Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess

"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.

"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