The Power of Theatrical Madness

With drawings by Jan Fabre, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and text by Kathy Acker and Germano Celant.

‘The unsayable, all that is infinite and therefore not subject to death, what is not human, all that we long for we call “good”, “pleasurable”, since physically pleasurable “sexuality”. // In order to touch, in order to attain this order of sexuality, a knighthood, to know it, because it is unattainable and inhuman, it is chance, chaos; the desirer must order the unordered. The human must such the inhuman. This duo of chaos and ordering or of sexuality and asceticism constitutes several human practices, one of which is art. But to control the uncontrollable and to name chaos, even within the safe borders of art, is to deny ecstasy and to reinstate boring moralism. The cliché: by loving humans kill whom or what they want.’ Kathy Acker

First edition, hardback. Good condition. Published by ICA London. 1986.