Michel Koch's 'Le Sacricide' and Klossowski's 'Tableaux vivants' explore Acéphale's legacy

Michel Koch's book 'Le Sacricide' (Éd. Léo Scheer, coll. Manifeste) recounts the history of the journal Acéphale, founded by Georges Bataille and André Masson in May 1936, and its secret society. Koch, who participated in the group in the late 1930s, waited over sixty years to publish his reflections. The book avoids anecdotal details, such as whether a human sacrifice was planned, and instead proposes a shift from postmodernity (which Koch calls hypermodernity) to a true metamodernity through a radical desacralization. Koch draws on archaic sacrificial murders, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and thinkers like Sade, Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, and Job. Meanwhile, 'Tableaux vivants (Essais critiques 1936-1983)' by Pierre Klossowski (Le Promeneur, edited by Patrick Mauriès) collects his previously dispersed essays, including texts from Acéphale, studies on Rilke, Jouve's Catherine Crachat, a letter on Walter Benjamin, and a long essay on Balthus's painting. Klossowski's dense, hermetic style is compared to Rilke's 'Duino Elegies' and Heidegger's concept of 'agir sans image'. The April issue of NRF (n° 557) features a harrowing account by surgeon Jean-Baptiste Savigny of the Medusa raft, illustrated by Lionel Guibout's lithographs, which were exhibited at Galerie Idem Mourlot from April 6 to May 23.