Signed copy. First edition, limited to 750 copies. “We can consider the entire body of Antoine d’Agata’s extreme art as a wide-ranging variant of Hölderlin’s reflection on the modern tragedy, which is, to borrow the conclusion of Reiner Schürmann, the pathetic condition of being. Prisons, summary executions, bordellos, soulless buildings, secular mysticism evoking Artaud or Bacon, convulsion (salvationby sensation, even that of agony): each of d’Agata’s photographs is shorthand for a form being placed in a box, a “wandering beneath the unthinkable” to use the words of Hölderlin again, an administration of an infinite death, even if it is delivered in the most executive manner possible. Modern death is an impersonal, interchangeable compartment: “the coldest, most trivial death, which is no more important than a sip of water or a head of cabbage,” as Hegel, Hölderlin’s childhood friend, once remarked.