La Folie

The book was first published in 1994, in the poetry series of Ikaros Publications, edited by Evgenios Aranitsis. It is a fragmentary, inner journey through the realms of the city and memory. As Thanos Stathopoulos noted in a conversation with the poet Ilias Lagios, speaking about the book |Anti, issue 571, 17 February 1995|, ‘…I would say it is a fragmentary text. The fragments resemble notes and broken stories. In a very specific way, each fragment is an extension of the previous one, and it has all been written together with this logic, like a natural flow of breaths. A fragmented story, as I call it, is not a story. It is the destruction of the story. Let’s say: the remnants of the story. In the style of a story, a note or an incident, I enter the realm of poetry or the paradoxical, and conversely: in the style of a verse, a poem, I enter the realm of history…’. The second revised edition is published with the addition of a poem.

Thanos Stathopoulos continues his journey through the coordinates of the archive, which contains the elements of a personal mythology, focusing on the Text as a literary genre and an erotic/poetic event. La Folie is a miniature museum that hosts the dangerous exhibits and noble absurdities of madness, the void, existential excess, the history of literature, autobiography, erotic passion, melancholy and the absurd. The author’s fragmentary and sui generis prose renders the beauty and ugliness of our shared psychopathology. Thus, the book can also be read as a poetic testimony to all that unfolds in the inverted face of every day.

Prose texts, notes, quotations, traces, readings, references, annotations, fragments on the poetics of space, space as a workshop, architectural space and the spiritual centre. In his seventh book, Thanos Stathopoulos emphasises the poetics of space, alluding to what we might call ‘architectural space’, that is, the realm in which human expression takes place and which is defined by the body, actions, habitation, memory, time, signs, form and the psychic centre. Reality is recognised through the dream, and the text is understood as an erotic event. Time signifies the centre of things.

In his eighth book, Thanos Stathopoulos continues his journey through the coordinates of the archive, which contains the elements of personal mythology and fragmented autobiography. Prose-like texts, notes, quotations, readings, references, annotations, traces, fragments on the fate of the day, the moment and duration, time, the self and the human condition. Introduction to the Day, perhaps Thanos Stathopoulos’s most silent and fragmented book, is a paroxysm on eternity and the oscillation of the day.

The longest night of the year. Fate cuts me into a thousand pieces: I detach from each fragment, I rejoice and I am shattered; finally, I emerge from my inner self into the sun: it is good here, let us bask our dead. I return with a butterfly watch.