Luther Blissett
Luther Blissett is a “multiple-use name” (or “anonymity pseudonym) as part of a transnational activist project.
It was informally adopted and shared by hundreds of cultural workers and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994. The pseudonym first appeared in Bologna, Italy, in mid-1994, when a number of cultural activists began using it for staging a series of urban and media pranks and to experiment with new forms of authorship and identity. From Bologna the multiple-use name spread to other European cities, such as Rome and London, as well as countries such as Germany, Spain, and Slovenia. Sporadic appearances of Luther Blissett have been also noted in Canada, the United States, Finland and Brazil.
For reasons that remain unknown, though according to one former member the decision was based purely on the perceived comic value of the name, the pseudonym was borrowed from a real-life Luther Blissett, a soccer player, who played for A.C. Milan, Watford F.C. and England in the 1980s. In December 1999, the Italian activists who had launched the Luther Blissett Project in 1994 decided to discontinue usage of the name by committing symbolic ritual suicide, or harakiri (seppuku). After authoring the best-selling historic novel Q as ‘Luther Blissett’, five of them went on to found the writers’ collective Wu Ming.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett_(nom_de_plume))
The notice of Luther Blisset’s seppuku can be read here: http://www.lutherblissett.net/archive/452_en.html
As Luther Blissett declares there: “so that the tension which Blissett produced in the past years can become incarnate in other experiences, the corpse must release spores that are both infective and thaumaturgical. Never the less, the Multiple has numberless bodies, many of them will stay alive notwithstanding the death of some others.
Thanks to the Seppuku, ‘Luther Blissett’ will go through different rebirths, all of them disengaged from the strict adoption of a name, for a name cannot help producing an identity. Whether this identity is singular or collective, real or virtual, historical or mythological is certainly not without consequences, but after a while it become something you need to get rid of.”
But, before his death, four Bologna-based members of the LBP (Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Luca Di Meo), wrote the novel Q, LB’s masterpiece, which can be seen as a final contribution to the LB Project. Q was published in Italy in 1999 by Einaudi under a creative commons copyleft. Q has been translated into English (British and American), Spanish, German, Dutch, French, Portuguese (Brazilian), Danish, Polish, Greek, Czech, Russian, Turkish, Basque, Serbian and Korean. In August 2003 the book was also nominated for the Guardian First Book Prize.
