trouve ainsi son fondement dans le cadre d'une pensée de l'échange poétique ou artistique qui nourrit lui-même le secret appelant à son dépassement. Gherasim Luca invite à une pratique de la circulation qui refuse l'épargne : des objets, des textes, des images de soi ». Après avoir proposé une très intéressante analyse du contexte historique de la parution de ce livre, Dominique Carlat, affirme : « pour qui demeure disponible à tous les signes, l'offre dont Gherasim Luca fera le centre de l'expérience du hasard objectif participerait donc d'un mouvement universel. le Vampire passif est entièrement dirigé par le désir inexpugnable de maintenir cette utopie. [...]. Le sujet abordé, le rôle du hasard objectif dans les liens qui lient les membres du groupe surréaliste, va conduire Gherasim Luca à révéler avec fausse candeur et truculence de quels désirs mêlés se fonde toute relation collective. [...] Les premiers textes de Gherasim Luca, au premier rang desquels le Vampire passif, cherchent à prolonger l'ébranlement suscité par les textes surréalistes. Par un mouvement réversible cette lecture vient, en retour, questionner les textes lus et les limites qu'inconsciemment ils s'étaient imposées. Ainsi, Gherasim Luca s'interroge sur la fragilité de la frontière établie entre le hasard objectif et le délire d'interprétation. [...] le Vampire passif se présente comme un objet littéralement impossible à définir : mêlant exposé théorique et prose poétique haletante, confessions personnelles et excursus universalisants, adresses personnelles et visée "scientifique", la position d'énonciation qu'il adopte se caractérise par une instabilité constante. Aucune définition générique, aucune analyse pragmatique des gestes de parole qu'il accomplit ne semble susceptible de cerner son identité. Mais ce trait semble moins tenir à une volonté expresse d'échapper à toute prise qu'à la teneur même de son propos. Celui-ci est fondé sur une intuition initiale développée dans la préface dont le propos pourrait originellement sembler uniquement théorique : Gherasim Luca propose de projeter sur notre rapport à l'univers, à sa globalité, la conception surréaliste de la rencontre ».
Il y a donc dans ce texte un aspect programmatique que je ne trouve pas très passionnant.
Finalement, ce que je préfère chez Gherasim Luca c'est l'esthétique du bégaiement de ses poèmes ultérieurs.
Le bilan : lecture dispensable, même si je me souviendrai de la poupée (figure 2, la lettre L) achetée chez un antiquaire et recouverte de charades découpées dans les almanachs.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published in 1945 as Romanian Ghérasim Luca’s exercise in surrealism, The Passive Vampire consists of two parts, “The Objectively Offered Object” and the eponymous “The Passive Vampire”—theory, with examples, and practice.

“Objectively offered objects,” aka O.O.O., consist of dissimilar items brought together, upon which the human brain, anxious to make sense of what lies before it, imposes an implication of relatedness so strained the results—what one makes of what is before oneself—are weird and dreamlike, like the effect created by Joseph Cornell’s boxes.

When introducing the concept of the O.O.O., Luca first seems to be creating an alternative form of Saussurian semiotics by imbuing common, mass-produced objects with a quasi-animist relationship between a subject and the object it sees. Luca sets to show how common items, when given and accepted as gifts, generate between the giver and receiver significant emotional bonds. But once this point in the narrative is reached and the examples begin, the Land of Surrealism has arrived with it bizarre and funny anecdotes related to various O.O.O.s Luca assembled and offered as gifts, the people they were meant for, what happened when the objects were offered, and so forth. The objects are as eccentric as the relationships.

The second, eponymous essay seems to itself be an O.O.O. to the reader, complimented by photographed instances of other O.O.O.s. (The placement of the visuals throughout the book is weird and arbitrary, apart from being sequential, often appearing many pages after their introduction and discussion.) Given the story’s fast pace, quickly turning and quirkily described subjects, I suspect that automatic writing may have factored into its composition.

Via the book’s footnotes, readers are also given insight into other actors in Romania’s surrealism scene at the time and their output. Kudos again to Twisted Spoon Presa and their translators for making available in English unknown or overlooked Central European writers.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Brad Dunn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frankly, quite unreadable. While it was published back in the 40's, its age is not the concern. But it is a surrealist mess. At times its interesting, but in sum, its a book about objects which this guy finds, and then gives—sometimes to other objects—but it kind of weaves into all kinds of linguistic car accidents. Its a surrealist book, but equally, this is not the concern. I don't know what to make of it, honestly. It reminds me a lot of Hans Bellmer's "The Doll", which also, I recall being really fascinated with, but could hardly stomach.

[Majestativa]

Advancing in the darkness with feline eyes.

& the dark darkens.