Horrible Workers

"In Arthur Rimbaud's letter to Paul Demeny, he describes the poet's role as being something like a trickster. But the poet's trick, or joke, is self-directed. A long dissociation of the senses from reality creates, for the poet, a new relationship with reality. But the poet's work with reality is always something like a play at what is real. Play becomes necessary; the poet doesn't just change his or her relationship with reality but, in playing, creates a space for poetics - a space for work. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud, American blues musician Robert Johnson, German anarchist intellectual Max Stirner, and the phenomena of the Manson family circle have all appeared as forms and figures on the invisible horizon described above by Rimbaud."

"Through a reading of Emile Durkheim's Suicide, Donald A. Nielsen locates hitherto unnoticed similarities in the social experiences of each subject featured in these four cases. Sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers of the social sciences, and adherents to cultural studies will find much of interest in Nielsen's study."--Jacket.