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100.
Away with the Murder of the Body.
London: Wicked Messengers, nd. (1974). 4to. Stapled wrps., 20pp. Printed offset-litho by the Suburban Press.
“An unauthorised transformation of a section from Trois Milliards de Pervers: Grande Encyclopédie des Homosexualités”, a work first published in March 1973 in Recherches, an avant-garde journal of psychiatry founded by Félix Guattari in 1965 (the issue was seized by the French authorities for breaching moral standards, with Guattari fined for committing an “outrage to public decency”).
The opening text reads: “However pseudo-tolerant it appears, the capitalist order in all its aspects - family, school, factory, office - continues to exercise over the whole of desiring, sexual, affective life its totalitarian domination, founded on property, male power, exploitation, surplus value”.
The majority of texts appear as speech bubbles in photographs and illustrations taken from contemporary film and TV, détourned by the Wicked Messengers, a group described by its founder, Nick Totton, as “a post-situationist groupuscule squatting communally in South Hampstead” (Totton was also involved with the Haringey Free Press and the north London radical bookshop, Rising Free; later, he moved to Hebden Bridge where, influenced by Wilhelm Reich, he practiced psychotherapy “as a means of psychological liberation”).
The publishing history of “Away with the Murder of the Body” is unclear, though it seems likely that it preceded the situationist anthology, “Leaving the 20th Century” (item #30), another, more elaborate collaboration between the Wicked Messengers and Jamie Reid’s Suburban Press.
Near Fine.