A Review of 4 Dada Suicides Part Three – An Editor of Do Not Submit
November 26, 2025
Part Three: Julien Torma
Nobody gives a fuck about Julien Torma. Just another of a cadre of provocateurs like Arthur Cravan who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Another Parisian Dadaist with very little biographical information, totally unconcerned with forging a literary reputation, his “utter rejection of all forms of commitment – whether political, social, religious or moral…” blah blah blah…
In February 1933, at the tender age of 30, Torma vanished into the Tyrolean Alps, his body never recovered. No suicide note, no ransom note, no witnesses.
Unremarkable. Except for one thing. Julian Torma did not exist. He had no registered address, no career, a surname absent from French birth records. No records exist of his employment, his parents passed early, his siblings untraceable. His sparse works were posthumously “unearthed.” Was he a collective fiction or an engineered hoax? Society not only suicided the poor man, it mythologized him into nonexistence.
Does this analog template for obliteration prefigure the systematic digital erasure of today’s dissident? The digital unpersoning by autocrats, oligarchs, corporations, tech platforms. Your online presence scrubbed, handles reassigned, timelines wiped. Or milder cases such as suspended accounts or being shadow banned. Ghost feeds where posts fail to propagate.
Or did Torma do to himself what would be done to future dissidents, executing the cleanest, most premeditated act of self-erasure the pre-digital world had witnessed? One of the first voluntary unpersonings? He did declare, “I am the man who never was,” leaving behind a corpus too fragmentary to canonize. Wipe the biography and what’s left of a legacy?