Excess—the Factory by Leslie Kaplan

Translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap

 

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In 1968, the American-born French poet Leslie Kaplan went to work in a factory. She did so out of choice rather than necessity, part of a generation of Maoist établis, university-educated radicals who entered the factory in order to organize the working class. Excess—The Factory evokes the tumult of those years through an encounter with the serial violence of the assembly line, descending by way of infernal workshops to reach the dark center of capitalist accumulation. Hailed by French luminaries such as Maurice Blanchot and Marguerite Duras as a unique event in writing, the book was at once legendary and all but lost to English-language readers. This long overdue translation by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap, true to the original’s spare, declarative tone, returns the book and its complex moment to new readers. Ferocious, despairing, beautiful line by line, this book captures the era we cannot stop leaving.

LESLIE KAPLAN was born in Brooklyn, New York, but raised and educated in France, where she still lives. Active in political groups as a student, she interrupted her studies in January 1968 and took jobs in factories. She moved from one industrial job to another for two years, and spent May 1968 in an occupied factory (the Brandt washing machine factory in Lyon). She is the winner of the Prix Wepler 2012 for her novel Millefeuille and author of over twenty plays, novels, and books of poetry. Translations of her work exist in Spanish, German, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Romanian, Turkish, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, and English.

JENNIFER PAP is Associate Professor in the program in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Denver. JULIE CARR’S most recent book is the essay collection, Someone Shot My Book. She lives in Denver where she helps to run Counterpath and teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Excerpt

The great factory, the universe, the one that breathes for you.
There’s no other air but what it pumps, expels.
You are inside.

All space is occupied : all has become waste. The skin, the teeth, the gaze.

You move between formless walls. You encounter people, sandwiches, Coke bottles, tools, paper, screws. You move indefinitely, outside of time. No beginning, no end. Things exist together, all at once.

Inside the factory, you are endlessly doing.

You are inside, in the factory, the universe, the one that breathes for you.

 

A remarkable document of her search for alternate forms of liberation from a system in which “You live, you die, each instant.”—Publisher’s Weekly

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