Gherasim Luca (; 23 July 1913 – 9 February 1994) was a Romanian surrealist theorist and poet. Born Salman Locker in Romania and also known as Costea Sar, and Petre Malcoci, he chose to become an apatrid, or stateless person, after leaving Romania in 1952.
Much of Luca's work hinged on the deconstruction of language, particularly through the framework of surrealism and its successor movements.
Early life
Born in Bucharest the son of Jewish tailor Berl Locker (died 1914), he spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German, and French.
Career
During 1938, he traveled frequently to Paris where he was introduced to surrealists. World War II and the official antisemitism in Romania forced him into local exile. During the pre-Communist period of Romanian independence, he founded a surrealist artists group with Gellu Naum, Paul Păun, Virgil Teodorescu and Dolfi Trost.
His first publications, including poems in French followed. He was the inventor of cubomania and, in 1945 with Dolfi Trost, authored "Dialectic of Dialectic", a manifesto of the surrealist movement Surautomatism. Harassed in Romania and caught while trying to flee the country, he left Romania in 1952, and moved to Paris after a short stay in Israel.
There he worked among others with Jean Arp, Paul Celan, François Di Dio and Max Ernst, producing numerous collages, drawings, objects, and text-installations. From 1967, his reading sessions took him to Stockholm, Oslo, Geneva, New York City, and San Francisco, although he remained a fairly minor figure in the Parisian scene. The 1988 TV-portrait by Raoul Sanglas, Comment s'en sortir sans sortir, made him famous for a larger readership.
Giles Deleuze first encountered Luca's work in 1972, and continued to follow it until his death. He praised Luca as "the greatest French-speaking poet alive" in his Abécédaire. Deleuze admired Luca's ability to deconstruct the French language and cause it, in his words, to "become minor", and drew his concept of bégaiement de la langue (language stammering or stuttering) from Luca's work.
Personal life
At the end of the 1980s, Luca's residence building in Montmartre was deemed insalubrious by the French authorities. In order to be relocated to another building, he had to justify his citizenship. As he had been without one ever since leaving Romania, he begrudgingly acquired French citizenship by marrying his long time partner. Luca had long refused to acquire citizenship, considering himself a man "belonging to no language, nation, or society".
He died by suicide on 9 February 1994, at the age of 80, by jumping into the Seine.