Pasolini's Our - by Nathanaël (Paperback)

About the Book

A philosophical and epigrammatic meditation on a body immersed in language, history and place, refracted through film, photography and architecture

Book Synopsis

The body of the filmmaker is itself a discrepancy. This may be one of this book's claims, if it were to advance something like an argument. Instead it writes its way through to a dry swamp, in the elusive company of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mizoguchi Kenji, and the albatross, evincing procedures of extinction that owe something to both translation and photography. Its armament, approximating the latent architectures of the Berlin Wall, is held up against the declensions of film, its destructibility. What might otherwise be read as a criminal investigation whose many pieces of evidence reproduce a body whose principal characteristic is that it is found neither in language nor at the edge of a scrubby beach.

About the Author

Nathanaël is the author of more than a score of books written in English or in French, including Feder (2016); Sotto l'immagine (2014) and Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal (2012). The French-language notebooks, Carnet de désaccords (2009), Carnet de délibérations (2011), and Carnet de somme (2012) were recast in English in a single volume as The Middle Notebookes (2015), which received the inaugural Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature.The essay of correspondence, Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book) (2009) was first published in French as L'absence au lieu (2007). Nathanaël's work has been translated into Basque, Greek, Slovene, and Spanish (Mexico), with book-length publications in Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazil). The recipient of the Prix Alain-Grandbois for ...s'arrête? Je (2008), Nathanaël's translations include works by Édouard Glissant, Catherine Mavrikakis, and Hilda Hilst (the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo). Nathanaël's translation of Murder by Danielle Collobert was a finalist for a Best Translated Book Award in 2014. Her translation of The Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert has been recognized by fellowships from the PEN American Center and the Centre National du Livre de France. Nathanaël lives in Chicago.