Excess—The Factory [electronic resource].

Commune Editions AK Press 2018

Open access content

In 1968, the American-born French poet Leslie Kaplan went to work in a factory. She did so out of choice rather than necessity, part of a generation of Maoist établis, university-educated radicals who entered the factory in order to organize the working class. Excess—The Factory evokes the tumult of those years through an encounter with the serial violence of the assembly line, descending by way of infernal workshops to reach the dark center of capitalist accumulation. Hailed by French luminaries such as Maurice Blanchot and Marguerite Duras as a unique event in writing, the book was at once legendary and all but lost to English-language readers. This long overdue translation by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap, true to the original’s spare, declarative tone, returns the book and its complex moment to new readers. Ferocious, despairing, beautiful line by line, this book captures the era we cannot stop leaving.
https://www.librarystack.org/excess-the-factory/?ref=unknown

Art and literature
Communism
Violence

Text

Leslie Kaplan
Jennifer Pap
Julie Carr
Front Group Design
Amze Emmons