EXCESS—THE FACTORY
Excess—The Factory
by Leslie Kaplan
Translated from the French by Julie Carr & Jennifer Pap
Commune Editions, 2018
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY JULIE CARR AND JENNIFER PAP
In 1968, Leslie Kaplan, a young American poet living in France, went to work in a factory. This was the Maoist practice of établissement, an effort toward helping form a revolutionary proletariat core. Excess—The Factory is about those years, about working class resistance to capitalism, about the possibility of a worker-led revolution, and about the '68 general strike in France. It has struck many readers (including French luminaries Maurice Blanchot and Marguerite Duras) as a unique event in writing, at once legendary and all but lost to history. This long overdue translation in English by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap, true to the original's spare, descriptive tone, returns the book and its complex moment to new readers.
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN JULIE CARR, JENNIFER PAP, AND LESLIE KAPLAN IN JACKET2
REVIEWS
“The factory is immense, but the immensity is in pieces; we are in an infinity divided into pieces. This is what Leslie Kaplan teaches me, far from Pascal: the infinite, but the infinite in pieces.”
MAURICE BLANCHOT
“I think we've never spoken of the factory as this book has. It is completely otherwise, like the wellspring of another time. One recognizes it. It's very impressive. Like a commonplace, something everyone knows without having spoken of it.”
MARGUERITE DURAS
“Kaplan’s focus on women reflects factory segregation and gendered exploitation, though the women find ways to cope. “These are used women,” she writes, “drinking and talking under the old arcades.” Disillusioned by the crushing of 1968’s revolutionary student-worker uprising, Kaplan renders a remarkable document of her search for alternate forms of liberation from a system in which “You live, you die, each instant.””
“Reading the book is absolutely claustrophobic. The book is also — for lack of a better word — real in a way that a lot of books are not. Maybe that has to do with the fact that American-born Kaplan actually worked in factories around France in the 1960s, as so many fellow Maoists and Marxists did at the time. She was there. She knows factory life (is “life” too strong a word?) from the inside. This intimate familiarity radiates from every page of Excess.”
MIKKEL KRAUSE FRANTZEN FOR LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
“In their excellent translators’ note, Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap give context to the book and Kaplan herself, but also offer a glimpse into the process of bringing the text into English.”
TIMOTHY OTTE FOR COLORADO REVIEW
“With its potential for carrying new ways of communication, translation may help to get outside deadening lines of thought. As Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap write in their translator’s note: “L’excess—l’usine makes suffering and alienation palpable. But as poetry perhaps it also performs the liberating gesture that Kafka claims for writing.””
LAURA MARRIS FOR ON THE SEAWALL
“Circulation is not just for parts on the assembly line and commodities in the marketplace. People, circulating freely, reappropriate their space, their time. Excess—The Factory attempts to offer a material poesis commensurate with this reappropriation, as well as the violence and alienation from which it must be born.”