The Prologue, The Poltergeist & The Hollow Tree

Jimmy Raskin

2005
Foundation 20 21
Edited by Miguel Abreu & Christopher Nicolson
Designed by Jimmy Raskin; POLLEN, New York
Hardcover, clothbound, 6x8 inches, 173pp., 49 color. Limited edition of 900 copies.
ISBN 1-891027-15-8

When Nietzsche called for the artist as the new ideal, Jimmy Raskin responded and not a moment too late here in the 21st century. This book is a beautiful collaboration of the visual and the philosophical. Jimmy Raskin is the tightrope walker in his revisitation of Nietzsche's classic Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This thought-provoking book is a eulogy to one of the masters of existential thinking who questioned every aspect of being.

Combining text with drawings, collages and a series of stunning diagrams, Jimmy Raskin's highly original book investigates the figures of the Poet and his counterpart, the Philosopher, and proceeds to anatomize their delicate relationship on the path to the Overman. Raskin's interest in the existential condition of the Poet as a metaphor for the artist in general confronts the modern Philosopher's quest to become Poet. The book manifests the stakes of this problematic merging and rigorously traces the thin line separating these two fundamental forms of Being. "The Poet's madness was something I had to salvage," says Raskin, "for the Unknown is only possible when distance collapses."

Today the Overman has been turned into a process, a mere method, so it is the Poet's failure that we need to learn more about. Identifying the precise location of this failure is the ultimate aim of this lyrical text, which mourns the fact that the Poet does not survive any longer without the Philosopher. And one of the problems of the Philosopher, as Zarathustra finds out in the prologue, is that he initially fails to entertain his audience. 

$50.00