Fondée en 2004, la revue inculte s’est installée durablement dans le paysage et l’histoire de la revue littéraire et philosophique. Le collectif inculte, à l’origine de cette revue et de la maison d’édition du même nom, met ainsi un terme à cette aventure de vingt numéros pour concentrer ses forces sur un nouveau format, une nouvelle approche de l’écriture collective. A la croisée de l’essai, du document et de la fiction collective, Le Ciel vu de la terre est un livre en trois mouvements autour d’un thème unique : de l’astrologie à la navigation aux étoiles, en passant par les ovni ou le voyage de Laïka dans l’espace, les romanciers et philosophes du collectif inculte passent en revue le rapport de l’humain à l’espace. Grande première en France, ce livre comporte trois « cahiers » distincts, magnétiques, détachables et autonomes, tout autant qu’ils se complètent : un cahier principal animé par le collectif (Mathias Énard, Maylis de Kerangal, Claro, Arno Bertina, Mathieu Larnaudie, Stéphane Legrand, Bruce Bégout, Oliver Rohe, Nicolas Richard, etc.) et ses invités (Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Iain Sinclair, etc.) ; un deuxième accueillant une réédition d’un grand classique de la littérature sur ce thème, « La Visite du Capitaine Tempête dans le Ciel », de Mark Twain ; un troisième sous forme de grande cartographie d’un cosmos sorti de l’imagination des navigateurs du XVIe siècle. Chaque volume du collectif inculte (un à deux par an) sera à la fois un événement éditorial fort, un objet à part entière à l’évolution constante et une approche hybride de la notion de revue et de création collective.

First English-language collection of writings by the legendary nineteenth-century insurrectionist Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) was one of the most important and controversial figures in nineteenth-century French revolutionary politics, and he played a major role in all of the great upheavals that punctuated his life—the insurrections of 1830, 1848 and 1870–71. Adamant that a just and egalitarian society can only be established by revolutionary means, he recognised that no insurrection can succeed if it fails to overcome the coercive resources of the state, and no revolutionary government can endure if it betrays the principles that alone earn and deserve mass support. At odds with followers of Proudhon on the one hand and of Marx on the other, Blanqui commanded unrivalled authority in French revolutionary circles during parts of his own lifetime but was quickly forgotten (if not derided) after his death. This is the first collection of Blanqui’s writings ever published in English, and it includes new and complete translations of his best-known texts: Instructions for an Armed Uprising and Eternity by the Stars. With material drawn from all his most important publications and speeches, as well as from the full sweep of his voluminous manuscripts and correspondence, this wide-ranging anthology will enable anglophone readers and political activists to arrive at their own critical assessment of Blanqui’s thought and legacy for the first time.

In a century replete with radical politics, final liberations, historical codas, and dreams of eternity, the shadowy figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the constant revolutionary, wrote Eternity by the Stars in the last months of 1871 while incarcerated in Fort du Taureau, a marine cell of the English Channel. In the midst of contemplating his confinement, Blanqui devises a simple calculation in which the infinity of time is confronted with the finite number of possible events to suggest a most radical conclusion: every chain of events is bound to repeat itself eternally in space and time. Our lives are being lived an infinity of times across the confines of the universe, and death, defeat, success and glory are never final. For the world is nothing but the play of probabilities on the great stage of time and space. By straddling the boundaries of hyperrealism and hallucinatory thinking, Blanqui's hypothesis offers a deep, tragic, and heartfelt reflection on the place of the human in the universe, the value of action, and the aching that lies at the heart of every modern soul. This first critical edition of Blanqui's incantatory text in English features an extended introduction by Frank Chouraqui. Exploring sources of Blanqui's thinking in his intellectual context, Chouraqui traces the legacy of the text in critiques of modernity devoting particular attention to the figures of Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Borges. It features copious illuminating annotations that bring out the web of connections which interlace the great marginal figure of Blanqui with more than two millennia of European culture.

When the rich and well-connected Raoule de Vénérande becomes enamored of Jacques Silvert, a poor young man who makes artificial flowers for a living, she turns him into her mistress and eventually into her wife. Raoule's suitor, a cigar-smoking former hussar officer, becomes an accomplice in the complications that ensue.