The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Public Square)

"This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life." — The Posthuman Dada Guide

The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world — all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich's Cafe de la Terrasse — a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution — lasted for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead and Dada stronger than ever.

As the poet faces the future mass murderer over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the world. Taking the match as metaphor for two poles of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, politics, and life, Andrei Codrescu has created his own brilliantly Dadaesque guide to Dada — and to what it can teach us about surviving our ultraconnected present and future. Here dadaists Duchamp, Ball, and von Freytag-Loringhoven and communists Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev appear live in company with later incarnations, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, and Newt Gingrich.

The Posthuman Dada Guide is arranged alphabetically for quick reference and (some) nostalgia for order, with entries such as eros (women), internet(s), and war. Throughout, it is written in the belief that posthumans lining the road to the future (which looks as if it exists, after all, even though Dada is against it) need the solace offered by the primal raw energy of Dada and its inhuman sources.

"One of our most prodigiously talented and magical writers." New York Times Book Review

"A hard-edged, rapier-like volume, perfect for sliding into a back pocket of skinny hipster pants or stabbing into the complacent underbelly of bourgeois (or bourgeois-bohemian) society." Eli Epstein-Deutsch, Village Voice

"The occasionally outrageous encyclopedic juxtapositions of entries give a firsthand experience similar to the effect of Dada cutups and collages. The human and so-called posthuman are concepts best understood via Codrescu's imagined 1916 game of chess in Zurich between Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dada (the art of the absurd), and Vladimir Ilych Lenin, avatar of the anti-Dada ethos of communism." --Publishers Weekly

"No other book has treated the relationship between the artistic and revolutionary avant-gardes as originally and provocatively as Codrescu's. This is both an immensely illuminating essay...and a disturbing meditation on absolute ideals." Vladimir Tismaneanu, author of Stalinism for All Seasons

"This highly original, beautifully written, and charming book is vintage Andrei Codrescu. No one else has written anything remotely like it. One is carried along by the author's sheer energy and drive, his good humor, his ability to laugh at himself, and his own truly Dada personality. The Posthuman Dada Guide will introduce Dada thinking to a whole new readership."--Marjorie Perloff, author of The Vienna Paradox

"No other book has treated the relationship between the artistic and revolutionary avant-gardes as originally and provocatively as Codrescu's. This is both an immensely illuminating essay of intellectual history and a disturbing meditation on absolute ideals turned into alibis for tyranny. Magically blending sarcasm and gravity, Codrescu invites us to engage in an emancipatory laughter as an antidote to morose scholasticism and dogmatic obscurantism."--Vladimir Tismaneanu, author of Stalinism for All Seasons

Andrei Codrescu is an award-winning writer and National Public Radio commentator. His latest books are Jealous Witness and New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City (Algonquin). The author of many essay collections, including The Disappearance of the Outside, he is the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University.