In this essay, I wish to expand on the range of possibilities encompassed by the term ‘biopoetry’ as coined by Eduardo Kac in 1999, by exploring an alternate example of the genre in a recent collaborative work by Galician poet Chus Pato and Canadian poet Erín Moure, Secession/Insecession (2014). I also wish to situate the emerging field of biopoetry within Merleau-Ponty’s theories of the phenomenology of language and expression, which share with both Kac and Pato/Moure a vital interest in the boundaries between speaking and non-speaking worlds and contain what I believe to be elements of a poetic theory pertinent to 21st century biopoetics. While Kac’s biological experiments (quite literally) offer voice to the bacterial world, Pato and Moure, in contrast, situate the poet in a space removed from language, where she writes in ‘secession’ from institutionalized words through the trope of poetry as ‘prosthesis’. Although their visions of biopoetry appear to mark opposite ends of a spectrum, the works of Kac and Pato/Moure each offer poetry as a translational bridge, navigating tensions between worlds. Ultimately, biopoetry stirs questions of political and ethical concern through experimental forms that contest the dominion of words over nature. At stake is the reclamation of the radical alterity of non-speaking worlds, to include the ‘muteness’ of time, geographic territories, and languages lost through forced migration, in addition to the ‘otherness’ of non-human biological life. Biopoetry plays at the margins, testing the fragile ground between a human world demarcated by language, and a world that has no need of it, or of us.
Eduardo Kac’s experiments with the transfer of genetic material between sentence patterns and plant and animal life mark the starting point of 21st century biopoetics. In Telepresence & Bio Art (2005), Kac describes his Genesis project (1998-99) as “a transgenic artwork that explores the intricate relationship among biology, belief systems, information technology, dialogical interaction, ethics, and the Internet” (Kac 249). For this art installation, Kac invented a synthetic “biblical gene” by translating a sentence from the book of Genesis first into Morse code, and then “into DNA base pairs,” which he then introduced to a culture of live bacteria. The biblical gene caused the bacteria to mutate, which in turn caused a mutation in the biblical sentence, “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (249). Kac’s choice of sentences is telling, revelatory of the significance of his linguistic gesture: while any sentence translated into DNA patterns would have undergone a genetic mutation, he selected a sentence that has theologically justified man’s rule over nature, inviting a dialogic response from the natural (and subjugated) world. As Kac writes, “[t]his sentence was chosen for its implications regarding the dubious notion of (divinely sanctioned) humanity’s supremacy over nature” (251). When Kac converted the DNA pattern from the transgenic bacteria back into human language, “the mutated sentence read: ‘LET AAN HAVE DOMINION OVER THE FISH OF THE SEA AND OVER THE FOWL OF THE AIR AND OVER EVERY LIVING THING THAT IOVES UA EON THE EARTH” (254, Kac’s emphasis). Kac’s Genesis project stirs questions regarding agency, authorship, and the conditions of possibility for interspecies communication, pressing the boundaries of intersubjective exchange to their outermost limits. He cites Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on our “not-sameness” as “the very condition of communication,” where “it is in the ambiguity of intersubjectivity that our perception ‘wakes up’” (280). Against the objection that a dish of live bacteria lacks the intentionality necessary for a dialogic exchange, Kac’s experiment questions the role perception plays in our understanding of author and agency: who is it that determines whether the mutated sentence does or not constitute a dialogic response from the non-speaking, bacterial world, and based upon what criteria?
Kac also anticipates the objection that his Genesis project “simply reiterates human dominion over another species” (252), arguing on the contrary that his live installation confronts the question of mastery, especially when his interactive exhibit forces viewers into a participatory role in deciding whether or not to activate a UV light that accelerates the rate of mutation in the bacteria (251). Kac’s exhibit—which “enables local as well as remote (Web) participants to monitor the evolution of the work” (251)—forces an ethical dilemma: a decision not to activate the UV light leaves the biblical sentence unchanged, “preserving its meaning of dominion,” while a decision to activate the light “changes the sentence and its meaning but [the viewer] does not know what new versions might emerge” (252). Kac’s Genesis display is therefore a type of performance art—or what he calls “performative ethics”—that directly engages the viewer in performance, “choreographing the expressive gesturality of ethics at the service of plastic imagination” (254). Kac notes that the “telepresence” of remote participants able to physically intervene in an art exhibit stimulates the paradox of “the presence-absence experience” addressed by Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind,” a phenomenon of perception suggestive that “perhaps all ‘presence’ is somewhat removed, remote, caught in an oscillation between presence and absence,” which is a question of renewed interest in our current age of virtual reality (149).
SECESSION/INSECESSION
Chus Pato and Erín Moure’s Secession/Insecession (2014), subtitled in their inscriptions as “a biopoetics” and “a biopoetics and echolation,” respectively,1 appears to hold little in common with Eduardo Kac’s early experiments with biopoetry. While Kac’s experiments create a transgenic mutation of biological and linguistic code patterns, Pato and Moure’s collaborative work advances a biopoetry that concerns itself with migrations of language and culture through historical time and place, brought to a crisis by the death camps of World War II and the redrawing of political boundaries following the war. Rather than mutant DNA, Pato and Moure explore the effects of “mutant territories”2 upon language and memory, addressing ways language itself is subject to colonization, political domination, and erasures of identity and culture. While Kac’s work pioneers a method of transmuting human text to biological life forms, Pato and Moure concern themselves with “the relation of transmissibility” through “the relation of text to bodies” (S/I 112). In contrast to Kac’s live art installation, Secession/Insecession is printed as parallel texts, on facing pages: on the right facing page is Pato’s Secession, translated by Erín Moure from the original Galician into Canadian English; on the left facing page is Moure’s “echolation” of the translated text, which parallels Moure’s own biopoetic scenes to the work in translation. Moure’s “echolation” makes visible the traditionally invisible role of the translator: rather than effacing her presence in the work of translation, Moure discloses ‘echoes’ from her own life story, which in turn evoke echoes in response from the reader.
The physical configuration of the Pato/Moure text engages the reader as an active participant in a different manner, but just as insistently, as the viewer of Kac’s installation piece. While Kac’s viewers must decide whether or not to accelerate the rate of genetic mutation, readers of Secession/Insecession must decide how to proceed through 63 parallel passages in decisions which alter their unfolding—passages that capture biographical scenes from Pato’s experience as a Galician national in Spain, and Moure’s experience as a English speaking native of Alberta, Canada, of mixed Polish, Ukranian, and Galician heritage.3 Although Pato/Moure’s vision of biopoetry does not match the degree of immediate physical intervention that Kac’s work imposes upon the viewer, Secession/Insecession also initiates a play of intersubjectivity that forestalls the possibility of a passive witness. In these contrasting examples of biopoetry, decisions of the viewer/reader are performative, among configurations of interactive texts, whether printed (Secession/Insecession) or encoded DNA (Genesis).
Moure and Pato’s biopoetics suggest that reading as an act of embodiment is not merely symbolic, but a literal exchange between body and text. Moure investigates the transmissibility of text to bodies through the affect of language on brain activity, noting that “poems, being ambiguous, activate cells in more areas of the frontal cortex… When we read literature, we equip our brains to deal with ambiguous speech” (30). While Moure doesn’t go so far as to define language as consciousness, she notes that “consciousness is aware of language. Consciousness is language reversible and striated in the cells” (104). To posit the idea of consciousness at the cellular level, as language “striated in the cells,” probes the boundaries of sensate and insensate life not only between species—as in Kac’s experiment—but also where language touches the boundaries of cellular structures within the human organism itself.
The parallel “Amygdala” sections illustrate the complimentary ways Pato and Moure explore the point of contact between text and bodies. As the brain’s “centre of emotion [that] processes human action in response to the new” or that “harmonize an attention that transmutes intelligence” (76-77), the amygdala are the points of exchange between bodies and words, making sense of raw perception. Furthermore, both Pato and Moure invoke the metaphoric and linguistic resonance of the almond-shaped amygdala as the ‘eyes’ of the brain—two subjectless ‘I’s that embody the double actions of sensing and responding. The imagery of almonds, the almond tree, and the white almond blossoms migrates across time, cultures, and continents as a metonym of Exodus and ultimately the Holocaust, when the hydrogen cyanide of the bitter almonds was used in the making of Zyklon-B. Secession/Insecession explores moments when language fails: gaps of silence when cataclysmic events fail to gather into words. It is in this gap—in the absence of language—where ‘bio’ and ‘poetry’ meet. In a scene titled “The House Which is Not Extension but Dispositio Itself,” Moure visits her friend Alberta after an accident has left her in a vegetative state, but whose EEG’s show increased brain activity in response to familiar voices. Moure visits to “converse with her silence,” but without clarifying if Alberta is an actual friend in the hospital or the personified presence of unconscious Alberta, Canada, the site of Moure’s birth (104). Ambiguously, the context leans towards geographic territory, where Moure’s silent interlocutor is “the land of aspens and her father, the lard pail lunch-bucket of her uncle and the river valley and horses” (104). Alberta, Canada—the land itself—is perhaps “the ruined body” slumbering in a vegetative state, yet “words still touch her.” “Imagine yourself,” Moure says to her, “walking through poetry, your new home” (106). Whether “the ruined body” is that of a human or of a geographic territory, poetry offers a point of contact and a space of dwelling.
Reciprocally, Secession/Insecession illustrates how physical houses and structures—to include the human body—retain a latency of words. At the same time that Secession/Insecession fulfills Heidegger’s claim that “language is the house of Being” (BW 217), the text also illustrates its reverse: that ‘house’ is the language of Being, in the sense that houses also language our being. I toy with the inversion to emphasize the indelible imprint of time and place upon language, and also the fragility of words that have no place, that time and history have unhoused. Lacking corporeality, “words are not subject to death,” but they are “subject to disappearance because we can conceive of the extinction of the species” (S/I 127/129). Moure asks, “Is there a route to memory that does not traverse the image of the house?” (26); or in Pato’s words, “The house is an apparition of writing and only linguistic ghosts can inhabit it” (27). Language is ambiguously present yet not present, a paradox that resonates with the “presence-absence” experience operative in Kac’s scenario of the remote viewer. In Secession/Insecession, words hover between worlds, and translations are authentic mutations of an original that never was since language is always already haunted. “Any language is ghostly because language is the nothingness of the living world extended in a body,” writes Pato (131). Language is paradoxically bodied yet disembodied, inhabiting an ambiguous place between what no longer exists and the mutant territories we now traverse. For this reason, “a poem (a poet) is always an uncomfortable and threatening being who belongs equally to the chambers of the living and the dead” (149), negotiating boundaries between worlds. It is in this liminal space that the poet writes ‘in secession.’
Moure’s section entitled “The House, Which is Not Extension But Dispositio Itself” echoes Pato’s “The House, Which is Not Extension But the Body Itself.” Both sections emphasize interrelationships of house, language, and time. Many of the scenes revisit houses once lived in or sites where houses once stood. The meaning of ‘house’ in Secession/Insecession encompasses homelands, home towns, homes lost to war, and other buildings and structures marking places in time, to include the Vienna Secession exhibition building which is the source of Pato’s title.4 In the section “Nevermore,” Pato is working in an old warehouse that has been converted into a center for contemporary art, a building she often visited with her maternal grandmother when the warehouse held goods that stocked a store in the village. In the scene from “Nevermore,” the repurposed art center is hosting a symposium on “identity and territory” which Pato overhears from her office. She hears debates over “the rural/urban dichotomy” and whether distinctions between “village” and “urban” even still exist. “Nor does a hybrid territory, a mixture of both, but our way of inhabiting space is transgenetic, which is to say, mutant” (39). The term ‘mutant territories’ refers “to sites where there were first farmed fields, then a freeway was added, a service station, an industrial park, and finally the workers built homes… until the spaces become mutant territories” (39). A ‘mutant territory’ therefore describes not only the repurposing of a physical space, layered over by time, but also our way of inhabiting the layers in multiple chronologies, as in this scene Pato occupies an ambiguous then/now of a warehouse converted into a center for contemporary art.
The parallel texts of Secession/Insecession converge in the passages that narrate Moure’s visit to the Birkenau death camp, echoing Pato’s visit to Auschwitz-1; passages that draw the reader through visits to two death camps at once. In “Northeast of the Carpathians,” Moure moves through the partially reconstructed museum near a modern subdivision of “neat yellow bungalows” occupied by residents annoyed by the noise and traffic of the buses bringing tourists. Juxtaposed with statistics of French citizens who detrained at the spot (“63,000 of the 500,000”), Moure notes small, concrete details of normalcy: “I think of the joy that potatoes have brought me; potatoes were here too” (58). Despite the new neighborhoods and artificiality of the museum displays (mutant territories) Moure sees signs that the earth has not covered over the atrocities: “In willow bushes, pushed up by the receded snow, a child’s thin white rib. On the path, teeth of a young woman. The earth cries out with such a mouth, for earth is the flesh now of these bones” (64). The scene presents a highly metaphoric conception of biopoetry where human teeth, scattered like seeds, are a mouth where “the earth cries out” in signs of human remains, at the physical site that still holds their stories.
Pato’s visit to Auschwitz-1 follows her descent through increasingly unassimilable artifacts that bring Pato to her “inflection point,” a moment of complete disconnect when “the brain doesn’t recognize what’s in front of it and creates a gap” (61). In sequence, Pato’s visit takes her past what appears to be “a contemporary art instillation” that she gradually realizes are the remains of eyeglasses, and not art at all. Her journey through the death camp pauses at moments of vision “that cannot be borne, is impossible to bear: orthopedics, hundreds of artificial legs and the start of the display of hair” (59). When she arrives at the canisters of Zyklon-B, she cannot read the labels. “The eyes strain, they decipher incredulously, they don’t believe it, retreat to a time when they didn’t yet know how to read” (61). Pato describes the silence of a moment, beyond words, as a retreat to a time ‘before’ words, when her eyes “didn’t yet know how to read” (my emphasis). At the end of her visit, she echoes Adorno: “life is impossible, hope impossible, writing impossible after Auschwitz;…” and yet, “we must write after Auschwitz” (65). The writing on the tags of suitcases brings her back to words, “because they held the names and points of origin, in the tiny printing of those who still believed in some kind of light while inscribing the last breath of an identity that had reached its vanishing point” (65; Pato’s emphasis). The contrast between the words “Zyklon-B” and the names and points of origin written by human hands opens an irreconcilable gap between words (Zyklon-B) and ‘words’ (the tiny printing by human hands), a space where the poet is able to write after Auschwitz.
Pato realizes that the catastrophe of event is also institution of a future; that words are “affective ghosts, scraps of a past or a destroyed future that craves to be written and that can’t write itself… so the poetic words take its place” (167). Even a “destroyed future” awaits articulation, as well as the “scraps of a past.” Pato and Moure describe the poet and translator’s roles as “prosthetics,” not only as prosthetic voice of the voiceless past, but needing their own mechanism separate from the ‘I’ who cannot speak the unspeakable. “A writing subject becomes a detached being, radically so,” writes Pato; “we however need prostheses, external technology (voice, articulated language, echo)” (109, 125). Although the prosthetic legs at Auschwitz starkly express their object of exchange, Pato questions “Which organ(s), places(s), subsist anaesthetized in exchange for a poem?” (125). Echoing Pato, Moure also thinks “of the prosthesis, yes, of poetry as prosthetic gesture” (120). However, neither poet offers an answer to the question regarding “which organ(s), places(s), subsist anaesthetized” in exchange for the prosthetic gesture of a poem. Note that Pato situates the poem as prosthetic voice for both physical and spatial loss—both ‘organ’ and ‘place’. Likewise, for Moure, the “prosthetic gesture” of a poem is an effort “to parse spatiality and corporeality” (120). The presence-absence of language, through the trope of poem as prosthesis, is a (re)membering of lives that have been severed from time and place.
PHANTOM ACHES: THE LANGUAGE OF PROSTHESIS
Is it possible to conceive of a language of ‘prosthesis’ as anything more tangible than a figurative trope? In his first experiments in biopoetics, Eduardo Kac sought a literal transgenesis of human language patterns and non-human life at the microcellular level. A limitation of Kac’s experiment is that the synthetic DNA was a code of his own invention, through his creative choice of which nucleic acids to assign to which signifier of the Morse code (dot, dash, word space, and comma). Nevertheless, his artificial DNA stimulated a quantifiable change in the live bacteria, visible through a change in fluorescent color when illuminated with the UV light. Kac’s first foray into biopoetry produced genuine mutations between the imaginary and the real. In addition, the ‘telepresence’ of remote participants stirred the paradox of a presence-absence that is currently remapping our sense of space in the virtual age. At what point, however, could the image of poetry as ‘prosthesis’ cross into the real? The question is important if Secession/Insecession is to stand, along with Kac’s Genesis project, as an early example of 21st century biopoetry. Beyond these operative examples is needed a foundational theory.
In Telepresence and Bio Art, Kac cites Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception in support of two key elements of his biopoetry: Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on our “not-sameness” as “the very condition of communication,” where “it is in the ambiguity of intersubjectivity that our perception ‘wakes up’” (Kac 280), and in the paradox of “the presence-absence experience” addressed by Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind,” a phenomenon of perception suggestive that “perhaps all ‘presence’ is somewhat removed, remote, caught in an oscillation between presence and absence” (149). In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty draws upon the activity of the painter able to ‘see’ and paint a scene not physically present to illustrate the ambiguity of presence-absence. His point is that the location of a mental image is and is not physically grounded in space—is and is not located in either the visible or invisible world. “Thus vision doubles,” he writes in “Eye and Mind;” “There is the vision upon which I reflect… And then there is the vision that actually occurs… collapsed into a body” (EM 126). The relationship of ‘eye’ and ‘mind’ is one that crosses and doubles, resulting in a vision of ‘vision’ able to see itself ‘seeing,’ a phenomenon operative in Kac’s installations that engage the telepresence of remote viewers who are ambiguously there, yet not there.
In his earlier writings, Merleau-Ponty illustrates the ambiguity of presence-absence not through the double vision of the artist, but through the quasi-presence of the phantom limb, which in Phenomenology of Perception he uses to begin his ongoing interrogation of “the bond between the flesh and the idea” (VI 149). In his chapter on “The Body as an Object and Mechanistic Physiology,” Merleau-Ponty argues that “the phantom arm is not a representation of the arm, but rather the ambivalent presence of an arm,” occupying an ambiguous place between presence and loss (PhP 83). Like Pato and Moure’s temporal structure of words as “the irremediable absence of objects that… are not entirely different from this absence” (S/I 125), Merleau-Ponty describes the phantom limb as a “quasi-present… the same arm that was torn apart by shrapnel… and that now comes to haunt the present body without thereby merging with it. The phantom limb is thus a previous present that cannot commit to becoming past” (PhP 87-88). In this regard, the conception of language as prosthesis bears a similarity to the virtual telepresence of the remote viewer, or the double vision of the artist whose body is able to see by ‘eye’ of the mind. The language of prosthesis is ambiguously ‘there’ yet ‘not there.’ When Chus Pato arrived at a point of inflection when her brain didn’t recognize what was in front of it, the tiny letters marking human names and points of origin on the suitcases held phantom aches to body forth in poems after Auschwitz.
I find in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology a promising start to a theory of biopoetics grounded in the dialectical tensions of sound and silence, nature and logos, and of flesh and the idea. In The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty sought the roots of expression “beneath spoken language,” where he sensed “an operant or speaking language, whose words have a silent life like the animals at the bottom of the ocean” (PW 87). His works investigate “the same transmutation, the same migration of a meaning scattered in experience that leaves the flesh in which it did not manage to collect itself,” which gathers into words “so that in the end they become the very body it had needed” (PW 48). In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language and expression, meaning “leaves the flesh” to gather into words. What his thoughts hold in common with 21st century biopoetry, as seen through the examples of Kac and Pato/Moure, is an interest in the transmutation of meaning that migrates from flesh into words, or reciprocally from words into flesh. In different ways, both Genesis and Secession/Insecession explore the site of exchange between ‘bios’ and poetry, in ways that maintain the ‘non-sameness’ of the other. An understanding of language, according to Merleau-Ponty, necessitates a recovery of what is decidedly ‘not’ language, demanding a surrender “of every signification that is already institutionalized and return to the starting point of a nonsignifying world” (PW 58).
More recently, Canadian poet Alan Davies’ remarks concerning “Prelinguistic Thought” (2011) express a similar interest in the liminal space between words and silence, especially the silence before words and the silence that follows. He questions the role of art relative to silence and to “things that cannot be said” in terms that resonate with Pato and Moure’s conception of poem as ‘prosthesis.’ “Are there things that cannot be said?” he asks, and follows with its implication that “to say so expresses the fact that we do not experience things entirely through (mediated-by) language / that there is a before (a before (that there is a before)) language. It is essential to get there” (Davies 44). Even his way of writing inscribes the echo of words returning to silence: “that there is a before (a before [that there is a before]).” Although Davies’ use of the term “pre-linguistic” seems to privilege language over silence, as if silence necessarily strives towards speech, the movement he describes is certainly a dialectical tension in which neither moment fully resolves into the other: “Perhaps it is not the poem itself that has a chance of lasting in time / but the silence at both of its ends that in a metaphorical sense might be spoken of as being pinned in place by the tack (the attack) of the poem” (39). Because of the silence of a ‘before,’ “We must sometimes think our way forward with words we don’t have” (42). Rather than a dominance of language over silence, Davies emphasizes the fragility of words “pinned in place” by a mere “tack” of a poem (39).
As further experimental works of biopoetry appear, I hope they will continue to challenge the boundaries between worlds, discovering points of contact and dialogic exchange. What the work of Kac and Pato/Moure already suggest is that the boundaries between ‘bios’ and poetry are not fixed, but permeable. In the effort to reassert the radical alterity of nature that has been dominated either by the Cartesian imperative to master and possess, or by a romantic impulse to anthropomorphize the non-speaking world, it is necessary to return, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, to a “non-signifying world”—to whatever degree this is possible. In a conversation with Erín Moure prior to publication of Secession/Insecession, Chus Pato emphasizes that “Trees flee the word ‘tree’… things do not need meaning in order to exist. Our need for meaning is alien to them; they are the insensate… they are neither word nor silence, they’re mute.”5 Pato’s insistence on the absolute strangeness of nature exceeds even the silence of Alan Davies’ prelinguistic thought, to a muteness beyond and beneath the tensions of word and silence.6 Early experiments in 21st century biopoetry contest the dominance of speaking over non-speaking worlds, restoring “the strangeness [and] surprise at being human and speaking, at being similar and strange even to ourselves” (C).
Cheryl A. Emerson
State University of New York at Buffalo
NOTES
- From the inscription pages of Secession/Insecession, 6-7. [henceforth abbreviated as S/I].
- Pato’s first use of the term “mutant territories” appears on p. 39 of Secession/Insecession.
- Moure’s paternal great-grandfather emigrated from Galicia, Spain, sometime after the Kingdom of Galicia’s failed attempt to win independence from Spain in 1846. While her previous works O Resplandor and The Unmemntioable trace her maternal heritage to a village in Ukraine erased by war, Insecession focuses more upon Moure’s ancestral ties to the language and people of Galicia, which Moure describes as a language “stateless within Spain and that is not Spanish” (Erín Moure and Chus Pato, “A Conversation”)
- The Vienna Secession building was designed by Joseph Olbrich as an exhibition hall for the Vienna Secessionist movement (1895-1920), a group of artists in Vienna who broke from conventional art forms to assert their own artistic style and design [cf. http://www.theviennasecession.com/vienna-secession/]. Chus Pato closes Secession with Ludwig Hevesi’s quote above the door of the Secession building: “To every age its art/to art its freedom” (S/I 175).
- See Chus Pato/Erín Moure, “A Conversation”
- Although I imagine Davies would remind us that there is (a before (a before)) silence, where perhaps even silence is mute [mute].
WORKS CITED
Davies, Alan. “Prelinguistic Thinking.” Rampike 21.1 (2012): 38-44.
Kac, Eduardo. Telepresence & Bio Art: Networking Human, Rabbits, & Robots. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception. Ed. James M. Edie. Trans. Carleton Dallery. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 159-192.
—. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge, 2012 [1945].
—. The Prose of the World. Ed. Claude LeFort. Trans. John O’Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
—. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Moure, Erin and Chus Pato. Secession with Insecession. Trans. Erin Moure. Book Thug, 2014.
Pato, Erin Moure and Chus. A Conversation. February 2014. 28 November 2014. http://bookthug.ca/chus-pato-erin-moure-a-conversation
Pressac, Jean-Claude and Robert-Jan van Pelt. “The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz,” in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994. 183-245.