Lhasa unlimited: The metaphysics of death in Steven Heighton's The 'Admen Move on Lhasa' and 'Translations of April'

Steven Heighton's The Admen Move on Lhasa and 'Translations of April' attempt to reconcile themselves with a lost, stable essence through meditations on language and death. Throughout, Heighton's work attempts to grasp momentarily what Maurice Blanchot calls 'naive existence' or at least to examine the process whereby consciousness continually fails to apprehend anything but itself in the act of attempting apprehension. Tracing the negation of naive existence embodied in the act of meaning, Heighton's work elegizes and thereby memorializes an essential, vital reality.