The Passive Vampire - Gh'rasim Luca

Originally published in 1945 by Les Editions de l'Oubli in Bucharest, The Passive Vampire caught the attention of the French Surrealists when an excerpt appeared in 1947 alongside texts by Jabes and Michaux in Georges Henein's magazine La part du sable. It is a work in which Luca attempts to transmit the 'shudder' evoked by Surrealist texts by probing with a caustic humor the fragile boundary between 'objective chance' and delirium. The Passive Vampire is impossible to define: it is a mixture of theoretical treatise and breathless poetic prose, personal confession and scientific investigation ' it is 18 photographs of Objects Objectively Offered, a category created by Luca to occupy the space opened up by Breton. These objects capture chance in its dynamic and dramatic forms as they objectify the ambivalence of our drives and draw out the nearly continual equivalence between our love-hate tendencies and the world of external things.