Erasurism traces how erasure shapes art and thought across history, exposing the political and poetic forces behind creative acts. The book explores erasure as a radical aesthetic and philosophical force shaping avant-garde, modernist, and postmodern practices across literature, art, media, and theory. From ancient cave marks to biopoetry, the volume traces a history of erasure that challenges authorship, ideology, and representation—uncovering the hidden politics and poetics beneath every act of writing.

LOUIS ARMAND directs the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, Prague. His theoretical works include Homo Catastrophicus (2024), Feasts of Unrule (2024), Entropology (2023), Videology (2015), Solicitations (2013), Event States (2007), Literate Technologies (2006), The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde (2013), Helixtrolysis (2014), Incendiary Devices: Discourses of the Other (2001), & Techne (1997). 

MICHEL DELVILLE teaches literature and comparative literature at the University of Liège, Belgium. He is the author or editor of some thirty books pertaining to contemporary poetics and intermedial studies, including The American Prose Poem, Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde, Crossroads Poetics, The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust (with Andrew Norris), Le roman de la faim : du Hungerkünstler au schizoflâneur, and The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem (w. Mary Ann Caws). 

Acknowledgments

Credits

Introduction

Under Erasure: Black Holes, Holographs, and the Missing Letter

Obliterations and Deviations: The Success Stories of Foundism and Erasurism

Composing the Holes: Poetry sous rature

On Detailism and Effacement

Hauntological Blurrings and Cancelations

No Thoughts but in “Things”

Radio Pictures, Blank Transmissions

Minima Semantica

The Interpunct

The Xenotext

Notes

Index

About the Authors