Description (EN)
First published in French in 1945 and written in the aftermath of the war, The Passive Vampire is one of Ghérasim Luca’s central works, where surrealism is pushed toward a more intimate and unstable register. Born in Bucharest in 1913, Luca co-founded the Romanian Surrealist Group before moving to Paris in 1952, developing a practice that moved between poetry, performance, and visual thinking, often centred on repetition and what he called a “stammering” of language. The book itself unfolds as a hybrid text, combining prose poetry, personal fragments, erotic speculation, and conceptual play, circling around desire, identity, and the instability of the self. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, it accumulates pressure through recurrence and variation, allowing meaning to emerge indirectly. In this English edition by Twisted Spoon Press, the text remains strikingly immediate, offering access to a body of work that continues to influence contemporary poetry and theory, while remaining portable, intense, and quietly transformative.

Note (Objectively Offered Object)
An object made while thinking of someone, carrying the giver’s hidden traits, offered not as a gift but as a shift in relation, to be read rather than received.

Kurzbeschreibung (DE)
Ein Schlüsseltext des surrealistischen Dichters Ghérasim Luca: eine hybride Form aus Prosa, Poesie und Spiel, in der Sprache ins Stocken gerät und Begehren als treibende Kraft erscheint.

Details

Ghérasim Luca, The Passive Vampire, Twisted Spoon Press, 2009, 140 pages, 17.02 × 20.07 cm, English, ISBN 978-8086264318.

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See also

A recording of Ghérasim Luca reading his own texts reveals the stammering, breath-driven rhythm that underlies The Passive Vampire.

Luca’s writing resonates with what Deleuze describes as a language pushed beyond fluency into intensity, where expression begins to stammer and meaning accumulates through repetition.