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oxford modern languages
and literature monographs
Editorial Committee
c. h. griffin e. m. jeffreys a. kahn
k. m. kohl m. l. mclaughlin
i. w. f. maclean r. a. g. pearson
This page intentionally left blank
Morfee: Artaud’s Writing Bodies 00-Morfee-prelims Final Proof
page iii
29.6.2005 3:25pm
Antonin Artaud’s
Writing Bodies
ADRIAN MORFEE
CLARENDON PRESS
.
OXFORD
3
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ß Adrian Morfee 2005
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Excerpts from Antonin Artaud’s Oeuvres complètes ß Editions Gallimard
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First published 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
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ISBN 0–19–927749–4
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
to Nathalie, of course
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Editions Gallimard for permission to reproduce
extracts from Artaud’s Œuvres complètes. I also wish to thank the British
Academy for a Postgraduate Studentship, which helped fund the thesis
on which this work is based. I have received generous help from many
teachers, colleagues, and friends. I am particularly grateful to Dr Christina Howells, who supervised the thesis. Without the guidance, encouragement, wisdom, stimulus, and inspiration of Professor Malcolm Bowie,
who jointly supervised this work, it would never have been completed.
His beneWcial inXuence is present throughout. To him I am most deeply
grateful.
CONTENTS
Notes on Texts and Abbreviations
x
Introduction
1
1.
Painful Bodies of Thought
20
2.
Self-Presence, Thought, and Language
49
3.
Angelic Bodies, Demonic Bodies
71
4.
Creating Identity and Meaning
97
5.
Writing Doubles
121
6.
A God-Ridden Artaud
150
7.
A Simple Artaud
173
Conclusion
206
Bibliography
221
Index
227
NOTES ON TEXTS AND ABBREVIATIONS
References to Antonin Artaud’s Œuvres complètes are given by volume and
page number in the main body of the text. The second revised edition is
used where one exists. Volumes i and xiv are each in two parts, designated * (part 1) and ** (part 2) by the publisher. Thus (i**. 9) refers to vol.
i, pt. 2, p. 9. In addition to the main nrf Gallimard series is Nouveaux écrits
de Rodez, referred to as NER. Other references to uncollected texts are set
out in footnotes where appropriate. In capitalizing titles of Artaud’s
works I have in all cases followed the format of the Wrst edition.
en poésie nous avons des droits sur les paroles qui forment et défont
l’Univers
(Apollinaire, Alcools)
Songez-y, un métaphysicien n’a, pour le système du monde, que le
cri perfectionné des singes
(Anatole France, Le Jardin d’Épicure)
INTRODUCTION
Il faut faire les choses plus simplement et plus terre à terre.
(xv. 218)
What can be thought of must certainly be a Wction.1
Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was a man of many parts: his creative
intellect travelled across both generic and conceptual boundaries and
he was poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, actor, producer, theoretician
of the theatre, and artist. He has also been fêted as a schizophrenic, druguser, and internee, and posthumously further roles were thrust upon him
as the following generation saw him as cultural iconoclast or as an
example of suVering, failure, and the descent of a great literary intellect
into madness. But all agree that his energies were channelled towards the
exploration and perhaps even the creation of the self within the artistic
act.
When Artaud died of cancer at the age of 51, he was a liminal Wgure in
the French artistic world. Scarcely known as an author other than to
those familiar with Surrealism, he was remembered as a minor actor,
having given remarkably intense supporting performances in Abel
Gance’s Napoléon (1927) and Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
(1928), and on the stage with inXuential theatre companies such as
Lugné-Poë’s anti-naturalistic Théâtre de l’Œuvre and Dullin’s L’Atelier
in the early 1920s. With the poet Roger Vitrac he founded the short-lived
and controversial Théâtre Alfred Jarry in 1926, and, having seen a
Balinese dance troupe at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931, he
wrote an article on the performance now known under the title ‘Sur le
théâtre balinais’. This was the Wrst of a series of essays setting out an
alternative to Western theatre, which were published in 1938 as Le
Théâtre et son Double, Artaud’s best-known work and one of the seminal
inXuences on modern drama.2
1
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale,
ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), para. 539.
2
For details of Wrst publications, as well as for full details of Artaud’s juvenilia, the reader
is referred to the extensive bibliography established by J.-C. Ramiel in Obliques, 10–11 (1976),
257–84.
2
introduction
However, Artaud was an original poet as he demonstrated with two
collections of self-analytic prose poems and fragmentary texts published
in the mid-1920s, L’Ombilic des Limbes and Le Pèse-Nerfs. These inXuential
collections build on the autobiographical correspondence of 1923 with
Jacques Rivière now known, under the title Correspondance avec Jacques
Rivière, as one of the deWnitive discussions of a favoured topic of twentieth-century letters, literature, and silence. The force with which Artaud
here exposes how linguistic lack provokes a sense of ontological thinness
has led critics to see these early self-analyses as a displacement of the
centre of writing in his texts. It is certainly the point at which the adult
Artaudian text emerges from the preceding juvenilia, and after Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière Artaud abandoned the attempt to produce
self-suYcient, extended works and produced instead the characteristic
fragmented texts that, it is argued, seriously disrupt the limits of the
Modernist artistic and conceptual tradition and challenge the terms by
which we deWne a literary work. Certainly, all Artaud’s writing refuses
traditional genres and fuses modes; the most prominent forms are the
open-letter essay poem of early years and the poetic fantastic metaphysical diatribe of the late years, both highly rhetoricized. Frequently
Artaud incorporated letters into his works, destabilizing the relationship
of art to life. His 1920s texts are already exercises in imaginative metaphysical and linguistic hypothesizing—but, in common with the theoretical works of the leading Surrealist poets of his generation (Breton,
Aragon), the most striking quality of Artaud’s theorizings is their poetry.
In addition to his acting and poetry, he played a prominent role in the
Surrealist movement, which he joined in 1924, editing an issue of la
Révolution surréaliste. For an intense two-year period he energized the
movement, and his impassioned belief in the need to combat not just
cultural inertia but all that upheld orthodoxy and tradition accentuated
the darker side of the movement.
Although it was during the 1930s that Artaud was most closely engaged in theatrical activities, with which his name is now linked, over the
course of the decade he became an increasingly marginal Wgure. He
drifted away from the heart of Parisian cultural life, and, while French
intellectual debate was becoming increasingly concerned with contemporary politics, he became especially interested in esoteric and ancient
modes of knowledge. Héliogabale, an essayistic novel, retells the story of
the Roman Emperor of that name and Artaud’s alter ego within the
framework of ancient Phoenician solar religions and ideas drawn from
the alchemic tradition, and the oracular Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être is
introduction
3
explicitly an apocalyptic reading of Tarot cards. In 1936, following the
failure of his 1935 production of Les Cenci in which he had endeavoured to
realize his philosophy of theatre, and already in a highly excited state of
mind fuelled by increasingly large doses of opiates, he travelled to the
Mexican Sierra to take part in the sacred rituals of the Tarahumara
Indians. These involved the drug peyote and, to his eyes, were an
enactment of the theatrical principles he held dear. This trip inspired a
series of articles, written (and rewritten in the light of his Xuctuating
religious beliefs) between 1937 and the end of his life and published
posthumously as Les Tarahumaras, in which Artaud tells the story of his
visit as one of a frustrated metaphysical and mythic odyssey. On his
return to Europe in 1937, in a state of severe mental confusion, he
undertook a disastrous trip to Ireland to return to the Irish people
what he maintained to the end of his life was Saint Patrick’s cane
(actually an unusually carved cane given to him by a friend), and this
culminated in his deportation and internment, the last three years of
which were spent at the asylum of Rodez in the south-west of France.
Here he started writing compulsively, Wlling hundreds of notebooks
with Wctionalized retellings of his past and present life woven in with wild
theological imaginings. Nearly three-quarters of Artaud’s total output
(and all his tortured drawings) come from the Wve-year period between
his arrival at Rodez in 1943 and his death, and it is these surprisingly
under-discussed late writings that are the focal point of this study. In
1946, thanks to the inXuence and Wnancial support of a group of
friends—including the playwright Arthur Adamov, the director and
actor Roger Blin, and the young woman who was to become the editor
of Artaud’s Œuvres complètes and defendant of his cultural legacy, Paule
Thévenin—he was transferred to a private asylum at Ivry-sur-Seine,
where he enjoyed near total independence. In the last two years of his
life he produced the major texts, including Suppôts et Suppliciations, Pour en
Wnir avec le jugement de dieu, Artaud le Mômo, and Ci-gı̂t précédé de la culture
indienne, and many more notebooks and uncollected poems, which have
interested recent theorists for their dissolution of dominant modes of
discourse and their expression of the fragmentation of the subject.
Artaud has become one of the cultural legends of the twentieth century.
During his lifetime Artaud published substantially less than half of the
textual material now available, rarely with the same editor, and only
three print runs exceeded 1,000 copies.3 Since his death the publication
3
The three were: Le Théâtre et son Double, Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société, and Pour en Wnir avec
le jugement de dieu.
4
introduction
process has stalled on several occasions, and up until 1970 the only major
texts to exist in widely available and reliable editions were the Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière and Le Théâtre et son Double, a fact that does much
to explain their preponderance in Artaud criticism. With the appearance
of Suppôts et Suppliciations in 1978, all Artaud’s texts intended for publication were in the public domain, including many of his letters, which he
saw as integral to his work, and since then most of the many notebooks
Artaud Wlled from 1945 on have appeared. But some of the most characteristic and revelatory of Artaud’s Wnal texts, which appeared in small
circulation reviews, and which are widely known thanks to Jacques
Derrida’s ‘La Parole souZée’, remain virtually unobtainable.4 The only
exposure to what are arguably some of Artaud’s greatest Wnal texts is,
therefore, through the medium of scholarly articles that quote them
within the framework of their own argument, and this has led to a
reluctance to challenge, correct, or expand upon earlier readings.
Though the majority of Artaud’s writing is largely unread, his reputation as a leading Wgure in European Modernism is secure. Had he
published but Le Théâtre et son Double, Artaud’s position in the history of
French letters would have been assured. Together with the writings of
Bertolt Brecht, Artaud’s visionary writings on the theatre have long been
recognized as among the most fertile and vigorous inXuences on the
development of twentieth-century Western theatre, which Artaud condemns for its reliance on the text and on the conventions of plot and
character. Le Théâtre et son Double is a typically singular work, for it does
not set down theories (though Artaud does give explicit if impractical
technical instructions) but explores the function of theatre through the
extended development of images. He oVers an inspired, unclear, and in
fact impossible vision seeking to jump clear outside the logic of representation and signifying processes. Artaud’s essential theatre is compared
to the plague in that ‘comme la peste il est la révélation, la mise en avant,
la poussée vers l’extérieur d’un fond de cruauté latente’ (iv. 29), to Lucas
de Leyde’s painting Loth and his Daughters for its ‘langage physique [ . . . ]
matériel et solide’ (iv. 36), and to alchemy for a shared working-out of
underlying metaphysical principles through the manipulation of symbols
(iv. 46). For Artaud the essence of the theatrical performance is an
organized delirium that calls up the dark forces in humanity, to intensify
and thus exorcise them. At the heart of Artaud’s theatrical vision is the
idea that gestures, movement, colour, lighting, music, and the phonic
4
Only the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris holds all the material.
introduction
5
qualities of the voice should be revelatory of underlying metaphysical
forces, reXecting his lifelong belief in an immanent metaphysical unity
subtending reality but incompatible with linguistic expression.
Thanks to the breadth of material now available under the Gallimard
imprint, it would no longer be possible for a judicious critic to write: ‘Le
Théâtre et son Double, Antonin Artaud’s major theoretical work, to which
all his other writings are conWrmatory marginalia or addenda [ . . . ]’.5
The vestiges of some such attitude remain, however, and, whilst the rest
of Artaud’s writing might no longer be discarded so cavalierly, his ideas
on theatre have been the centre of enquiry for nine out of every ten
scholarly publications on his writings over the past thirty years. This is
out of all proportion: whilst all Artaud’s writing is profoundly inXuenced
by the idea of replacing representation with performance, which is at the
heart of his theatrical doctrines, this does not mean to say that his writing
in the domains of poetry or autobiography may be reduced to an
extrapolation of Le Théâtre et son Double.6 The fame of Le Théâtre et son
Double can still cramp critical exploration of the other twenty-Wve volumes of Artaud’s Œuvres complètes.
In this context it is worth recalling that Blanchot suggested Le Théâtre et
son Double is ‘rien d’autre qu’un Art poétique. Je reconnais qu’il y parle de
théâtre, mais ce qui est en cause, c’est l’exigence de la poésie telle qu’elle
ne peut s’accomplir qu’en refusant des genres limités et en aYrmant un
langage plus originel.’7 Derrida disagrees with Blanchot here, arguing
that the theatre is the total art form for Artaud, citing: ‘La question pour
moi n’était pas de savoir ce qui parviendrait à s’insinuer dans les cadres
du langage écrit, mais dans la trame de mon âme en vie’ (i*. 9).8
Blanchot’s suggestion is worth pursuing a little further, however. As
Derrida observes, it is the gestural dimension of language that is to be
privileged in the Theatre of Cruelty—sonority, intonation, and intensity—where the word-gestures are linked up by a syntax of bodily drives.
5
Eric Sellin, The Dramatic Concepts of Antonin Artaud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1968), 81. This fundamentally excellent work, together with the book by the philosopher
Henri Gouhier, Antonin Artaud et l’essence du théâtre (Paris: Vrin, 1974), constitute the starting
point for those interested in Artaud’s theatrical ideas.
6
This is not to deny the very interesting application to which Artaud’s conception of
theatre has been put to read his other works, especially Héliogabale, a novelistic transposition
of many of the ideas of Le Théâtre et son Double. See e.g. Carol Jacob, ‘The Assimilating
Harmony: A Reading of Antonin Artaud’s Héliogabale’, Sub-Stance, 17 (1977), 115–38.
7
Maurice Blanchot, ‘La Cruelle Raison poétique’, Cahiers de la Compagnie Renand-Barrault,
22–3 (1958), 69.
8
Derrida discusses Blanchot in ‘La Parole souZée’, Tel quel, 20 (1965), 41–65. Repr. in
L’Écriture et la diVérence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 253–92.
6
introduction
And it is precisely sonority, intonation, and intensity that characterize
Artaud’s poetry, where the syntax linking up the words is driven by oral
pleasure. To return to the line quoted by Derrida:
j 1 2
3
j 1 2 3 j1 2 j
j 1 2
3
j 1 2
3 j 1 2 j
j dans les cadres j du langage j écrit j, [mais] j dans la trame j de mon âme j en vie j
what is striking is the heavily determined 3/3/2 rhythmic patterning where
the stress falls on the Wnal syllable, with this pattern reinforced by the dual
anaphora of ‘dans’ et ‘de’ and the internal rhymes and half-rhymes; and it is
surely not innocent that the line closes on envie (en vie), suggesting the
desiring bodily pulsions driving this text forward. It will be suggested here
that poetry becomes the space in which to enact the Theatre of Cruelty.
In addition to the work on his conception of the theatre, from the
1960s on Artaud’s reputation has been bound up with theoretical, mainly
post-structuralist readings presenting him (frequently alongside Bataille
and Nietzsche) as a radical Wgure throwing deeply entrenched presuppositions about the ‘subject’ into question, thus problematizing the
foundations of epistemology. A list of theorists who have devoted substantial articles to discussion of Artaud’s writing reads like a roll-call of
recent intellectual history: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze (both on his
own and as a co-author with Félix Guattari), Julia Kristeva, Susan
Sontag, Phillipe Sollers, Leo Bersani, not to forget earlier critical interventions by Maurice Blanchot, and the more Xeeting attention of Michel
Foucault.9 Their inXuence on Artaud scholarship has been enormous,
and through their power of intellectual provocation they initiated Artaud
criticism proper. What these readings have in common is that they are
attracted to Artaudian writing for what Sollers has dubbed the ‘expérience des limites’. The critical theorists see Artaud as oVering an experience of the otherness they seek to think, and a certain bias is thus
introduced. For post-structuralism, rather than being a self-conscious,
self-possessed source of insight, the subject is regarded as decentred,
elusive, an eVect of language or residue of pernicious metaphysical
thinking. But self-conscious self-possession is precisely what Artaud
9
Kristeva provides an excellent characterization of Artaudian practice in psychocritical
terms. The concept of the chora—the immediate manifestation of semiotic and bodily
pulsions—allows her to articulate the links between Artaud’s Surrealist texts on writing and
the late texts on the imagination of a new bodily form, and her account is wholly
convincing. Despite Deleuze’s grandiloquent championing of Artaud in his article ‘Le
Schizophrène et le mot’, where he declares he would not sacriWce one page of Artaud for
all of Carroll, in fact only half a page out of Wfteen are given over to discussing Artaud. This
is a disappointing failed encounter.
introduction
7
wants, and, far from being at ease with postmodern views of language,
Artaud Wnds the fact that meaning is caught in a perpetual round of
deferral to be catastrophic (as is clear in texts such as ‘La question se pose
de . . . ’). The post-stucturalist readings at least partially edit out the
desires motivating the text, altering the tenor of Artaud’s project.
The earliest and the most inXuential of the theoretical readings were
Derrida’s two articles ‘La Parole souZée’ and ‘Le Théâtre de la cruauté
et la clôture de la représentation’, subsequently reprinted in his seminal
L’Écriture et la diVérence. For most literary scholars these will be the two
pieces of Artaud criticism with which they are familiar, and after thirty
years they remain the most inspiring and still sketch out the richest
agenda, privileging the later texts and the notions of subjectivity, language, and metaphysics that are at the heart of Artaud’s creative enterprise. But this can be a problem for critics working in the wake of
Derrida if they are expected to engage with his analysis on his own
terms. Derrida observes that Artaud struggles against distinctions such as
life and philosophy, experience and concept, and this can only be conducted within the structure his discourse seeks to demolish. Readings
operating outside the terms of Derrida’s debate Wnd themselves relying
on just these notions, and so can seem to fall foul of his argument with
the (erroneous) implication that Derrida’s portrayal of Artaud is thus
somehow superior. But, whilst Derrida’s conceptual analysis of what is at
stake in the Artaudian project is indubitably correct, that does not
thereby guarantee the accuracy of his portrait of Artaud—which is in
fact wholly incidental to his conceptual analysis. And, once we look at
the practice of the Artaudian text—and no longer at the subjacent
dyadic thought structures they bring into question—then we can see
that Derrida presents a skewed vision of Artaud, especially in the Wrst
and most inXuential part of ‘La Parole souZée’, where he discusses
Artaud’s non-theatrical writings. It is worth looking at this in some detail,
for both its insights and its oversights.
As Derrida convincingly argues, Artaud promises an art that gives rise
to no works, an artist who is no longer the point of access to something
beyond or outside himself. Artaud thus protests against exemplarity
itself. Yet in this context Derrida silences Artaud’s own hesitations over
the exemplarity of his ‘maladie’, which Artaud comes to see as both
singular and exemplary (an attitude Derrida upbraids Blanchot for).
Whilst in no way invalidating Derrida’s critical methodology nor his
reading, this indicates the sort of thing that might be left out if we take
Derrida as chief guide to Artaud—and that is the speciWcs and logics of
8
introduction
Artaud’s writings. In general Derrida operates at the level of the conceptual implications of Artaud’s writing, suggesting, for example, that
Artaud seeks to destroy dualist metaphysics by eliminating expression in
favour of pure creation. This current study focuses more on the how and
the what, the excitements and incoherences of Artaud’s writing about his
desire for pure creativity. These diVerent focal distances and levels of
enquiry are, of course, complementary. But Derrida’s account, concentrating on the implications of Artaud’s writings for Derrida’s arguments
about a deconstruction of metaphysics, loses sight of his texts; and in this
second instance he inverses the means and the end—what Artaud seeks
is not the destruction of dualist metaphysics but pure creation. Artaud’s
thinking is not primarily metaphysical.
A second distortion arises from the ambition of Derrida’s overview.
His titular thesis is that ‘Artaud a voulu interdire que sa parole loin de
son corps soit souZée.’10 This is a typically crafty act of preterition, for
Derrida, never one to fall victim to the conceptual implications of his
own theses, outplays Artaud and consistently speaks Artaud’s texts in the
Wrst person, illustrating the impossibility of circumventing the metaphysics that, by treating a text as separate from its locus of production,
legitimates commentary. Yet, however sophisticated a move, it cannot
validate Derrida’s major thesis that any word oVering itself to be read or
heard thereby becomes for Artaud a stolen word. Perhaps some such
tenet is implicit within Artaud’s desire for a form of pure non-expressive
creativity, but that is beside the point: Artaud is not one to unpack his
claims, nor police the internal coherence of his thought. There is quite
simply no textual evidence for the claim that all utterances are by
deWnition stolen. And, if a supporting passage were found—and no
doubt it could be—many more would contradict it. Artaud is not a
careful thinker, and one of the major problems with Derrida’s reading
is that it credits him with too much philosophy. Artaud is not as smoothly
coherent and pat as Derrida makes him look.
Artaud is quite simply not as meditative, reXective, and philosophical
as Derrida’s brilliance makes him appear, nor do his texts carry the
penetrating insights he lends them. Derrida argues that ‘impouvoir’ is
not lack of inspiration, the sterility of having nothing to say, but on the
contrary is the inspiration itself in so far as it is antecedent and another
voice coming from ‘nowhere’. This is a powerful insight, but the idea of
the essential alterity of the inner voice is hard to Wnd in any Artaud
10
‘La Parole souZée’, 261. Page references are to the reprint in L’Écriture et la diVérence.
introduction
9
text—it is instead a transtextual deduction hovering above all his texts
and none in particular. In Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière and Le PèseNerfs where Artaud discusses ‘impouvoir’, linguistic crisis is associated
with the three diVerent problems of material Xashing through the mind,
of manifestations welling up from the chora, and of the linearity of
language. Artaud’s way of thinking is not unidirectional and incisive,
but fragmented, messy, and repetitive. Similarly, Derrida observes that
‘dès que je m’entends, le je qui s’entend, qui m’entend, devient le je qui
parle et prend la parole [ . . . ] à celui qui croit parler et être entendu en
son nom’ and so suggests that for Artaud word-theft is founded on the
‘unité première de ce qui ensuite se diVracte comme vol’.11 He experiences speech as an act of dispossession where the speaking subject is no
longer he (alone) who speaks, and so always Wnds himself in a secondary
position—is thus always the double. Once again, this is a luminous
insight, brilliantly linking up the motifs of word-theft and doubling
belonging to distinct periods of Artaud’s career. Yet, once again, this is
too intellectual and too tidy for Artaud and there is no textual evidence
that such is his position. It is a teasing-out of the implications for
philosophy of what Artaud has to say, but in being used this way Artaud
slips beneath the Derridean argument and out of view.
In fact Derrida is driving to his own goal, and Artaud’s texts are used
as fuel. He is not detained by the passages he quotes but oVers links
between them, joining up the dots, as it were, to see the larger picture,
but paying scant attention to the textual speciWcs.12 Beyond any local
distortion, the greater danger with this approach is that it assumes
Artaud may be treated synthetically. But Artaud is not that sort of writer.
His ideas evolve and mutate over time, and, to make matters more
complicated, he proceeds by developing pairs of conXicting accounts,
and in his Wnal poetry two mythic narrative systems, the one to trace the
genealogy of his alienation, the other to trace out a future genealogy that
would end it. ‘La Parole souZée’ takes Artaud as oddly static, univocal
and free from internal dissension and fails to appreciate the inner
11
Ibid. 265.
Context is ignored when he yokes together a 1920s text about the body, for example,
with the identiWcation of God as ‘le Voleur’ in the 1940s texts. Suppositions are shallowly
anchored, with the textual evidence lacking for such cornerstone ideas as that God is the
name of that which deprives us of our own nature and birth and who will always, on the sly,
have spoken before us, introducing himself between me and me. Some suggetions seem
unfounded, as when he suggests that, for Artaud, God does not just usurp our innate
attributes but our very inneity, quoting from the ‘Préambule’ to the Œuvres complètes: ‘Il y a
des imbéciles qui se croient des êtres, êtres par innéité. j Moi je suis celui qui pour être doit
fouetter son innéité’ (i*. 9), where the link to God requires substantiation.
12
10
introduction
dialectic of Artaud’s mythopoeisis. When Derrida argues: ‘Pour me
garder, pour garder mon corps et ma parole, il me faut retenir l’œuvre
en moi, me confondre avec elle pour qu’entre elle et moi le Voleur n’ait
aucune chance, l’empêcher de déchoir loin de moi comme écriture’, he
is taking evolving narrative schema and treating them as a synchronic
system.13 Here he confuses early Artaud on the work as detrital artefact
and late Artaud on the need to faire bloc against the Voleur. For late Artaud
the œuvre is essentially a process moving towards the elimination of the
other, and so the text qua alterity is not to be retained but perpetually
evacuated. Further, while Artaud at times does link up the two ideas that
the Voleur is present at birth and that alterity is in language to suggest that
the Thief is present within utterance, he basically keeps these two
narratives separate (for otherwise writing would perpetuate, not put an
end to alienation). Derrida’s account of Artaud’s texts breaks down as he
is insuYciently attentive to their ongoing development.
Derrida claims to be speaking towards Artaud; to adapt this expression, he is in fact writing away from Artaud, used as part of a larger
argument about logocentrism. Derrida is at his strongest in drawing out
what is at stake in Artaud’s writing. Thus he concludes his article by
observing that Artaud seeks to destroy and to preserve in one and the
same moment metaphysics in general. Artaud’s discourse recalls the
motifs of the metaphysical tradition—self-presence, unity, self-identity—
accomplishes their deepest tendencies and so destroys them. Derrida’s
insights are right—there are two madnesses staring each other in the
face, the madness of an art without works and that of art as a relay, and
he brings this aporia into clear focus. But the Derridean performance is
ultimately uninterested in Artaud’s texts. Perhaps this is true of all
criticism that is disingenuous if it pretends to be handmaid to a master
text. Nevertheless, the problem is more pressing with Derrida because of
the way he has been read. First, because of the minute attention the
Derridean text pays to its own details, it creates the impression (to which
it never lays claim) of paying equal attention to the Artaudian text. And
Derrida, of course, produces the least handmaidenly of readings. Secondly, the playfulness of Derrida’s text makes us slow to realize how
earnestly he takes Artaud’s texts, ignoring Artaud’s own playfulness.
Thirdly, Derrida’s deconstructionist approach makes us similarly slow
to appreciate that, whilst never monolithic nor reductionist, his reading
fails to adjust to the way Artaud produces not a synchronic system but
13
‘La Parole souZée’, 272. Artaud’s ideas on text and excretion are discussed fully in
Chapter 7.
introduction
11
more of a burning hieroglyph (to use Artaud’s image from Le Théâtre et son
Double). And, if Derrida is very strong on the metaphysical reactions
making that burn, that does not qualify him as a guide to the forms those
hieroglyphs might take. It is in fact ironic, though here the fault lies with
his readers, that Derrida, the commentator of distrust, should have been
taken by Artaud studies as a guide to Artaud. This study, then, does not
seek to correct Derrida so much as to extricate Artaud from Derrida’s
performance on Artaud.
As Jane Goodall reminds us, Derrida fails to see the ‘oVensive dynamic
that fuels [Artaud’s writing] and the indefatigable strategic resourcefulness of Artaud’s campaign’.14 This gleeful resourcefulness is integral both
to the structure of Artaud’s way of thinking and to the local details of his
way of writing. Artaud has a liking for hyperbole and for the extreme
form of his own ideas. Further, his ideas are not discarded but transformed by the new work they are called upon to perform into bolder and
more encompassing variants. Artaud’s writings are clearly not a single
event (as ‘La Parole souZée’ might seem to imply), and his ideas are
better thought of in terms of their elaborate and volatile rhetorical
surface, at least as much as in terms of any conceptual substance. This
is why it is so important to see what Artaud says and how he says it—to
view his texts closer up in greater detail losing the (false) clarity of a
conceptual overview. Artaud ampliWes the rhetorical surface networks—
his ideas and narratives—to a point where they become deranged,
supercharged with meaning. This is lost if Artaud is read exclusively
for the implications of his problematization of dyadic thought structures.
The mobility of his ideas is not just the mobility of a thinker such as
Freud and his evolving modellings of the psyche, it is more of a burningup of ideas—and this constitutes a major part of the challenge of his
texts. This is where Derrida’s reading fails Artaud. However right he
may be in his transtextual exegesis, he does not respect this mobility, this
dance of ideas. And this dance is in fact integral to the overall architecture of the project, both an aesthetic principle and generative of the joy
that Derrida—along with many others—fails to see.
Artaud’s conceptual systems are intrinsically playful, and are in turn
vehicled by playful language.15 It is the combination of the impulse to
14
Jane Goodall, Artaud and the Gnostic Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 216.
Anyone interested in Derrida’s extraordinary readings of Artaud may proWtably consult
Goodall’s closing polemical chapter where she turns deconstructionist techniques against
their practitioners (pp. 213–20).
15
Canuille Dumoulié is the only critic to refer to Artaud’s humour (in Antonin Artaud (Les
Contemporains; Paris: Seuil, 1996)).
12
introduction
theorize his sense of alienation and, to redeploy Jacques Vaché’s term,
umour that is so signiWcant. The Artaudian text plays recklessly with
language in the midst of its most extraordinary conceptual leaps, injecting literarity into existential crisis, unsettlingly allowing the pleasures of
language to guide the unfolding of lines of thought. Metaphors are no
sooner established than they become the basis for a new, further Xight
towards epic mythologization, and the irritation Artaud’s writing provokes arises from his refusal to accept the cherished notions of the
Western tradition, but especially from his refusal to go about his questioning in the sanitized, decorous mode of intellectual endeavour. Philosophy may be considered as the type of writing in which the signifying
element is illusorily repressed in favour of the signiWer, and Artaud
refuses to leave metaphysical and theological notions in unruZed dignity. Instead his texts take mischievous delight in mixing modes and
Xouting discursive etiquette, and in his late writing he develops a signatory hybrid genre of poetic fantastic metaphysical diatribe tinged with
both puerile naughtiness and deadpan irony. This is his true iconoclasm.
It can be hard to maintain one’s equanimity in the face of Artaud’s
wilfully wild writings, which at times veer towards rant and the dishearteningly simplistic. But his texts can also be highly enjoyable and this,
perhaps the most important thing about his writing, goes forgotten.16 If
Artaud has some message, if he leaves us with an abiding image, it is
perhaps that the subject’s écartèlement by discourse goes far deeper than
other Modernist writers suggest, and the only way to face up to this fact is
through word-plays and -ploys.
Unfortunately, however, Artaud’s writing is disappearing under criticism. And the problem with much criticism is that it treats Artaud’s texts
as puzzles, or as failed message-conveyors that may with ingenuity be
rebuilt or unscrambled. Artaud suVers here from his reputation as a
problem writer. Typically, his writing is said to be fragmented, his style
jagged, and the various phases of his writing career to display only
minimal unity of purpose. Criticism has thus been reluctant to do
more than organize his work in such a way as to allow certain recurrent
images and themes to come to the fore. Even Derrida’s reading takes
Artaud’s texts as instances of a certain mode of metaphysical thinking,
16
Kristeva observes how the eroticization of the vocal apparatus leads to the introduction into language of the surcharge of oral pleasure that poetry translates into the redistribution of sound and syntax. It might further be argued that this phonic and syntactic
redistribution and consequent staving-oV of closure and meaning are something Artaud
takes to a high point, frequently combining them with eroticized descriptions of lower
bodily processes; this is what makes Artaud a master in juicy linguistic performance.
introduction
13
thus as message. Little attention has been paid to the poetic practices, to
the processes by which his texts generate their meanings nor to the logics
developed to hold these meanings precariously together. What such
readings miss is not only the speciWc terms of the thematic, the logics,
and the structurings of Artaud’s texts, but also the anger, polemics, and
inventiveness. If we content ourselves with a non-reading knowledge of
Artaud, we shall miss out on the pleasure that is the real key to his work.
It is only by reading Artaud that we may see beneath the large tidal
currents (so convincingly identiWed by Derrida) and see the crossrhythms that make the individual Artaudian sentence such fun to read.
Collapse and fragmentation are indeed strongly present features of
Artaud’s writing, and this study explores the characteristic processes of
dismantling, but this is far from being the whole story. Of course
Artaud’s writing is a-rational and does not hit any stride that would
sustain the prolonged development of a text—an inherent short-windedness means that in Artaud’s two novels the narrative machinery is
continually breaking down and having to be Wred up again—and his
view of reality becomes increasingly divorced from anything to which
most readers would wish to subscribe. But if we acknowledge the dispersive forces at work in the Artaudian corpus, we must also acknowledge
that they are held precariously in check by equally impressive structuring
forces. In what follows I attempt to demonstrate both how Artaud
disrupts and how he builds meaning-giving structures in his writing.
Each phase of his thought has suYciently strong structuring features
for us to talk of deviant systems. There are indeed contradictions and
incoherences, and one of the most striking features of his systems is that
they display an ongoing hesitancy towards the ideas they develop; but
even more impressive than his dissolution of established views of reality is
that he produces structures, Xawed, unstable, and provisory perhaps, out
of the debris. And at the level of textual detail we shall see that Artaud
displays an almost maniacally tight control over phonic patterning, the
semantic shifts to which he subjects terms, and the organization of
semantic blocks through both a wilfully idiosyncratic syntax and, in his
poetry, lineation. Out of these details, which make his prose and his
correspondence an especially free form of free verse, Artaud builds his
larger structures, which are marked in turn by the combination of
Xuidity and order that characterize his sentences.
It is both the details of the incoherences of Artaud’s conceptual
systems and the details of his sentences that allow us to get to grips
with the Artaudian text. For, with the exception of Le Théâtre et son Double
14
introduction
(and arguably Héliogabale), Artaud’s texts are either not read, only rapidly
read, or else read as examples of liminal discourse. The most neglected
area is the writing from 1943 on: the extensive correspondence written at
Rodez, the late writings intended for publication (Artaud le Mômo, Ci-gı̂t
précédé de la culture indienne, Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu and Suppôts et
Suppliciations), and the extensive notebooks. What discussion there is
approaches them as a largely homogenous group needing to be lent
coherence (this is also true of his more discussed 1920s writings). The
general tendency is to tell the story, as it were, of Artaud’s writing, a
tendency that helps to identify the structural features of the texts in
question but fails to respect their literarity. Traditionally the late texts
have been interpreted according to the hidden paradigm of the linear
narrative: if Artaud composes a series of works, it is, the tacit assumption
seems to be, because he cannot say everything at once. Consequently the
shifts in his ideas have been played down. What this study seeks to do is
to explore these late texts, in all their internal and mutual contradictions,
for their own structuring devices. And, as importantly, to treat them as
distinct if related works and trace the ways in which Artaud’s ideas are
subjected to pressures by the fact of their expression within a particular
work, leading to the need to write a new version of these ideas in each
subsequent work. There is a drivenness to Artaud’s writings that escapes
readings that would smooth over the plasticity of his ideas. In brief, then,
this study analyses the read but under-scrutinized early writings, so as to
provide a framework, derived largely from Artaud’s work itself and not
from external bodies of theoretical or doctrinal discourse, within which
to start reading the under-read Rodez writings, before turning to the
Wnal works. The aim is to elucidate the larger structures by looking at the
neglected low-level structuring features, but also to highlight the complexities, contradictions, incoherences, and tensions that propel his writing forward into the next phase.17
The opening two chapters suggest that the sense of linguistic and
existential crisis in Artaud’s 1920s and early 1930s texts is a response to
the impossible desire to write a pre-linguistic state of bodily awareness.
The Wrst chapter charts Artaud’s engagement with Surrealist thought,
17
It is, of course, not strictly true that no critics have paid close attention to textual
details. The most obvious example that comes to mind is Rodolphe Gasché’s brilliant
reading of the onomastic complexities that gravitate around Artaud’s naming the plaguebearing boat of Le Théâtre et son Double the Grand-Saint-Antoine (in ‘Self-Engendering as a
Verbal Body’, Modern Language Notes, 93 (1978), 677–94). However, my point is that critical
overviews of Artaud’s work do not engage in such low-level analysis and that they thereby
miss out on the dynamics of Artaud’s writing.
introduction
15
his abjuration of rationalistic discourse and preoccupation with the
paucity of verbalized consciousness. His sense of de-realization in discourse leads him to imagine a new idea of selfhood privileging an
instinctual awareness of the welter of bodily experience. The second
chapter disputes the view that his early writing documents literary silence
and cognitive stalling. Instead his texts are seen implicitly to invoke an
ideal, pre-verbal prise de conscience of himself as a functioning, sentient
body-in-the-world. This leads Artaud to imagine a rejuvenated language
able to say the Xuctuations of such rudimentary experience in its dynamic complexity, for he concludes that only new linguistic forms could
deliver full self-cognition and thus the eZorescence of an inner self. The
opening two chapters therefore discover the positive theorizing work
carried out under cover of the negative critique of language and show his
underlying concern is not the dysfunctioning of his psyche but selfpresence, precisely that which is ever more explicitly his concern in the
writings from 1943 on.
In Chapters 3 and 4, Artaud’s deepening metaphysical dualism is
traced, providing the intellectual background to the idiosyncratic ontotheological system of his neglected asylum texts of 1943–5, which have
not previously been studied in detail other than as symptomatic documents of psychosis. As part of a broader questioning of all origins and
givens, Artaud recasts his Surrealist ideas on language and the body,
privileging the idea of a dual body of abjection and purity, which later
grows into the notion of the corps sans organes. Similarly his idea of
‘envoûtement’ evolves into a metaphoric account of the way cultural
and linguistic structural patternings bring alterity into the heart of the
linguistic subject. Chapter 4 then expands this reading, tracing the ideas
on language that run through the religious narrative. Artaud considers
there to be a gulf separating human language from the cosmogenesic
Word of God, resulting in an impoverished status for artistic utterance.
He rebels against this until the discursive hierarchy has been inverted,
overthrowing Artaud’s Christian beliefs. Artaud’s enquiries into language are thus shown in Chapter 4 to be the wellsprings of the project
of the Wnal poetry, to create a new Artaud by doing away with God.
The closing three chapters read the univers imaginaire of his late writings
in the light of these narrative structures on body and language. They
argue that his late texts poetically rewrite metaphysical orthodoxy by
fostering large-scale ambivalences, and that the interrelated writing on
God and the body constitutes a ludic yet eerily compelling mythic
system. Chapter 5 is pivotal, arguing that the extravagance of Artaud’s
16
introduction
Wnal writing resides in the work upon language as much as in the ideas
expressed. The diYculty of the writing is frequently an index of its
subversive energies, and the techniques that make the text diYcult
actually perform positive sense-generating work. The text disrupts normal linguistic functioning to disclose and so purge language of the values
and structures of Western conceptual orthodoxy, considered to be incommensurate with authentic self-expression. Linguistic exuberance
might threaten Artaud’s texts with unintelligibility, but the Cahiers work
on language in order to fashion the sense-units with which they build a
strange new textual world.
The closing pair of chapters examines the dual, intermeshing myths
Artaud evolves in his late writings of a God who inhabits his body and of
an alternative body he would possess unchallenged. Emphasis is placed
on the extent to which formal qualities structure these mutating narratives. The story of God’s vampiric, salacious practices becomes increasingly extravagant as it feeds oV its own images and rhetorical devices,
pushing the narrative system beyond a metaphoric account of alienation.
This increasing extravagance means it would be as unwise to portray
Artaud’s theology as purely a ludic parody as it would be to portray it as
merely psychotic. Despite the fame of his image of the corps sans organes,
what the Wnal poetic texts say about the body, and how they say it, have
received only brief critical attention. Far from glorifying the lower body
and its Xuids, the notion of the corps sans organes is an increasingly
unbodily body.18 It is the idea of the corps sans organes that leads the
conceptual dance, drawing the diverse theorizing mythic systems loosely
together. But, as with the related account of God, the writing on the
body takes oV and becomes a self-perpetuating, mutating narrative
fuelled by its own rhetorical energy. Increasingly the text identiWes the
writing subject with the corps sans organes, and linguistic innovation here
plays a key role in reimagining a new kind of identity. The Wnal emphasis
is placed on the increasingly stretched structure-giving qualities of his
poems, precariously holding in check the conceptual excesses of their
mythic narratives.
The reading put forward here, then, discerns the structuring, reconceptualizing work performed by Artaud’s writing without losing sight of
the disordering impulses. When both the system-dismantling and the
18
This is perhaps where the missed encounter between Deleuze and Artaud may be
most clearly seen: to suggest that ‘le corps sans organes est seulement fait d’os et de sang’ and
that the corps sans organes is ‘un corps Xuidique et glorieux, Xamboyant’ can be qualiWed only
as misreading (Gilles Deleuze, ‘Le Schizophrène et le mot’, Critique, 255–6 (1968), 741 n.).
introduction
17
system-building tendencies have been appreciated, the most impressive
thing about Artaud’s texts is the way that, within each poem, line by line,
Artaud’s trenchant, muscular style manages to craft a precarious equipoise between order and dissolution. In what follows we shall see great
energy expended by Artaud’s writing in its disruption, dispersal, and
regeneration of structures. In the early writings he develops what the
critic Dumoulié nicely characterizes as a ‘dynamique de la fureur’,
which, whilst pretending to reveal his naked being uncloaked by literary
artiWce, actually sets up a rhetoric to convince the addressee of the reality
of the analysis carried by his images.19 This fury of destructive energy is
not only directed against the higher level structures of orthodox ideas on
thought and language; from the beginning of his writing career it spills
over into the lower level of sentence and paragraph in such texts as ‘Paul
les Oiseaux ou la Place de l’Amour’ (written in 1925, the opening year of
Artaud’s major publishing career). Artaud here writes a Wctionalized
version of his own life refracted through the intermediary of the Florentine Renaissance painter Uccello, renowned for his perfection of the
structure-giving quality of perspective. The excedentary energies of
Artaud’s writing leap over the Wrebreak separating writing self from the
image reXecting back that self:
Paulo Uccello est en train de se débattre au milieu d’un vaste tissu mental
[...]
Quitte ta langue, Paulo Uccello, quitte ta langue, ma langue, ma langue,
merde, qui est-ce qui parle, où es-tu? Outre, outre, Esprit, Esprit, feu, langues
de feu, feu, feu, mange ta langue, vieux chien, mange sa langue, mange etc.
J’arrache ma langue.
oui.
Pendant ce temps [ . . . ] (i*. 54)
There is here a quite extraordinary headlong rush from the stability
aVorded by the stage-direction-like detachment of the Wrst line through
the direct address of the second-person singular to an increasing breakdown of logic and referentiality. The momentum gathers as the text
accelerates to full near-nonsensical speed in just three lines, only to apply
the breaks with equal force as Artaud swallows the linguistic outburst
back down as the clauses lengthen out again for the second paragraph to
close on the imposition of silence. A silence immediately shattered by the
full-throated aYrmatory outburst. The third paragraph is one single
capitalized word, and this lineation, to which we have been sensitized
19
Dumoulié, Antonin Artaud, 11.
18
introduction
by the use of punctuation to expand and contract the semantic units in
the second paragraph, underscores how the will to structure contained in
one word is equal to forty words of dissolution. An intense centrifugal
force has curbed the threatened incoherence and allows the text to
progress in clichéd tranquillity. Artaud’s explosive energy is brought to
heel by a reordering of the textual world he has just shattered in a way
that will be echoed less than a year before his death in Pour en Wnir avec le
jugement de dieu, with the aYrmation that his uncontainable explosive
force will scatter reality into 10,000 shards before regrouping it into an
unforgettable new form (xiii. 118). From the earliest through to the latest
texts Artaud’s writing displays this dual movement of dispersal and
restructuring. His strong-armed control over syntax, punctuation, and
lineation allows him, with increasing conWdence, to subject his writing to
extreme distensions, and in the later writings the unfolding of sense is
deferred until breaking point. He orchestrates his writing with a Wne ear
for the limits to which he can push disorder without quite rupturing the
structures that contain it.
The twin impulses to order and disorder are carried over from
sentence making to the higher level of writing deviant conceptual systems. Artaud’s pathological onto-theology and metaphysics display great
elasticity. In his mythologized conceptualization of the human condition
the rebellious theological and metaphysical structures he has crafted
have to expand and contract to accommodate the discordances and
contradictions generated by his unstoppable ‘dynamique de fureur’.
And, having restructured metaphysics and theology, he then writes
against these restructurings, dissolving his own creations and producing
ever sparser and more agile conceptualizations of his life. This ongoing
creative conceptualizing is conducted through imagery, and this explicit
poeticization of theorizing can lend his thinking a phantasmal air. It is a
theorizing of suggestion, not of deWnition, and the object in whose name
this theorizing is covertly undertaken is absent from his texts. Whether it
be his early desire for a language that might enable self-presence, a
theatre of metaphysical immediacy in his middle period, or the performative, dynamic identity he lays claim to in his Wnal writings, he is
always gesturing towards something he cannot quite state. The structures of his theorizing are grandiose constructs that do not hold their
unobtainable desires. Artaud does not build theories but theorizes, his
work is directed not towards creating objects, either aesthetic or theoretical, but towards the activities of thinking and writing. His is a writing
introduction
19
of intellectual energy, not intellectual fruits. What matters to Artaud is
not structures, but the dissolution and reconstitution of structures.
This study is a study of literature. It is not an apologia for Artaudian
thought. It looks at what happens when linguistic playfulness is placed at
the service of wide-scale metaphysical restructuring in Artaud’s writing,
and, if this involves tracing Artaud’s ideas, this should not be taken as an
endorsement of them. In his Wnal great work, Suppôts et Suppliciations,
Artaud suggests that, ‘depuis cinquante ans que je dure, mon délire ne
m’a pas quitté et c’est le délire d’un homme éclairé’ (xiv**. 167). We
might not agree that it is an enlightened delirium (at least not in the sense
Artaud here suggests), but we must recognize that Artaud’s is a coherent
delirium. And both these terms, ‘coherent’ and ‘delirium’, must be given
equal weight if we are to trace the extraordinary structuring and dismantling energies at work in the Artaudian text. If the delirium of
Artaud’s writing increases with time, so too does its eerie coherence. In
the face of increasing self-dissolution, Artaud’s increasingly voluminous
writing aYrms his will to stay just this side of disorder, and out of the
dispersal of self and sense to forge a verbal self-reinvention. The organization, and aYrmation of will achievable in writing mean the text
replaces an existence of entropy and disarray. If the heart of Artaud’s
late idea of a new form of existence created by writing is delirious, it is
undertaken out of a desire for coherence and simplicity.
What follows, then, is an attempt to chart the Xows of order and
disorder, and of creation and destruction, in Artaud’s work. He theorizes
on a cusp between reason and unreason, but throughout his energies are
directed by questions of authorship and of language. The rationale
behind his vast rhetorical and mythic systems is to create a means of
expressing the cruel creativity of being, but rhetoric and myth cannot say
being, only gesture towards it. And yet, when we Wnish reading Artaud,
what is even more striking than the delirious desire to dissolve and
recreate being by the act of writing is the immense creative, orchestrating will, what Artaud calls at Rodez: ‘la simplicité de ma Volonté
inabdiquante’ (xv. 112), which plays unnervingly with order and disorder.
And, as we shall see, if at diVerent stages in his career Artaud’s writing
organizes reality in very diVerent ways, there is an underlying dynamic
that allows us to see Artaud not just as a giver of local structure but as the
author of a master structure, and his writings not just as a series of
fragmented texts but as a precariously ordered œuvre of exciting, irreducibly strange, and fascinating poetic works.
1
PAINFUL BODIES OF THOUGHT
Sous la grammaire il y a la pensée qui est un opprobre plus fort à
vaincre, une vierge beaucoup plus revêche, beaucoup plus rêche à
outrepasser quand on la prend pour un fait inné.
(ix., 10)
We set up a word at the point at which our ignorance begins, at
which we can see no further, e.g. the word ‘I’ [ . . . ]—these are
perhaps the horizons of our knowledge.1
In Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière (1924), Artaud’s Wrst major text and a
seminal account of the misdirections and breakdowns in thinking and
writing, Artaud presents himself to Jacques Rivière, critic and editor of
the vanguard journal La Nouvelle Revue française, as a signiWcant writer
precisely because of his acute diYculties in writing.2 He claims to be ‘une
véritable anomalie’ (i*. 27), and is at pains to distance himself from
contemporaries who, if their writings testify to a relative ‘faiblesse’ in
front of the written word, are not like him aVected ‘dans la chair et dans
[l’]âme de tous les jours. Cette inapplication à l’objet qui caractérise
toute la littérature, est chez moi une inapplication à la vie. Je puis dire,
moi, vraiment, que je ne suis pas au monde, et ce n’est pas une simple
attitude de l’esprit’ (i*. 41). Others might opt to surrender intellectual
control to follow the caprices of thought, Artaud implies, but the fabric of
his being embodies a veritable inability to think. His is no stance; and
herein lies the value of his writing, he argues, for its peculiar failings are
revelatory of an exemplarily alienated mind: ‘Je m’étais imaginé vous
retenir [ . . . ] par la rareté de certains phénomènes d’ordre intellectuel
[ . . . ] Je me Xattais de vous apporter un cas, un cas mental caractérisé, et
[ . . . ] attirer votre attention sur la valeur réelle, la valeur initiale de ma
1
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, para. 482.
Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière was not Artaud’s Wrst publication. Prior to this were a
collection of poems in rhyming stanzas, Tric-Trac du ciel (1923), and two copies of a slender
review penned entirely by Artaud, Bilboquet (1923), standing midway between traditional
rhyming stanzas and the self-analytic poetic fragments developed to the fullness of their
power during his alliance with Surrealism. He had also published two dozen or so poems,
letters, and essays. It is with Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière, however, that the evolution of
the writer we now know commenced.
2
painful bodies of thought
21
pensée’ (i*. 28). These are unashamedly publicist letters, and such
threadbare rhetorical devices as paired reprises (of the nouns ‘cas’ and
‘valeur’) spring readily to Artaud’s pen. But he claims to live in a diVerent
linguistic order and hence diVerent reality from the rationalized and
ordered view of the world enshrined in orthodox discourse. There is, he
suggests insistently, something special about his thought that makes his a
dramatically discontinuous and yet essentially metaphysical and surreal
mental universe. However insistent the lament that he suVers from his
exclusion from this world (‘je ne suis pas au monde’), he presents his audelà as a realm of greater existential authenticity.
It is, of course, no small irony that a series of letters where Artaud is
laying claim to a uniquely profound breakdown in his creative thought
processes and presenting himself as ‘un cas’ should now be perceived as
one of the deWning accounts of creative thought, rivalling Paul Valéry’s
La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste (1896). Indeed, Rivière explicitly places
Artaud alongside Teste (i*. 35), but the comparison, whilst an honour
to the force of exposition of the unknown Artaud of 1923–4, must not be
pushed too far. Teste’s troubles relate to an over-abundance of possible
thought trails; in Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière Artaud presents his
diYculties in obverse terms as a fundamental stalling of the mind where
every thought is recalcitrant. Whereas Valéry’s thinker would seem to be
threatened by an over-transparency, a too great facility in observing the
mind that could lead him to look straight through it, the kind of
nothingness described by Artaud is not invisibility but absence.
The Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière throws a long shadow over
Artaud’s œuvre, not least because he has been taken at his word as
importantly and illuminatingly non-mainstream. The prevalent image
of Artaud sees him as a revealing combination of the seminal and
the marginal and his writing as a heroic failure where genius is at the
service of intellectual dissolution. It is certainly true that Artaud takes the
question of creativity and silence into new areas by his account of
insidious linguistic collapse and the non-occurrence of thought, together
with his Wne analyses of the sense of existential paucity this occasions.
Throughout his career he courted the image of archetypal yet atypical
suVerer and seer, and identiWed with such ‘aliénés authentiques’ as Van
Gogh, Nietzsche, and Nerval. His most highly regarded texts—Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière, Le Théâtre et son Double, Van Gogh, le suicidé de la
société—are those where his theorizing about art is accompanied by the
implicit claim that the excentric perspective he adopts aVords an incomparably superior appreciation of art’s true function, and, by extension, of
22
the basic realities of life. This image of the crazedly lucid poète maudit
survived his death, and in the late 1940s and 1950s his name was elevated
to critical canonization as martyr to artistic suVering,3 while his appeal to
post-structuralist critics in the 1960s relied on a more sophisticated yet
related vision of his writing as revelatory of the dispersive forces at work
on the modern linguistic, thinking subject. Artaud is thought to be
interesting because liminal, and this liminality is said to tell us something
of the intellectual taboos of Western culture. Yet, whatever the value of
seeing his texts as a revealingly distorted mirror held up to the Western
world view, it has prevented an appreciation of the way Artaud’s writing
does not just assault Western thought modes but also builds up something that, despite its tensions and its increasingly mythic overtones, is a
form of conceptual system.
Still, there is an important way in which the image of Artaud as a
marginal writer whose thought is revelatory of the dissolution of the
thinking and linguistic subject does hold good. In countering certain
conceptual myopia—thinking, for example, is not just the smooth,
homogenous process that the Western tradition was long prone to
dress it up as, but may instead be legitimately seen as subject to secret,
hidden pressures exerted by linguistic and conceptual systems—Artaud
allows repressed aspects of ideas and accounts to come to the fore. What
he says about those repressed aspects might, especially towards the end
of his life, be extravagant, but that does not detract from his signalling
speciWc aspects of a notion as neglected to the point of being occluded
(or, as Artaud will call it in the 1940s, occulted—‘envoûté’). A fundamental point about Artaud is that he takes ideas with a quite extraordinary seriousness, and what for others are largely dead metaphors are
for him vibrantly alive and often threatening truths. Without denying the
justiWable basis of the image of Artaud as exemplary marginal Wgure,
then, it is important to see that this marginality is not the result of an
inherent oddity, an eccentric and perhaps psychotic world view, but is
instead the product of a lively intellectual interaction with cultural and
intellectual frameworks. He builds his extraordinary and extravagant
vision of the human condition out of his analyses of the failure of
language and of the voids of the thinking subject.
3
A typical example of early Artaud criticism: ‘Antonin Artaud s’est à bon escient suicidé
sa vie durant, sans une heure de répit, sans se préoccuper de disciples, d’imitateurs, pour notre
salut ’ ( Jacques Audiberti, ‘Le Salut par la peau’, Revue K Numero double Antonin Artaud, 1–2
(1948), 62.
23
In his writings of the 1920s Artaud dwells closely on how language,
thought, and ratiocination may relate to self, body, and world. His
writing circles round these themes, playing out the same motifs with
myriad variations. They provide the framework for the exploration of his
sense of existential thinness and insubstantiality initiated in the 1920s
texts and continued in all his subsequent writings, so this chapter will
oVer a general view of what Artaud has to say on these issues and a broad
feel of how he tends to express it. It is in fact insuYciently recognized that
Artaud’s intellectual trajectory Xows directly from the 1920s collections
(Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière, L’Ombilic des Limbes, Le Pèse-Nerfs, Fragments d’un Journal d’Enfer) and especially from the originally uncollected
writings now published under the title ‘Textes surréalistes’ (i**) and
largely ignored by criticism. The following chapter in particular will
draw on these texts to analyse more closely what Artaud says about
linguistic aridity, thus revealing some rather surprising premisses to the
philosophy of language structuring his poetics.
The notion of a linguistic crisis is not, of course, peculiarly modern,
and Artaud is far from being alone in sensing the inadequacy of the
poetic idiom.4 To take the example of an immediate precursor, in his
famous Chandos Letter (1902) the Austrian poet, dramatist, and essayist
Hofmannstahl Wnds that previously real abstract concepts crumble in the
mouth like mouldy fungi. Within the English tradition, the generation of
Yeats and Eliot—the contemporaries of the Surrealists—felt language to
be depotentiated by rationality and to have undergone an irreversible
process of deformation and decay. Instead of being a vehicle for selfexpression, language is experienced by the modernist writer as an oppressive superego. In a letter of July 1914 the German-language writer
Kafka, who captured so much of twentieth-century anxiety in his work,
observed that ‘what I write is diVerent from what I say, what I say is
diVerent from what I think, what I think is diVerent from what I ought
to think and so it goes on further into the deepest darkness’.5 It is not
a lack of individual inspiration or the dead weight of tradition that
impedes creativity but language as such. Language is no longer conceived as a tool but as a force in its own right (making literary activity less
an aesthetic than an existential activity). The German philosopher
4
The brief overview of the idea of linguistic crisis that follows is especially indebted to
Richard Sheppard’s excellent article ‘The Crisis in Language’, in Malcolm Bradbury and
James McFarlane (eds.), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (London: Penguin, 1991), 323–36.
5
Quoted in English in ibid. 328.
24
Heidegger, whose work is contemporary to Surrealism, says of language
that it does not exhaust itself in signifying but remains excedentary to
human uses, outside the world, self-standing and resistant. This captures
in abstract terms a strain running through Dada and Surrealist thought.
Much of what Artaud has to say on the issues of discourse and reality
overlaps with the ideas of French poets of his generation. His conception
of language, thought, and reality is inscribed not just within the modernist movement but wholly within the matrix of Surrealist debate, of
which he was one of the moving forces. However, where André Breton
and Louis Aragon perceived the split within the speaking subject as
introducing a fruitful strangeness into experience that made possible a
rejuvenation of reality, Artaud identiWes this doubling in the subject with
linguistic breakdown. It is true that breakdown places him on a metaphysically more authentic plane than that of the usual conceptual Wctions
of the doxa. Linguistic failure is for him an index of authenticity. It opens
his eyes to the delusions of orthodox ideas on the linguistic subject, but
only because he is battering himself against the limits of discourse in his
attempt to express his subjecthood. But, given that for Artaud the subject
is largely the linguistic subject, linguistic failure precludes the possibility
of authentic subjecthood. Placing great stress on the jumps, breaks, and
losses within thought and on the importance of the suVering body in
relation to this non-continuity of thought, Artaud’s personal creed is
saturated with an existential pessimism and solipsism that sit oddly with
the upbeat fervour and the ludic nature of much 1920s Surrealist writing.
Where Surrealist poetry aims to liberate the human spirit, in his selfanalytical writing Artaud never even says to his satisfaction his own
fragmentation. So what distinguishes Artaud’s thought on language,
truth, self, and world from the Surrealist matrix in which it develops is,
Wrst, that he situates his ideas more squarely in the domain of metaphysics, not aesthetics, and, secondly, that he despairs of breaking out of the
wasteland of reality and alienation into a surreality of vibrancy and
plenitude. This latter is his desired destination throughout his writing
career, but one from which the linguistic subject is, he suggests, permanently exiled—or fallen.
Artaud, with the other habitués of Masson’s studio (sometimes called
the 46 rue Blomet group), began attending the second wave of André
Breton’s gatherings in the summer of 1924. If now seen as a secondary
Wgure in the Surrealist movement, he was no mere fellow traveller, and
leant towards zealotry and extremism in his interpretation of what
Surrealism should stand for: ‘J’ai fait connaissance avec tous les dadas
25
qui voudraient bien m’englober dans leur dernier bateau surréaliste’,
Artaud writes in 1924, ‘mais rien à faire. Je suis beaucoup trop surréaliste
pour cela. Je l’ai d’ailleurs toujours été, et je sais, moi, ce que c’est que le
surréalisme. C’est le système du monde et de la pensée que je me suis fait
depuis toujours’ (i**. 112).6 He was nominated Director of the Bureau de
recherches surréalistes in January 1925, and edited the third edition of
the standard-bearing La Révolution surréaliste. Soon he was introducing his
own urgent concerns and it has been suggested that his expulsion in 1926
was in large part due to Breton’s disquiet at the guiding force Artaud was
becoming.7 It was inevitable that Artaud’s alliance with Surrealism be
uneasy because of a diVerence in literary temperament. The form his
writing naturally took was violent socio-religious invective, whilst the
emphasis in Surrealist writing—at least until its politicization in the late
1920s—was placed on the positive ideal of a creative liberation from
social and rational orthodoxy, and on a beauty to be spun out of the
freshness of the merveilleux and the hasard objectif. In the words of a leading
scholar of the movement: ‘Surrealism insults reason for the beneWt of
spontaneity, logic for the beneWt of the lyric sense of the marvellous, and
everyday reality for the glory of the insolite.’8 The undertow of Artaud’s
writing pulls in a very diVerent direction, for he directed his energies
towards writing against what he conceived as the barriers to this freedom—language, reason, and conceptual constructs. Artaud intones the
apocalypse, and does not sing the Surrealist revolution. Whilst the
violence of much Surrealist textual imagery was a joyous, iconoclastic
release of energies, the violence of texts such as Artaud’s ‘Adresse au
Pape’—‘guerre à toi, Pape, chien’ (i**. 41)—reveals an earnest hatred.
The intense passion that was criticized in his acting of the period was just
as apparent in his writing, of uncustomary virulence even for Surrealist
polemic.
Artaud claims to be naturally Surrealist on the ground that for him the
surreal was not a willed, aestheticized vision of reality but attendant
upon the acute derealization he experienced within discourse. Leaving
6
This ties in well with André Masson’s reading of Artaud: ‘S’il existe un surréaliste,
c’était assurément Artaud’. ‘Artaud, lui-même’, Cahiers de la Compagnie Renaud-Barrault:
Antonin Artaud et le théatre de notre temps, 22–3 (1958), 9.
7
The suggestion is made by Stephen Barber (Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (London:
Faber and Faber, 1993), 29). Gérard Durozoi, in le Surréalisme, co-authored with Bernard
Lecharbonnier (thèmes et textes; Paris: Larousse, 1972), quotes Breton as being distinctly
alarmed by ‘cette voie; mi-libertaire, mi-mystique, [qui] n’était pas tout à fait la mienne’.
8
Mary Ann Caws, The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1970), 18.
26
aside the signiWcant diVerence of tone, there is certainly much common
ground between Artaud and such major theoreticians of Surrealist
poetry as Aragon and Breton. Many elements of the Dada-derived
early Surrealist creed are to be found in Artaud’s collections of the
1920s, L’Ombilic des Limbes, Le Pèse-Nerfs, Fragments d’un Journal d’Enfer,
and especially L’Art et la Mort. (This latter, oddly, is the one collection
published after Artaud’s rupture with the Surrealist movement and yet
the only one extensively to deploy orthodoxly Surrealist stylistic techniques.) The scandalizing of intellectual good manners, negation of
knowledge, and celebration of the arational mark their credentials as
early French Surrealist polemic. If stylistically most of these texts stand
apart, only infrequently displaying touches of Surrealist lyricism (and this
is an important point underlining the fact that Artaud’s overlap with
Surrealism lay in a mode of thinking more than in an aesthetic),9 they
articulate a similar attitude towards Western rationalistic culture and its
impasses as the writings of mainstream Surrealist writers, together with a
similar neophytic admiration of other (mainly oriental) cultures.10
As Director of the Surrealist Research Centre Artaud was quick to
speak for the collective in his more ideologizing moments: in an anonymous text he wrote to open the third edition of La Révolution surréaliste,
for example, ordered thought is decried as anathema to deep reality:
‘logique, ordre, Vérité (avec un grand V), Raison, nous donnons tout au
néant de la mort’ (i**. 32). Binary logic and dualist thought modes are
particularly reviled: ‘L’Europe logique écrase l’esprit sans Wn entre les
marteaux de deux termes’ (i**. 43). Reason and logic have stunted reality
to the point of deformation: ‘le réel n’étant qu’une des faces les plus
transitoires et les moins reconnaissables de l’inWnie réalité’ (i*. 126) and so
the revolution must strive for ‘la rupture et la disqualiWcation de la
logique qu’elle pourchassera jusqu’à l’extirpation de ses retranchements
primitifs’ (i**. 45). Artaud departs here from mainstream Surrealist
thought, which is not antirationalistic as such but suggests that what
rationality presents as contradictory is better seen as complementary. In
the Second manifeste André Breton writes that: ‘Tout porte à croire qu’il
existe un certain point de l’esprit d’où la vie et la mort, le réel et
9
Two notable stylistic exceptions are Paul les Oiseaux ou la Place de l’Amour (i*. 54–6)
and the text inspired by a painting by André Masson, Un ventre Wn . . . (i*. 60–2).
10
See e.g. Artaud’s sycophantic ‘Adresse au Dalaı̈-Lama’ (i**. 42). This should not be
confused with the hostile text of the same name (i*. 16–19) written by Artaud the cultural
terrorist in 1946 to introduce his projected Œuvres complètes (see i*. 271 n.). There are also two
texts entitled ‘Adresse au Pape’ for the same reason.
27
l’imaginaire, le passé et le futur, le communicable et l’incommunicable,
le haut et le bas cessent d’être perçus contradictoirement.’ The aim is to
reconstitute totalities and resolve antimonies through the work of what
Apollinaire called ‘la raison ardente’, instead of the dissociating and
classifying of ‘la raison froide’. This creed provides the basis for Surealist
poetic images, which unite elements habitually dissociated: thus, for
example, Eluard both sings the poet’s power and negates the logical
dissociation of things in ‘J’établis des rapports entre l’homme et la femme
j Entre les fontes du soleil et le sac à boutons.’ Surrealist poetics seek less
to do away with reason than to reinstate all that reason does away with,
and the aim in lines such as Eluard’s is less to transgress old orders than
to connect anew. For Artaud too the rationalistic order is seen as
insubstantial in comparison to the potential richness of mental life: ‘la
Toute-Pensée. Le merveilleux est à la racine de l’esprit’ (i**. 32). But,
despite positive reference to the marvellous, the dominant impression
even in the most mainstream Surrealist texts Artaud wrote for La
Révolution surréaliste is of advanced entropy and of being dragged down
into the ‘néant’ that appears so frequently under his pen. The rationalistic inXection of our ideation of reality veils the inadequacy of our
representations of it, for reason lends a false coherence and illusory
higher dignity to a reality that, if truth be told for Artaud, is experienced
by suVering bodies as a scattering, confusing welter of experience. The
compartmentalization and ordering of experience within rationalistic
language drains our representations of life of any vitality for Artaud,
and this is true not just of the outside world but also of the linguistic
subject. For Artaud, cognition is a supremely complex operation upon
equally complex experiential material; rationalistic thinking loses all this
complexity.
Rationalistic language is, therefore, a major factor in Artaud’s sense of
existential paucity. In texts of the mid-1920s he sometimes prescribes a
vital dose of the unordered and the surreal. In a rare text where Artaud
employs Surrealist stylistic devices he contrasts a mental state of surreal
chaosmos to the sterility of mental experience once it has been ordered
by ratiocination. Initially the text evokes the rich, dense experiential state
prior to conceptualization:
Une grande ferveur pensante et surpeuplée portait mon moi comme un abı̂me
plein. Un vent charnel et résonnant souZait, et le soufre même en était dense. Et
des radicelles inWmes peuplaient ce vent comme un réseau de veines, et leur
entrecroisement fulgurait. L’espace était mesurable et crissant, mais sans forme
pénétrable. (i*. 51)
28
The correspondance of ‘charnel’ wind and ‘crissant’ space is not just poetic
conceit: the experience described is one of free interplay that celebrates
the many-meaningedness of immediate lived experience. The repeated
‘et’ conveys an almost trancelike participation in the rich multiplicity of
pre-rational experience. But, once the higher intellectual faculties work
on this interfused mass of brute experience, it is fractured into discrete
elements, draining out the signiWcatory plurality: ‘quelque chose du bec
d’une colombe réelle troua la masse confuse [ . . . ] toute la pensée
profonde à ce moment se stratiWait, se résolvait, devenait transparente
et réduite’ (i*. 51). The poetic manifold is lost. Somewhere between the
noisy over-signiWcation of chaos and the sterility of an order-ridden
discourse Artaud posits a fragile poetic state that is a celebration of
multiplicity and potentiality. A new, chaotic order is to elicit but not
impose form on the miasma of experience, and at times Artaud seems to
imply that surreal poetic diction might oVer the means of retaining the
vital disorder of experience.
There may be an element of provocation in Artaud’s imputing sonority and resistance, physical characteristics, to objects of consciousness,
as there may in his describing mental space as ‘crissant’ (i*. 51). But this is
not dictated purely by a taste for provocation. Artaud’s texts insist with
some urgency on the need for a new state of autonomy in which he
would be open to, yet not dominated by, the world. Such desires bring to
mind how in Eluard’s poetry objects frequently acquire a simple yet
powerful presence capable of inducing a childlike sense of plenitude. But
with Eluard the object is always present to a distinct subject, the two
existing in a harmonious state of equal ontological purity. Eluard is thus
closer to Hofmannstahl’s idea of the poet as he who sees the total
relatedness of things by acting as the centre and coordinator, the ‘silent
brother of all things’. Artaud’s writing suggests the surreal might somehow abolish such a separation into subject and object, self and world.
There is an almost pantheistic mystical strain that goes beyond existential fraternity in the desire ‘[s]e laisser emporter par les choses [ . . . et]
pour cela avoir en soi le courant des choses, être au niveau de leur
courant, être enWn au niveau de la vie au lieu que nos déplorables
circonstances mentales nous laissent perpétuellement dans l’entredeux’ (i**. 16–17). This mystical impulse is made explicit in ‘une révolution surréaliste [ . . . ] vise à la substance profonde et à l’ordre de la
pensée . . . Elle vise à créer avant tout un mysticisme d’un nouveau
genre’ (i**. 219). This ideal state of simple reciprocity with the world
where the barrier between subject and object erected by the mind is not
29
yet in place would, Artaud suggests, generate a new reality: ‘au point où
le monde devient sonore et résistant en nous, j avec les yeux de qui sent
en soi se refaire les choses, de qui s’attache et se Wxe sur le commencement d’une nouvelle réalité’ (i**. 16). There are moments in Artaud’s
1920s writing when it seems that the world is to be the making of the
subject, and that, if the prophylactic of rationalism were done away with,
then the subject might be fertilized by the world. The optimistic notes of
early Surrealism can be heard, then, at times in Artaud’s writings. It is
just that for him the ideal of surreality is something to be posited, not
attained.
Yet overshadowing the aYrmative faith in freeing the mind so that it
might cognize in tune with reality is, for Artaud, the basic experience of
cognitive stalling and the sense that consciousness is a void. ‘J’ai l’air bien
aVreusement préoccupé de démontrer que je ne pense pas’, writes
Artaud nine months after the appearance of his correspondence with
Rivière and a few weeks prior to the appearance of the equally selfanalytical L’Ombilic des Limbes and Le Pèse-Nerfs, ‘mais je pense [ . . . ] qu’il
vaut mieux être dans un état d’abdication perpétuelle en face de son
esprit’ (i**. 17). It is only by such an abdication of faith in intellectual
prowess that Artaud can allow the outside world to take on a similar
density within (‘le monde devient sonore et résistant en nous’ (i**. 16))
and so experience the ‘sentiment [des choses] et leur retentissement en
moi: le retentissement au bout duquel est la pensée’ (i**. 16). It is
noticeable, though, that Artaud’s texts tell of himself, not of the world.
Despite comments on the need to connect afresh with the material
world, he writes no Rimbaldian impressionistic texts of pure vision. If
literary impressionism is a means of seducing essence from myriad
circumstance, its multiplying of views brings the threat of annihilating
the poet at the centre, and anonymity is a price Artaud is not prepared to
pay. Artaud’s writing on rhapsodic illumination typically never goes
beyond imagining it to actual enactment.
The ideal of pure, simple co-revelation of self and world joins up here
in Artaud’s writing with linguistic failure. The general feeling of his
Surrealist texts is of trying to return back up the lines of thought
underpinning the awareness necessary for writing, with the aim of
capturing reality unmediated by any but the most simple concepts.
Artaud insists that his writing is
notes [ . . . ] modèles [ . . . qui] s’adressent aux confus de l’esprit, aux aphasiaques par arrêt de la
langue. Que voilà pourtant bien des notes qui sont au centre de leur objet. Ici la pensée fait défaut,
ici l’esprit laisse apercevoir ses membres. Que voilà des notes imbéciles, des notes primaires [ . . . ]
30
Mais des notes Wnes vraiment [ . . . ] Ces notes qui méprisent la langue, qui crachent sur la
pensée. (i**. 47)
In the attempt to Xee the complacent emptinesses of culturally endorsed
thought—the ‘bêtise’ Artaud and Surrealism see in rational thinking—
he deploys what he presents as a cognitively superior and (supposedly)
artless failure. For Artaud, true, existentially dense and complex thought
is pre-linguistic, and so unsayable and unwritable, but his ‘notes primaires’ might gesture towards what such thought could be like (and he
rather smugly implies they do). It is by attending to the frictions between
discourse and perceptual experience that the way may be opened to a
new reality. Failure and loss become the hallmark of success and the basis
of recuperation.
Artaud deWnes the Surrealist revolution not just as a rejection of an
inherited cultural and conceptual order but as a rejection of the fundamental ideas that underpin such orders: a faith in the grammaticality of
reality and in the reliability and trustworthiness of cerebration: ‘Le fait
d’une révolution surréaliste dans les choses est applicable à tous les états
de l’esprit, j [ . . . ] à tous les états du monde au milieu de l’esprit, j [ . . . ] à
tous les ordres de l’esprit. j Cette révolution vise à [ . . . ] la dépréciation
de l’esprit [ . . . ] j au dénivellement de la pensée’ (i**. 45). For Artaud the
higher intellectual apparatus cudgels reality into its own form; he rails
against the ‘Esprit-intimidation-des-choses pour les faire entrer dans
l’Esprit’ (i*. 49). Such an attitude means that Artaud ‘doit admettre
jusqu’à un certain point une mystique surréaliste’ (i**. 46) to try to
remedy the fact that ‘l’Esprit ne soit pas dans la vie et que la vie ne soit
pas dans l’Esprit’ (i*. 49), and this leads to a dream of a work of art that
would be ‘une porte simplement abouchée avec la réalité’ (i*. 50). Such
complaints and aspirations are common to Surrealist poets writing in the
1920s. Even the image of the open door is part of the Surrealist topos,
generally used to suggest the point sublime lying beyond it where contraries
are magically resolved in a superior reality. But Artaud does not conWne
himself to rejecting reason’s codiWcations on the basis of a gulf between
mind and reality, and he parts company from his peers in complexifying
his account of the barriers to authentic experience. His rejection of
ratiocination has a diVerent thrust, since he places it in the context of
a personalized account of the non-possession of thought; he thus
insists on a second gulf, this time between thought and thinking
subject. Once again, the idea of a doubling within consciousness is
common to much Surrealist poetry. But for Breton, Aragon, and the
practitioners of automatic writing, this distancing of self from self is a
31
positive phenomenon, providing the framework for dictation from the
unconscious. So, if the Surrealist poet ‘ne croit à l’eYcacité de l’espritéperon, de l’esprit-guillotine, de l’esprit-juge, de l’esprit-docteur’, it is not
the case that ‘il ne se reconnaı̂t aucune pensée [ . . . ] j Il désespère de
s’atteindre l’esprit’ (i**. 46) for the ideal of recuperating the unconscious
within consciousness precludes such a credo. The latent solipsism of such
an attitude, as well as his estrangement from mainstream Surrealist
poetics and philosophy, will become increasingly pronounced as he
problematizes the relationship between thought and thinking subject.
This solipsistic tendency is already evident in ‘A la Grande Nuit’,
Artaud’s rejoinder to his expulsion from the Surrealist group (i**. 59–66).
For him Surrealism is a war cry against the derisory signiWcance allotted
to the individual and his thought: ‘Que chaque homme ne veuille rien
considérer au delà de sa sensibilité profonde, de son moi intime, voilà
pour moi le point de vue de la Révolution intégrale’ (i**. 60 n.). This idea
of changing reality by an inner revolution had been very much in the air
in the last quartile of the nineteenth century with the fad for Vedic,
Buddhist, and Cabalistic thought, and had been carried forward by the
German Expressionists, who believed in ‘Revolution as an act of the
spirit’ (in Lothar Schreyer’s words). It could also be taken as the watchword of Artaud’s writing career. By functioning at a higher level than
that of the thinking subject, the Surrealist movement as personiWed in
Breton abandoned, for Artaud, any claim to being truly revolutionary. If
the aim is to ‘désaxer le fondement actuel des choses, de changer l’angle
de la réalité’ (i**. 60 n.), this can, for Artaud, be eVected only by a radical
reconceptualization and re-engineering of individual consciousness
according to new, non-rationalistic principles. This total focusing on
the inner self, however, leads Artaud to neglect the outside world in
whose name this rethinking of subjecthood is initially undertaken. The
withdrawal into inner space is Artaud’s early Kehre which sets his course
on a reconceptualization of the self when he should, according to his own
principles, be writing towards an interpenetration of self and world.
(This interpenetration is announced at the end of his writing career on
the dubious grounds that the world, perceived as too threatening to the
integrity of the self, is redeWned and placed under the dominion of a self
that subsumes and contains all reality.) Artaud’s gloominess about ideational consciousness leads to the ironic situation where, to escape from
the narrow conWnes of the inherited idea of subjecthood, he shuts himself
up in a lifetime’s redeWnition of the subject. By digging ever deeper into
the diYculties of thought and widening the gulfs between thought and
32
reality, between thinking subject and thought—by distancing the meaning-making self from signiWer from signiWed from referent—Artaud can
head only towards solipsism.
So Artaud’s work becomes an endless commenting and theorizing
about the paucity of thought and its many hiatuses, indefatigably reporting the losses attendant upon thinking. The Correspondance avec Jacques
Rivière is famously not about its declared subject matter, the (negligible)
literary merits of the poems Artaud sent to the Nouvelle Revue française for
publication, but instead reports the blockages and losses he holds to be
inherent to thinking. L’Ombilic des Limbes and Le Pèse-Nerfs continue the
attempt to give tongue, in fragmentary form, to the discontinuities of his
mental life, taking the project forward to an endeavoured prise de conscience
of thought-in-troubled-action. Artaud displays an obsession with the
relationship between thinking subject and thought, and even texts that
would not initially seem to be about thought—for example, his imaginary
biographical sketches of Paulo Uccello (i*. 54–6; i*. 140–2; i**. 9–13)— are
soon drawn into reXections about the complex relationship that exists
between a thinking, writing subject Antonin Artaud who imaginatively
projects himself into a thought-about subject Paulo Uccello. The complications inherent to thinking, to a world view founded on the separation
of thinking subject from object of thought, are the staple constituent of
Artaud’s 1920s writings. What, then, does he have to say about the inner
fracture between subject and object of thought?
Clearly, Artaud suggests that thinking is a far more complex matter
than common parlance would suggest. His experience of thought is that
it collapses at moments of great intellectual promise. These impediments
to thought are described as amounting to an ‘eVrondrement central de
l’âme, une espèce d’érosion, essentielle à la fois et fugace, de la pensée’
(i*. 28) The commas here puncture the breathing of the phrasing, and
this, together with the interwoven phonic patterning, expulse the term
‘pensée’ to the end of the sentence, where it sticks out awkwardly like
some appendage on its prepositional stalk. He makes it clear that
the problem is not that his wielding of language fails to do justice to
the complexities of his thought. It is thought itself that is Xawed: ‘Je parle
de la vie physique, de la vie substantielle de la pensée [ . . . ], je parle de ce
minimum de vie pensante à l’état brut,—non arrivé jusqu’à la parole,
mais capable au besoin d’y arriver’ (i*. 66). The raw material of mental
activity introduces non-identity into thought; it is the very stuV of
thought in its brute state that is to blame: ‘ce qui me caractérise est
[ . . . ] une extinction dans la racine et dans l’œuf de toutes les forces en
33
nous antérieures à l’esprit’ (i**. 167).11 Given that it is the brute stuV of
thought that is lost, Artaud cannot know the modes of loss. Loss occurs in
a no man’s land between nascent thought and consciousness of thought;
it is in this sense that Artaud speaks of the ‘inconsciente minute’ at which
loss occurs (i*. 42). Consciousness cannot be witness to the loss that it
experiences on the limits of its domain, but it can testify that loss has
occurred. There is an unnameable ‘quelque chose qui détruit ma pensée
[ . . . ] Un quelque chose de furtif qui m’enlève les mots’ undercutting
thought (i*. 28). Artaud can but witness, with all that the term implies of
enforced passivity, the ravishing of what language calls his thought, but
which is revealed in its breakdown to be not fully his. He can know only
the after-eVects of this action, can state only that ‘[j]e sais comment ça se
traYque là-dedans’ (i*. 30). The ‘ça’ cannot be named, the events cannot
be speciWed (‘se traYque’); ‘ça se traYque’ is all Artaud can say or do
about his alienation within thought.
Given this inability to be aware of the functioning of his mind, the
leading statement of Artaud’s early ars poetica—‘[l]à où d’autres proposent des œuvres je ne prétends pas autre chose que de montrer mon
esprit’ (i*. 49)—is all the more astonishingly ambitious. Surrealism insists
of course on the fact that art is not a separate, specialized aesthetic
discursive act but like any language act engages and expresses the totality
of the personality. Beauty is thus irrelevant and replaced by authentic
self-expression. In L’Ombilic des Limbes and Le Pèse-Nerfs Artaud implicitly
claims success for this project of collapsing writing and life onto each
other and so revealing the mind as it is. And it is true that there is no
Xavour of Wctionality, especially in Le Pèse-Nerfs; Artaud sticks to his
subject matter, himself, and the reader can feel, however misguidedly,
that this is Artaud. The fragmented, notelike jottings seem to allow us to
accompany Artaud as he observes his own thought, without any distance
of literary artiWce. It is as if we were sitting in on his thinking, eavesdropping on his inner voice. But this very transparency and apparent
immediateness is the strongest proof of the literarity guaranteeing communication. These texts are, as he says in a diVerent context, ‘des notes
Wnes vraiment’—very sly writing.12
11
Since Artaud Wnds fault with the stuV of thought, not its functioning, the objection that
the lucidity of his self-analyses belies the judgements of those analyses is pre-empted: ‘Ma
lucidité est entière, plus aiguisée que jamais’, he writes to his friend and psychoanalyst
Dr Allendy, ‘c’est l’objet auquel l’appliquer qui me manque, la substance interne’ (i**. 145).
12
In the context of the Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière, Artaud’s evident desire to
manœuvre Rivière into publishing his texts should lead us to be careful about reading
the texts as Artaud’s pure voice. Despite claims to be conducting a ‘confession mentale’
34
Moreover, though the texts of L’Ombilic des Limbes and Le Pèse-Nerfs
might make an implicit claim to be striking right to the heart of thought,
in fact they remain on the sidelines, commenting, describing, theorizing.
The writing is far from guileless and far removed from automatism.
Artaud does not show his mind but speaks of his ruminations about
why thought is not the epiphany of vitality he imagines. We are never
given the mind à vif but instead reXections about Artaud’s past experience of thought: the present moment of thought is banished from the
text. Nor does Artaud in fact tell of the impediments involved in the
thinking processes: impediments are taken as given, so he concentrates
on the after-traces of lost thought. The phenomenon that has inspired
this intellectual and literary adventure is invisible: it is pre-text. Artaud’s
early texts are haunted by a shadow of absence: ‘Je parle moi de
l’absence de trou, d’une sorte de souVrance froide et sans images, sans
sentiments, et qui est comme un heurt indescriptible d’avortements’
(i*. 69) where the echoes of a clichéd decadent melancholy further
desubstantialize any putative extra-literary referent.
Thought, then, is doubly absent, since both thought and its loss are
unknowable. This is why, after these early collections, Artaud’s texts
become an unstoppable theorizing machine about a self that would not
be subject to loss, a self that would be able to show itself. The fact that
loss cannot be told paradoxically provides the stimulus to write. Loss
becomes the Wrst condition of self-exploration through writing.
Such an attitude underpins the Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière. The
insistence on the interpenetration of art and life is, of course, in no way
speciWc to Surrealist poetry. Proust’s great novel, the publication of
which had started only ten or so years previously (in 1913), was intimately
concerned with capturing the kaleidoscopic quality of lived selfhood in
the work, and it was still sending shock waves through French, and
indeed Western culture.13 But Artaud, rather than regarding writing as
a way of attempting to capture the self, sees it rather as a way of
theorizing about the impossibility of such an undertaking. Where other
authors transpose the oft-frustrated quest to express the self into Wction,
(i*. 27) it is more a case of vide me than mea culpa. Artaud’s tone swings from the toadying to
the petulantly insulting, and he does not contain his glee when Rivière proposes to publish
the correspondence. Artaud no longer takes weeks but replies by return of post with the glib
grandiloquence of a prosateur: ‘votre idée me plaı̂t, elle me réjouit, elle me comble’ (i*. 40). It
must not be forgotten that the Correspondance originated not as a literary text but as a
correspondence, with all the desires and subterfuges of any such interaction.
13
Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols., ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Bibliothèque de
la Pléiade; Paris: Gallimard, 1987–9).
35
Artaud instead develops an imaginative (Wctive) theory that purports to
account for the diYculties that beset the undertaking of self-expression.
The kind of identity between art and life of which Artaud speaks is far
more literalist, for he sees writing and existing as identical: the concern
lest his thought ‘ne parvienne pas l i t t é r a i r e m e n t à exister’ is
described as ‘tout le problème de ma pensée qui est en jeu. Il s’agit
pour moi de rien moins que de savoir si j’ai ou non le droit de continuer à
penser, en vers ou en prose’ (i*. 25). There is no distinction between
existence as a thinking subject and writing. The ‘lambeaux’ of his
meagre texts are valued not for aesthetic reasons—‘la littérature proprement dite ne m’intéresse qu’assez peu’ (i*. 38)—but for existential
reasons, since they are ‘les quelques manifestations d’existence spirituelle
que j’ai pu me donner à moi-même’ (i*. 24). (In Le Con d’Irène (1928)
Aragon too explicitly states that writing is his only way of thinking.)
In rejecting literary Wnality Artaud follows Surrealist practice that
employs poetic form primarily to help emancipate the mind and thus
reveal ‘la matière mentale’. But he goes further and, in a peculiar move,
displaces his identity onto the page: the writing subject is to be one with,
as opposed to just revelatory of, the existing subject. The underlying idea
would seem to be that writing is the only means for self-knowledge, as the
very failings of writing expose those aspects of his thought that are truly
issued from his self and not mere borrowings from discourse. It is
precisely and uniquely in the failure of writing that Artaud hopes to
Wnd his mind. He fully exists only in writing and can fully know his self
and his thoughts only in writing. Artaud’s later, dominant belief that he
could change his identity and biology via writing (the corps sans organes to
be delivered by the text) is therefore to be found in embryo form at the
beginning of his literary career. The great value Artaud places on writing
arises from its unique ability to provoke self-awareness in a way that the
alterity of thought could seem to make impossible.
This idea of the text as a work of apperception is, of course, one of the
most important ideas of Surrealist theory and at the heart of the practice
of automatism. In the Premier manifeste Surrealism is famously deWned as
the means ‘exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre
manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en
l’absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute
préoccupation morale ou esthétique.’14 It is thus an undertaking seeking
knowledge of the true functioning of thought. As suggested above, the
14
André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme (Collection Folio/Essais; Paris: Gallimard,
1985), 36.
36
idea of the duality of the self is common to Surrealist poetry, and Louis
Aragon’s verse often displays a sense of the doubling that occurs in
introspection, an experience that does not induce despair so much as
intrigued self-observation: ‘J’écoute au Wn fond de moi le bruit de mes
propres pas s’étendre j J’entends ma propre chanson qui se fatigue de se
plaindre.’15 For Breton the doubling of the self is an even more positive
experience than it is for Aragon; he considers that the attendant shock
plays a major role in the willed ‘déséducation des sens’ that must be
undertaken if true thought is to be discovered beneath the overlay of
literary and philosophical thought structures. Doubling is, for Breton,
the basis of self-knowledge: ‘Je veillais sur moi sur ma pensée,’ he writes
conWdently.16 The Surrealist poet can speak of the alterity of the self with
conWdence, since the activity of Surrealism was to allow the poet to
embrace the totality of previously occluded mental forces: ‘l’idée de
surréalisme tend simplement à la récupération totale de notre force
psychique par un moyen qui n’est autre que la descente vertigineuse
en nous, l’illumination systématique des lieux cachés [ . . . ], la promenade perpétuelle en pleine zone interdite.’17 This descent into the self,
even if described as ‘vertigineuse’, is evidently not perceived as dangerous: it is a ‘promenade’ that results in ‘illumination’. However, if Artaud
is to gain self-knowledge through writing, it is not by tricking the
unconscious onto the page by automatic writing or induced slips of the
pen.18 If the Surrealists left themselves open to the charge that they
allowed the unconscious to usurp the throne of reason, Artaud is far
more circumspect and views the unconscious with suspicion as the
repository of forces emanating from society. It is the way the mind
works, or rather does not work, and not its hidden content, that interests
Artaud. For Artaud the descent into oneself brings agony and paralysis:
‘Je souVre d’une eVroyable maladie de l’esprit’ (i*. 24).19 Whereas for the
15
Louis Aragon, Le Roman inachevé (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 182.
André Breton, ‘Les Attitudes Spectrales’, in Clair de terre (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 114.
17
Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme, 86.
18
It would seem that Artaud never tried his hand at automatic writing. As someone
passionately interested in the self, it could be supposed that he would have thrown himself
enthusiastically into any project susceptible of yielding such fruits as the Surrealists claimed
for automatism.
19
An intriguing parallel suggests itself here to the Proustian narrator when he Wnds his
artistic creation threatened: ‘tachant de trouver un sujet où je pusse faire tenir une signiWcation philosophique inWnie, mon esprit s’arrêtait de fonctionner, je ne voyais plus que le
vide en face de mon attention, je sentais que je n’avais pas de génie ou peut-être une
maladie cérébrale l’empêchait de naı̂tre’ (A la recherche du temps perdu, i. 170). Proust’s irony
and lightness of touch tell of the world of diVerence between the two writers.
16
37
Surrealists writing was to reveal the syntax of the self, for Artaud this is
an impossibly optimistic dream, since thought refuses to yield itself to
inspection: ‘Ma pensée m’abandonne, à tous les dégrés’ (i*. 24). He is
interested not in opening up new vistas of the imagination but in avoiding the loss of any shreds of thought left to him. He is seeking to
‘exhausser mon abaissement, d’équilibrer ce qui tombe, de réunir ce
qui est séparé, de recomposer ce qui est détruit’ (i*. 53). He claims the
right to be prescribed opiates to counter his sense of loss and not for
the exhilarating liberation of hitherto unexploited resources of his psyche
(i*. 64–7).
It should by now be clear that, whilst many of Artaud’s early writings
are written from within a recognizably Surrealist theoretical framework,
there is a signiWcant diVerence in perspective—perhaps a diVerence in
temperament—between him and the major Surrealist poets. Where
Eluard, Breton, Desnos act with a positive sense of liberating purpose,
Artaud reacts negatively against self-dissolution. Breton’s suggested dictionary deWnition of Surrealism in the Wrst Manifeste du surréalisme (1924) is
lyrically optimistic: ‘Le surréalisme repose sur la croyance à la réalité
supérieure de certaines formes d’associations négligées jusqu’à lui, à la
toute-puissance du rêve, au jeu désintéressé de la pensée.’20 Artaud, on
the other hand, outlines his personal project in terms of gloomy urgency:
‘Me mettre en face de la métaphysique que je me suis faite en fonction de
ce néant que je porte’ (i*. 114). Artaud departs radically from Surrealist
thought in his ontological pessimism. Being-in-the-world is not, for
Artaud, a given, but something that involves great mental eVort: ‘Il y a
des imbéciles qui se croient des êtres, êtres par innéité. j Moi je suis celui
qui pour être doit fouetter son innéité’ (i*. 9).21
Artaud’s keen awareness of the problematics of consciousness means
that he situates himself at a level ‘below’ that of lyric fancy. His mental
world is taken over by an anguished awareness of its non-awareness.
This kind of self-reXexive non-thought is in danger of becoming a hall of
empty mirrors: ‘ma conscience réduite à un Wl me met, j non en
puissance d’émotions, de sensations, de pensées, d’associations, de vibrations quelconques de la sensibilité générale, et du moi, j mais en
20
Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme, 36.
This quotation, although from the beginning of vol. i of the Œuvres complètes, does not
date from the Surrealist period, being drawn from the Préambule written in 1946. It is at a
switch-point in the text where Artaud is moving from discussion of Correspondance avec Jacques
Rivière to a discussion of his work in general. It does not seem extravagant, although it is not
explicit, to take it as a synthetic reworking of the underlying ideas of the 1920s collections.
21
38
puissance d’angoisse’ (i**. 191). Artaud would appear to be caught on a
spiral leading ever further away from the self and downwards into
mental nothingness: ‘la conscience, renonçant à lutter avec une clarté,
une élucidation pourtant nécessaire, et sachant les avortements qui la
ménacent, redescend vers elle-même’ (viii. 66).22 Writing is experienced
as painful, a necessarily disjointed undertaking, and a lyrical despair
lovingly crafted would be a travesty of his intimate reality. This is why
Artaud is scornful of those who reproach him with his inability to write of
‘une belle douleur, d’angoisses remplies et charnues’ (i*. 84). Writing, for
Artaud, has nothing to do with aesthetic felicity. Artaud could no doubt
concur with that other arch-modernist, Samuel Beckett, and his gnomic
‘nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which
to express [ . . . ] together with the obligation to express’.23 Both consider
writing as an imperative but doomed metaphysical enterprise.
Artaud’s pessimism stems from the faith he has in language. Just as he
feels that his works are failures in comparison to his ideal of full and
perfect expression of a subjacent, inner self, so he feels that language fails
him because he attributes it with such extraordinary powers over reality.
Once again Artaud is working within the framework of Surrealist
thought here, the Surrealists displaying an ‘almost superstitious faith in
language as magic incantation’, as Caws suggests.24 This belief in the
magic potential of language transpires in his complaint that static inherited discourse will never capture the truth of reality: ‘Ce n’est que par un
détournement de la vie, par un arrêt imposé à l’esprit, que l’on peut Wxer
la vie dans sa physionomie dite réelle, mais la réalité n’est pas là-dessous’
(i**. 32), where the sudden Wring of the barely repressed jaunty rhythm
and overstated internal rhymes are suggestive of the full-throated glee of
late Artaud. Aragon shares some of Artaud’s ambivalence towards
language. Like Artaud, he writes of the ways in which the poet may be
alienated within his own discourse: ‘chaque parole [ . . . ] dit autre chose
que ce qu’elle dit [ . . . ] tout vocable porte j Au-delà de soi-même
une signiWcation de chute une force révélatrice j Où ce que je ne dis
22
This is from a series of dispersed notes collected by Thévenin under the title ‘Pages de
Carnet. Notes Intimes’ (viii. 47–94). The text quoted here is dated by Thévenin as 1932—
hence seven or eight years after the majority of texts under discussion in this chapter. The
‘Pages de Carnet. Notes Intimes’ will be used quite extensively in the next chapter as
important corroborating evidence for the interpretations put forward of Artaud’s late 1920s
and early 1930s writings.
23
Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder, 1965),
103.
24
Caws, The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism, 20.
39
pas perce en ce que je dis.’25 But if there is alienation within language for
Aragon, the excedentary nature of language is ‘révélatrice’. However
diYcult it may be to express thought and however much language may
betray the poet, Aragon, even though he maintains that there is no
thought beyond language, does not experience this inescapable world
of mutating meanings as imprisonment nor the misdirections of speech
as alienation. Aragon delights in the metamorphosing world of language
as a form of never-ending enchantment:
Jamais je ne perdrai cet émerveillement
Du langage
Jamais je ne me réveillerai d’entre les mots.26
One of the rallying ideas of Surrealism is that in unconscious speech
words lose their wrinkles. Language no longer functions as an oppressive
superego and can be expressive of new thoughts. Automatism shows that
the Xux of the inner mind is linguistic, and so, if at one level language is
an alien social institution, at a deeper level it is a natural phenomenon
expressive of the entire being.
Artaud reacts very diVerently. Language, as the faculty of representing
the real by a sign and of understanding that sign as being representative
of the real, ought, on Artaud’s theory, to be capable of reorienting reality:
‘Il ne me faudrait qu’un seul mot parfois, un simple petit mot sans
importance, pour être grand, pour parler sur le ton des prophètes’ (i*.
88).27 But such language is beyond him. This is why he considers his to be
a twilight world of half aperçus and aborted thought trails, where the
terms he employs are the nets that entangle him, pegging him down and
preventing him from following his thought any further:
Tous les termes que je choisis pour penser sont pour moi des t e r m e s au sens
propre du mot, de véritables terminaisons de mes
mentales, de tous les états que j’ai fait subir à ma pensée. Je suis vraiment
l o c a l i s é par mes termes [ . . . et] je ne les reconnais pas comme valables dans
ma pensée. Je suis vraiment paralysé par mes termes, par une suite de terminaisons. Et si a i l l e u r s que soit en ces moments ma pensée, je ne peux que la faire
passer par ces termes, si contradictoires à elle-même, si parallèles, si équivoques
qu’ils puissent être, sous peine de m’arrêter à ces moments de penser. (i*. 96)
25
Louis Aragon, Les Poètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 20.
Ibid. 164.
27
Artaud’s belief in the power of language to alter reality is evident in the glossolalia
(discussed in Chapter 4) that took over ever greater portions of his texts towards the end of
his life.
26
40
In this passage, typically bordering on the prosaic yet combining a lowkey urgency with noisily staged complaint, Artaud writes of the boundaries language imposes on creative thought. His language does not go far
enough, because it falls short of expressing the inexpressible (note the
hiatus between ‘mes’ and ‘mentales’). The Surrealist theory of language
holds the poetic image to be a means of knowledge because of its ability
to create a universe of relationships between seemingly opposed objects.
But Artaud goes further in his epistemic claims, placing impossibly high
demands upon language as bearer of knowledge: insight must be insight
into something beyond his ken, pushing back the frontiers of the expressible and the knowable. But the damagingly restrictive conceptualization of reality that suVuses inherited discourse is all Artaud has.
Language is both an unattainable promise and a prison, and so Artaud
experiences language as inevitable alienation, writing of ‘cette langue qui
n’arrive plus à dépasser son écorce’ (i**. 57). Language, unable to break
out and touch reality, must be turned back in on the mind to assault its
own inadequacies: ‘voici maintenant le seul usage auquel puisse servir
désormais le langage, un moyen de folie, d’élimination de la pensée, de
rupture’ (i**. 34). If language cannot bring new knowledge, it may at least
destroy old illusions.
When Artaud does move away from his theorizing and polemics to
describe his experience of thought, it is striking how thoroughly the two
realms of mental and bodily fuse.28 ‘Description d’un état physique’
(i*. 58–9), overshadowed by a sense of disempowerment as Artaud
lurches from description to aborted description, evokes burning pain,
fear, bewilderment, straining, staggering, gasping, fatigue, fragility,
numbness, fracturing, pressure, and rupture. It is a description not so
much of a physical state as of the interfusion of mental and physical pain,
a sophisticated phenomenology of pain. SpeciWcally physical details are
immediately played out in the realm of the mind. The ‘muscles tordus’
are overshadowed in their twistedness by the impression that they are ‘à
vif’; the ‘engourdissement douleureux’ has no physical eVect but an
extraordinarily powerful mental eVect ‘qui n’interdit aucun mouvement
28
There are frequent descriptions of physical pain, which, whilst they at Wrst glance
appear to be associated with cognitive shortfalls, in fact refer to the physiological consequences of his attempts to come oV opiates. In a questionnaire Artaud completed in 1932 on
admission to a detoxication programme he describes his experience of a cessation in the
intake of drugs in terms of ‘froid intense, morsures dans les muscles, terrible emprise dans
les lombes, toute la conscience au moment des paroxysmes réduite à l’état d’un bloc de
douleur criante’ (viii. 320). Care needs to be taken to prevent such descriptions skewing an
account of Artaud’s theorizings.
41
mais change le sentiment interne d’un membre’ (i*. 58). Physical fatigue
is described in terms of its eVect on mental life: ‘ne présentant plus au
cerveau que des images de membres Wliformes et cotonneux, des images
de membres lointains et pas à leur place. Une espèce de rupture intérieure de la correspondance de tous les nerfs’ (i*. 58). Artaud is of course
regarded as the advocate of the carnal, but the body is valued only in
so far as it is the locus of the mental and hence has the potential to take
the mind hostage. If throughout his writing career Artaud emphasizes
the body, his early texts show that this is because of its ability to induce
self-alienation.
Many early texts tell of how bodily suVering intrudes on the proper
functioning of thought. Artaud’s thought is stolen with the complicity of
what for him symbolizes incarnation, his marrow: ‘mes moelles [ . . . ] se
plaisent à ces rapts furtifs auxquels la tête de ma pensée préside’ (i*. 88).
The anguish as the alienated thinking conscious self (‘la tête de ma
pensée’) looks on is described in terms of immobility, lack of Xow, halted
or suspended activity: ‘une congellation de la moelle, une absence de feu
mental, un manque de circulation de la vie’ (i*. 69). Once the body is
involved, it is not just a slowing-down of thought implicit in ‘[l]’Angoisse
qui pince la corde ombilicale de la vie’ (i*. 67) or the summary of his
problem as being that he thinks ‘à un taux inférieur’ (i*. 66 n.). Thought
is now petriWed because of the intrusion of the suVering body. The
‘grande ferveur pensante’ (i*. 51) has become ‘une sorte de vermine
dure et dont tous les mouvements sont Wgés’ (i*. 69). And the failure of
thought is experienced not just as mental but also as bodily absence:
‘c’est le trajet nerveux de la pensée que cet eVritement atteint et
détourne. C’est dans les membres et le sang que cette absence et ce
stationnement se font particulièrement sentir’ (i*. 117). Whilst the
idea that there can be hiatuses in thought is commonplace, Artaud
goes further, writing the absence of thought into the fabric of the body
itself.
The painful body intrudes upon the proper functioning of the mind to
such an extent that the individual is determined: ‘jusque dans les ramiWcations les plus impensées de son être irréductiblement déterminé’ (i**. 27).
Already in the 1920s Artaud is blaming the ill-adaptedness of his anatomy to his mind: ‘ce conditionnement de mes organes si mal ajustés avec
mon moi’ (i**. 26), foreshadowing his late idea of the corps sans organes.
The dispersing anatomy means that the self is victim to a ‘promiscuité
obligée des choses avec l’essence de notre moi [ . . . ] ce qui touche cet
être [ . . . ] est devenu partie intégrante de sa substance’ (i**. 55). Instead
42
of pristine reciprocity with the world, the subject is contaminated,
sullied, and denatured. And already Artaud is associating this dispersive
anatomy with God: ‘Il a disposé de moi jusqu’à l’absurde, ce Dieu; il m’a
maintenu vivant dans un vide de négations, de reniements acharnés de
moi-même. [ . . . ] Il m’a réduit à être comme un automate qui marche,
mais un automate qui sentirait la rupture de son inconscience’ (i**. 27).
Artaud’s view of the human condition is captured in this Wne phrase—
‘un automate qui sentirait la rupture de son inconscience’—evoking how
identitary leaching is but dimly sensed. Artaud is so hypnotically paralysed by his awareness of his suVering body that it reduces him to a
secondary status: ‘ce déduit d’imbécillités, d’abdications, de renonciations et d’obtuses rencontres qui est le moi d’Antonin Artaud, bien plus
faible que lui’ (i**. 21).
But, if Artaud is unable to overcome this state of dispersal and
paralysis, he is nevertheless aware of a latent, potential, stronger self:
‘ce moi virtuel, impossible, et qui se retrouve tout de même dans la
réalité’ (i**. 21). The conditions of his existence might be such that he
feels it impossible to actualize his latent capacities, but his underlying,
repressed self is real all the same. One of the mainstays of Artaud’s world
view is that there is an inner self, a plenitudinous ego-entity, and, if he
complains that he does not possess his thought and language, it is the
thought and language of this pristine, culturally untouched inner self.
His everyday, public language self is less real, less authentic than this
super-real, but virtual and unmanifestable self. The solipsistic bent to
Artaud’s way of thinking leads him to equate authenticity with impossibility and virtuality.
Artaud might insist that the diYculties he encounters in thought have
nothing to do with questions of inspiration (i*. 24) and that ‘cette
paralysie qui m’étouVe est au centre de ma personnalité usuelle et non
de mes sens d’homme prédestiné’ (i*. 114–15), and such comments have
been taken at face value, but the textual evidence against this begins here
to look overwhelming. In particular, the frequent references to a new sort
of truth to be found militate against the claim that his concern is with
an everyday, public self. He must ‘penser d’une manière rare, rare,
c’est-à-dire essentiel, mieux criblée que les autres’ (i**. 188). He is seeking
pristine, nascent thought, ‘une sorte d’élémentaire conscience. j Ce
nœud de la vie où l’émission de la pensée s’accroche’ (i*. 113) and his
writing is to be a ‘Pèse-Nerfs’ (i*. 101) that will, he implicitly claims,
supply ‘la géometrie sans espace [ . . . ] la conWguration de l’esprit’
(i*. 102). Artaud states boldly and unequivocally that he is seeking
43
‘une vérité claire [ . . . ] Je vois dans le fait [ . . . ] de me lancer dans
l’aYrmation d’une vérité pressentie, si aléatoire soit-elle, toute la raison
de ma vie’ (i*. 113–14). Such a felt truth will arise, Artaud suggests, from
his ‘sang’, from listening to an instinctual, pre-verbal knowledge of
the body:
je me jette sur une fausse piste indiquée par mon sang. Je ferme les yeux de mon
intelligence, et laissant parler en moi l’informulé, je me donne l’illusion d’un
système dont les termes m’échapperaient. Mais de cette minute d’erreur il me
reste le sentiment d’avoir ravi à l’inconnu quelque chose de réel [ . . . ] Sur les
routes où mon sang m’entraı̂ne il ne se peut pas qu’un jour je ne découvre une
vérité. (i*. 114)
Artaud believes that by dropping down beneath the level of intellectuality a new system or order of knowledge may reveal itself. A heightened
responsiveness to the complex, messy experience of being alive and
thinking could provide the framework for a new way of conceiving of
himself, for ‘le grouillement immédiat de l’esprit [ . . . ] s’ordonne suivant
des lois qu’il tire de l’intérieur de lui-même, en marge de la raison claire’
(i**. 54). It is by blocking out conscious thought to focus instead on an
awareness of the ever-rumbling hubbub of the mind that goes on beneath thought, and the substratum of awareness of a functioning, breathing, blood-pumping body, that the syntax of the latent inner self might be
discovered: ‘Je ne crois plus qu’à l’évidence de ce qui agite mes moelles,
non de ce qui s’adresse à ma raison’ (i**. 52). By being responsive to the
pre-verbal, pre-rational, instinctual life of bodily awareness, by placing
himself ‘au-dessous de la pensée’, he will Wnd ‘un haut enseignement’ (i*.
118–19). Bodily knowledge will generate a new gnosis: ‘des choses capitales et peut-être bienfaisantes [ . . . ] des choses de vérité sur la vie, sur
l’esprit, sur la réalité et l’irréalité, sur toutes choses’ (i**. 167). BeneWcial
truths are not traditionally associated with Artaud’s aims and aspirations,
but this is no freak textual occurrence, an aberration from the man of
‘blows and bombs’29 and outlandish ideas; truth and truths are Artaud’s
declared aim.
So, although Artaud Wnds that his inner self is paralysed and trapped
in the realm of the virtual owing to bodily and mental ill-adaptedness, he
holds out the hope of recuperating this self through a simple bodily
awareness. In Fragments d’un Journal d’Enfer (1925), a bleak homage to
Rimbaud, Artaud laments the wreckage of the self and ‘mes nuages
29
Such is the subtitle to Stephen Barber’s biography of Artaud, to which reference has
already been made.
44
éteints [ . . . ] mon immortelle impuissance [ . . . ] ce monotone cruciWement [ . . . ] où l’âme ne Wnit plus de se perdre’ (i*. 116–18), but the
emphasis is in fact far less on the spiritual night of the soul than on the
solid physical presence of the body: ‘J’ai le culte non pas du moi mais de
la chair [ . . . ] Toutes les choses ne me touchent qu’en tant qu’elles
aVectent ma chair, qu’elles coı̈ncident avec elle, et à ce point même où
elles l’ébranlent, pas au delà. Rien ne me touche, ne m’intéresse que ce
qui s’adresse directement à ma chair’ (i*. 116). What interests Artaud is not
what bodily experience can tell him about himself but the brute, immediate experience itself, the ‘point même où [les choses] ébranlent [ma
chair], pas au-delà’.30 Although there is a strong negative strain to this
collection of fragmentary paragraphs telling of Artaud’s creative breakdown, when he hits bottom he discovers a hope. For it is possible to make
an ‘aYrmation d’une vérité préssentie’, even if the truth he can aYrm is
that his identity is inextricably linked to his abject Xesh: ‘Je suis homme
par mes mains et mes pieds, mon ventre, mon cœur de viande, mon
estomac dont les nœuds me rejoignent à la putréfaction de la vie’ (i*. 117).
And this aYrmation of the body is not an alternative, a fall-back position
for someone who has despaired of thought. For Artaud a minute sensitivity to the body could allow the recuperation of his inner self and
thought since the Xesh is also a thinking body, a ‘chair irriguée de
nerfs’ (i**. 52).
By dropping down from the level where there is a split between
thought and thinking subject to that of the ‘nerf ’, Artaud hopes to pass
beneath his sense of alienation. If self-reXexive thought is not possible, a
visceral self-awareness is, and it is at this level that he Wnds the possibility
of ‘une réorganisation souveraine’ opens up and that ‘un nouveau
Sens’—and the capitalization is eloquent—can be founded (i**. 53). It
is at this level of pre-reXexive, body-anchored thought that he feels he
comes closest to Wnding his personal, authentic tongue: ‘l’image amenée
par mes nerfs prend la forme de l’intellectualité la plus haute [ . . . ] un
concept qui porte en lui la fulguration même des choses, qui arrive sur
30
There is a striking parallel here with an 1890 text by the Norwegian poet Knut
Hamsum on the sub-life of the mind: ‘They last a second, a minute, they come and go
like a moving winking light; but they have impressed their mark [ . . . ] Secret stirrings that
go unnoticed in the remote parts of the mind, the incalculable chaos of impressions, the
delicate life of the imagination [ . . . ] the random progress of these thoughts and feelings;
untrodden, trackless journeyings by brain and heart, strange workings of the nerves, the
whisper of the blood, the entreaty of the bone, all the unconscious life of the mind’ (quoted
in James McFarlane, ‘The Mind of Modernism’, in Bradbury and McFarlane (eds.),
Modernism, 81–2).
45
moi avec un bruit de création. Aucune image ne me satisfait que si elle
est en même temps Connaissance’ (i**. 52). If concepts are to be bearers of
knowledge, they must be image-concepts that have inscribed within
them the searing Xash with which objects burst in upon the body.
These intellectual, nerve-produced image-concepts are the means of
ensuring that ‘l’ébranlement de la chair participe de la substance haute
de l’esprit’ (i**. 51). This ties in directly with the desire to eVace the
barrier between subject and object, ‘être au niveau des objets et des
choses, avoir en soi leur forme globale et leur déWnition du même coup’
(i**. 17). For it is only by accepting to be a body among bodies that the
true nature of things, their deWning form, can become known. Selfknowledge will bring with it knowledge of the world.
Given that Artaud holds that the important truths of his existence
reside at the level of bodily awareness and not mental activity, it is not
surprising that the text that amounts to a creed of his early thought
should be entitled ‘Position de la Chair’ (i**. 50–2). This bodily stance he
adopts means that ‘[t]ous les systèmes que je pourrais édiWer n’égaleront
jamais mes cris d’homme [ . . . des] cris intellectuels, des cris qui proviennent de la Wnesse des moelles’ (i**. 50). For Artaud, the immediate
physicality of the ‘lowest’ of expressions is greater than the greatest
intellectual extrapolations, and the marrow, the epitome of Xeshly existence, displays an archetypally ‘mental’ characteristic of Wnesse. But it
does not seem that Artaud is merely insisting on the obvious fact that he
is both body and mind. The intellectual and carnal are intimately knit
together: ‘Je refais à chacune des vibrations de la langue tous les chemins
de ma pensée dans ma chair’ (i**. 50). This is an extraordinary proposition, but one that must be taken seriously if the true extent of Artaud’s
rejection of the thinking subject in favour of brute thinking bodies is to be
properly appreciated. Artaud implicitly admits his creed is outlandish
when he describes his ‘Position de la Chair’ as far removed from the
commonsensical, the result of a ‘recherche enfouie dans les limbes de
[s]a conscience’ (i**. 51). The insights gained are three times removed
from the status of self-warranting evidence: ‘j’ai cru sentir des éclatements, comme le heurt de pierres occultes’ (i*. 51, emphasis added). The
sudden emergence of insight is compared to ‘la pétriWcation soudaine de
feux. Des feux qui seraient comme des vérités insensibles et par miracle
vitalisées’ (i**. 51). For Artaud insight is unpredictable and perhaps
self-contradictory, since the petrifaction of Xames is here what vitalizes
them. It is true that literarity here dominates exposition, but nevertheless
this text is not just underlining the physicality of the mind and the
46
corporeality of perception.31 Artaud is proclaiming the Xesh as the true
homeland and hunting-ground of ontology and metaphysics: ‘la chair
[ . . . ] doit me donner une métaphysique de l’Être, et la connaissance
déWnitive de la Vie’ (i**. 51).
With Artaud ‘toute vraie connaissance est obscure’ (i**. 51), and his
account of the Xesh borders on the paradoxical. It is in bodily awareness,
Artaud suggests, that there is no distinction between subject and object
of awareness, and this is what sets bodily awareness apart from mental
awareness. The Xesh is the privileged site of unmediated, deWnitive
knowledge, dependent on nothing other than itself, for it is illumined
from within:
Pour moi qui dit Chair dit avant tout appréhension, poil hérissé, chair à nu [ . . . ]
c’est-à-dire connaissance directe, communication retournée et qui s’éclaire de
l’intérieur. Il y a un esprit dans la chair, mais un esprit prompt comme la foudre
[ . . . ] qui dit chair dit aussi sensibilité [ . . . ] c’est-à-dire appropriation intime,
secrète, profonde, absolue de ma douleur à moi-même, et par conséquent
connaissance solitaire et unique de cette douleur. (i**. 51)
The Xesh is autonomous, is able, at the level of brute bodily awareness
and bodily presence, to be the perfect mirror of itself. The Xesh is that
most elusive of things, for Artaud; it is identical to itself. The ‘esprit dans
la chair’ is as quick as lightning, so prompt and rapid there is no moment
in which a gap may open up between the Xesh and the intellectual
apprehension of the Xesh. In contradistinction to Artaud’s experience
of thought, nothing can insinuate itself between the Xesh as sensor and
the Xesh as sensed. It is the site of an ‘appropriation intime [ . . . ]
profonde et absolue’ of oneself. In the body alone can Artaud experience
true self-presence. Artaud, who is ‘à la poursuite constante de [s]on être
intellectuel’ (i*. 24), has no such problems with the ‘esprit dans la chair’
that oVers the possibility of ‘connaisance directe’, ‘connaissance solitaire’, ‘connaissance unique’ in the ‘vitalité nerveuse des moelles’.
Artaud, as a man who has ‘qu’une occupation, me refaire’ (i*. 97),
Wnds in the Xesh the possibility of eVecting self-identity and of joining
up with the dolorous song of his self.
Looking back on his involvement with the Surrealist group after his
expulsion, Artaud acknowledged the important lesson he learnt from the
31
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories and their extensive relevance to Artaud’s emphasis
on the corporeality of mental experience are examined in Jacques Garelli’s highly technical
Artaud et la question du lieu (Paris: Corti, 1982). If Artaud’s expression of these ideas is more
exciting than Merleau-Ponty’s, the latter’s exposition in works such as Le Visible et l’invisible
(Paris: Gallimard, 1964) is more convincing. Artaud is not a precursor, more of a distant
herald.
47
Surrealist embracing of disorder and non-plenitude: ‘Le surréalisme ne
pouvait pas me rendre une substance perdue, mais il m’apprit à ne plus chercher
dans le travail de la pensée une continuité qui m’était devenue impossible, et à savoir me
contenter des larves que mon cerveau faisait traı̂ner devant moi ’ (i**. 67). He might
not be able to bring about the mental revolution, but at least he knows
that his jagged, abortive attempts to capture the complexity of his
thought are of greater validity than any illusorily smooth lines.
If the Surrealists sought to reunite subject and world by opening up
reason to embrace the arational via ‘la raison ardente’, it is by embracing
the pre-rational that Artaud would heal the self. That is not to deny the
references to fertile illogicality and wilful arationality, ‘la logique’ as
Artaud calls it in good Surrealist disregard for logic, ‘de l’Illogique’
(i*. 53). But such references are far from being the leading light of
Artaud’s thought. They seem more the residue of a way of thinking
rapidly left behind, trappings that sit well enough on his underlying
philosophy but that also conceal its true nature. Whatever the respective
merits of Artaud’s writing and that of his Surrealist poetic companions,
Artaud is the greater and more adventurous theorizer. Artaud drops
down from what he regards as the too high level of ‘esprit’, for it is not by
liberating previously repressed forces of the psyche that he will attain a
state of poetic rebellion that would celebrate the vast complexity of life.
Instead he chooses to situate himself on the level of bodily awareness and
develops what might be called a corporeal mysticism. Of course, mysticism is always corporeal in the sense that the mystic yearns for a fusion
with the absent Divine body, but Artaud’s corporeal mysticism does not
seek fusion between him and an absent transcendent body but instead
seeks a state of simple reciprocity between his sensing body and other
material bodies in the world. Whereas the direction in which the mystic
seeks to move is in some sense ‘upwards’, Artaud’s ideas suggest instead a
movement ‘downwards’. The ‘sur-réel’ is for Artaud the ‘sous-réel’.
It is by accepting the downwards pull of the Xeshly body, Artaud
decides, that thought may be brought to an intuitive awareness of the
world and so attain an ‘intraduisible science’ beneath language. For
Artaud, everything truly important happens at this sublinguistic level.
This goes a long way towards explaining both the dominant tone of
anguish of Artaud’s writing and the extremes to which he will increasingly push his language. Artaud recognizes that this places him in an
almost untenable position: ‘c’est ma faiblesse à moi,’ he writes to Jacques
Rivière, ‘mon absurdité de vouloir écrire à tout prix’ (i*. 30), and the price
he will pay as a writer who cannot place any true faith in his language
48
will indeed be the high one of an ‘aliéné’. The inner self—the pure egoentity untouched by discourse—is not available in language nor is his
sense of loss of thought. This explains why the dramatic theories he will
develop privilege gestures over words and why his new science of
existence is grounded in bone and Xesh, ‘moelles’ and ‘chair’. He can
tell neither of his loss nor of his new discovery because they are too
intimately part of his bodily fabric: ‘Jamais aucune précision ne pourrait
être donné par cette âme qui s’étrangle, car le tourment qui [ . . . ] la
décharne Wbre à Wbre, se passe au-dessous de la pensée, au-dessous d’où
peut atteindre la langue [ . . . ] Cette malédiction est d’un haut enseignement pour les profondeurs qu’elle occupe, mais le monde n’en entendra
pas la leçon’ (i*. 118–19). This incommunicability of Artaud’s inklings
into reality is the result of their source, his painful body. Pain is utterly
incommunicable in its essence—‘il n’existe pas de sismographe humain
qui permette à qui me regarde d’arriver à une évaluation de ma douleur’
(i*. 67)—but closely associated with insight: ‘Je suis un homme qui a
beaucoup souVert, et à ce titre j’ai le droit de parler’ (i*. 30). Pain brings
about a feeling of estrangement from a body perceived as hostile: ‘Sans
une grande douleur il n’est pas de véritable intelligence. L’intelligence est
avant tout éloignement, séparation’ (i**. 211). The private lesson of pain
teaches Artaud that his is a thinking body.
The insistent will to work at a level lower than normal thought
processes will characterize all Artaud’s writing. He accepts what others
might view as the failure of his thought to accede to some normal
operational level, and indeed actively seeks out this base level, regarding
it as more revelatory than the heights of rationalistic endeavour: ‘Il faut
avoir été privé [ . . . ] de la complétude consciente du nerf pour se rendre
compte à quel point le Sens et la Science de toute pensée est caché dans
la vitalité nerveuse des moelles’ (i**. 50). It is a matter of paying greater
attention to the mental terrain and so discovering more: ‘Mon esprit s’est
ouvert par le ventre, et c’est par le bas qu’il entasse une sombre et
intraduisible science, pleine de marées souterraines, d’édiWces concaves,
d’une agitation congelée. Qu’on ne prenne pas ceci pour des images.
Ce voudrait être la forme d’un abominable savoir’ (i**. 49). Where Freud
proposes an archaeology of the mind, Artaud proposes a geology that
exposes the inner chasms and fault-lines. His seismograph of painful
awareness will lead him ever further down into concepts and the mind,
and all his work may indeed be seen as the ‘abominable savoir’ that
results from his early ideas on thought, language, and body.
2
SELF-PRESENCE, THOUGHT, AND LANGUAGE
L’idée de la connaissance absolue se confondait avec l’idée de la
similitude absolue de la vie et de ma conscience.
(i*. 131)
We always express our thoughts with the words that lie to hand. Or,
to express my whole suspicion: we have [ . . . ] only the thought for
which we have the words.1
Maurice Blanchot, whose work on Artaud in the 1950s inaugurated the
critical debate and still serves as the gateway to Artaud criticism, opens
his Wrst Artaud article with: ‘Chaque pensée était pour lui la plus grande
souVrance, et ne rien penser, l’absence de la pensée, c’était la présence
nue de la souVrance.’2 The critical heritage on Artaud’s early writings
largely agrees that they are an exposition of a failure to think and a
failure to write, overshadowed by a paralysing sense of physical pain.
What primarily occupies Artaud, we are told, is his experience of loss of
thought, an experience of suVering, paralysis, degeneration, absence,
what Blanchot deWnitively dubbed, in his article of this name, ‘la cruelle
raison poétique’. The title of this chapter might thus seem surprising, for,
whatever Artaud says about thought and language, avid readers of
criticism might say, it has little to do with anything as positive as selfpresence. Such an observation would be true if we take what Artaud says
literally, yet, if we start to look more closely, the inherited view of
Artaud’s early texts starts to seem unnecessarily restricted. For the
picture of Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière, L’Ombilic des Limbes, and Le
Pèse-Nerfs cannot be maintained intact if we open up our reading to
include his other occasional writings of the period.
The originally uncollected ‘Textes surréalistes’ (mainly in volume i**,
which appeared in 1976, after twenty years of critical reliance on the
original Wrst volume), whilst clearly mining the same seam of ‘abominable savoir’ as the collected 1920s writings, nevertheless do so in a
diVerent spirit. The emphasis is less on loss and is shifted more towards
1
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), para. 257.
2
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Recherches: Artaud’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 8 (1956), 873–81.
50
self-presence, thought, and language
a ‘savoir’ (the phrase, tellingly, comes from the uncollected writings) and
an ideal of wondrous plenitude to be constructed out of this loss. Yet, if
this supplementary volume has itself been available for many years now,
it has been largely used for corroborating evidence of the prevalent
critical orthodoxy rather than for a re-evaluation.3 It will be seen that
Artaud’s critique of thought and language is a way of theorizing about an
implicit term of comparison that is his ideal: self-presence in thought and
self-presence in language. As is apparent in the neglected occasional
‘Textes surréalistes’ and letters of the supplementary volume i**,
Artaud’s account of thought loss is articulated around the idea of the
virtual inner self and not around the nothingness of the self.4
However, before addressing the question of how best to take what
Artaud has to say about thought, a certain number of preliminary
remarks are called for about the peculiar nature of Artaud’s texts.
Jacques Derrida has referred to Artaud’s ‘aventure (et par ce mot nous
désignons une totalité antérieure à la séparation de la vie et de l’œuvre)’.5
This idea of a seamless fusion between life and work is, as is generally
recognized, one that Artaud announces as the guiding spirit behind his
aesthetics: ‘Je ne conçois pas d’œuvre comme détachée de la vie’ (i*. 49).
This is especially apparent in the self-analytical imaginative theorizings
of Artaud’s 1940s writings, but what matters here is to examine the eVect
of the fusion of art and life in his earlier works, since it has gone
unnoticed how this might change the way we choose to read them. In
brief, the early texts on thought and language cannot be read as authorially guaranteed statements on a question, even though they appear to
be so, but need to be seen as trials for possible answers.
Schematically, Artaud unites ‘œuvre’ and ‘vie’ in two diVerent ways.
First, the Artaudian text is about what it is like to be Antonin Artaud and
3
This situation started to change in the 1990s. Jane Goodall’s 1994 book (Artaud and the
Gnostic drama) and Camille Dumoulié’s 1996 introductory textbook (Antonin Artaud (Les
Contemporains; Paris; Seuil, 1996)) make even-handed reference to the two volumes i*
and i**. Yet, even here, it would seem the inherited view of pessimism is in the driving seat,
with volume i** coming along for the ride.
4
One exception to this rule of critical neglect is Paule Thévenin’s lengthy and littleknown article ‘L’Automatisme en question’, in Fabienne Hulak (ed.), Folie et psychanalyse dans
l’expérience surréaliste (Nice: Z’Éditions, 1992), analysing Artaud’s suspicious attitude towards
automatic writing in particular and the unconscious in general. A signiWcant number of the
passages quoted here may also be found in Thévenin’s article. However, whereas Thévenin
uses these texts to trace the biographical and ideological complexities of Artaud’s relationship to Surrealism, the focus here is on the complexities of Artaud’s ideas about the thinking
subject.
5
Derrida, ‘La Parole souZée’, 261.
51
the sense of alienation that he experiences as one of the basic facts of his
existence.6 ‘Œuvre’ and ‘vie’ come together, then, in that Artaud’s texts
are overtly his reXections on his life, not in the diarist’s mode, perhaps,
but not in a sustainedly Wctionalized, transpositional mode either. They
are, in a sense, confessional: they are lived fact, narrative and conjecture
all rolled together. Second, and both more importantly and more oddly,
the text is an ‘œuvre’ for Artaud in the sense that it is an act of labour in
which he comes into being by writing. Elements of this are apparent in
the self-analytical texts of the 1920s under discussion in this chapter,
although the generative power of the text will not be most fully expressed
until the 1940s texts in which Artaud claims to give birth to himself and a
spiritual family. For Artaud, the text is not just an account of artistic
consciousness striving towards full self-consciousness and of the labours
involved in creating subjecthood: he goes further than this Romantic
conception and equates the act of writing about self-identity with bringing self-identity about. The Artaudian text is implicitly empowered with
the ability to change his life, and this not just in the comparatively
incidental ways observed by André Gide. Nor is it a matter of replacing
a stylized lyrical poetic self with a more intimate and authentic voice—
Artaud goes far beyond the project of Gustave Kahn who sought to
‘écrire son rhythme propre et individuel au lieu d’endosser un uniforme
taillé d’avance’.7 It is not a matter of saying more fully his self. Instead
the text implicitly reconWgures the metaphysics of Artaud’s self and
perhaps even his biology. Writing has something revolutionary
and magical about it so that stating something is, in Artaud’s hybrid
textual reality, equivalent to having performed it. It is important to insist
on how extraordinary this is. If contemporary Surrealists aYrmed a
direct link between subject and object—the basis of magical thought
modes—and if Péret could write ‘un commun dénominateur unit le
sorcier, le poète et le fou, [qui] ne peut être que la magie’, this is a
6
There are, of course, exceptions to this statement: Héliogabale (1934) is about the life
of the Roman emperor of that name, Le Moine (1931) is a retelling of Lewis’s tale, and
Artaud’s most famous work, Le Théâtre et son Double (1938), is a polemical dramaturgical
tract. There are also myriad minor, short texts, particularly from the 1920s, about contemporary cultural events (see volume ii). However, this is but a small fraction of Artaud’s
œuvre; and the level of identiWcation between Artaud and Héliogabale is something he insists
on in a letter to Jean Paulhan: ‘Héliogabale vit, je crois, jusque dans ses profondeurs, que ce
soient celles d’Héliogabale personnage [ . . . ] ou celles d’un personnage qui est moi’
(vii. 152).
7
Gustave Kahn, ‘Préface sur le vers libre’, in Premiers poèmes (Paris: Société du Mercure
de France, 1897), 3–38.
52
matter of voyance and not of changing, as Artaud seeks to, the basic
existential condition.8
Underpinning the Wrst idea that the work may fully say his experience
is a surprising and naive belief in the possibility of language adequately
saying reality in all its complexity. The second idea, that the text can
change his existential conditions, is based on a belief in the generative
power of language, a cornerstone of the Theatre of Cruelty (‘les mots
seront pris dans un sens incantatoire, vraiment magique’ (iv. 121)) and a
tendency that reaches its extreme point in Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être
(1937), where Artaud’s word accords itself the power to act violently and
magically across time and space: ‘qui dira que je n’ai pas vu ce que j’ai vu, je lui
déchire maintenant la tête’ (vii. 119). But, if the precondition for a successful
enactment of the Artaudian aesthetic is a magical and all-saying language, he Wnds, as we have already seen, that the most fundamental
aspects of his existence are incommunicable: they may be intuited but
cannot be put into words. There is, then, a great tension at the core of
Artaud’s ideas about the written text: his idea of the work as being one
with life and of language dictating to reality is placed at one extreme of
the spectrum of possible philosophies of language; and his idea of
language as so Xawed that nothing of importance may be said about
his inner experience is to be found at the opposite extreme of the
spectrum.
There is also a further sense in which we may choose to see the
Artaudian text as an adventure combining life and writing. As suggested
in the previous chapter, though Artaud’s texts might implicitly claim to
be showing the living moment (‘je ne prétends pas autre chose que de
montrer mon esprit’ (i*. 49)), they are in fact given over to abstract
theorizing, although of a special kind. Artaud’s texts do not document
any stream of consciousness and do not show the Xuctuating thought
patterns of his living mind, but they do trace the fortunes of his thinking
about his experience. His texts are not the transcription of a previously
thought-out position so much as the space where Artaud does his
thinking. If for Rimbaud poetry became a means of exploring the
process of the perceiving mind as process, of capturing the gestation of
the pre-poetic, something akin happens with Artaud, for whom writing
becomes the means of exploring the process of the self-perceiving mind,
making visible the emergence of raw self-analyses. In both cases there is a
8
Benjamin Péret, Le Déshonneur des poètes; suivi de, la parole est à Péret (Paris: Éditions Mille et
Une Nuits, 1996).
53
displacement of focus both inwards and backwards. Artaud’s texts take us
into the workshop of his thinking and show us his theories, their energies,
and their misdirections.9 What Artaud’s writings record is an ongoing
adventure of thought. With the Artaudian text, the thinking is in the writing,
which becomes a speculative exploration of unknown inner territory.
Seeing Artaud’s texts as a work permanently in progress—a work
site—explains why the systems Artaud builds are so aharmonious.
Even the descriptions of the workings of his mind, the starting point
for his speculations, are plain inconsistent. The frequent brief wordsketches of his sense of alienation might at Wrst seem to Wt well together
thanks to a homogenous lexicon of abstract and spatial terms such as
absence, inexistence, nothingness, abandonment, pursuit, and erosion,
but on closer examination they show themselves to be mutually contradictory. Artaud says he suVers from mental dysfunction and from a
radical non-functioning; his problem is temporary writer’s block and a
chronic inability to partake in his own mental activity; it is not a question
of inspiration and yet it is a question of reaching the upper echelons of his
mind. Four consecutive pages of Le Pèse-Nerfs oVer four diVerent descriptions of loss: ‘ces rapts furtifs’ (i*. 88), ‘[u]ne espèce de déperdition
constante’ (i*. 89), ‘la dépossession de ma substance vitale’ (i*. 90), and
‘[u]n impouvoir à cristalliser inconsciemment’ (i*. 91). Furtive abductions, gradual leakage, dispossession of a vital substance and a powerlessness to crystallize thought, though referring to the same type of
experience, cannot be made to Wt together as characterizations of the
same phenomenon. Attempts to make sense of the three early collections
as referring to a ‘maladie’ run into the problem that Artaud seems to be
suVering from as many ‘maladies’ as descriptions of it.
Perhaps the early collections are not really about an ‘eVroyable
maladie’. Such conXicting deWnitions are no isolated example restricted
to his writings on loss of thought, and great ingenuity, probably casuistry,
would be needed to resolve the inconsistencies between Artaud’s divergent statements on a given subject. The technique of furnishing a series
of descriptions in a state of obvious tension is so prominent a feature of
Artaud’s writing, and becomes more and more common over the course
of his career, that it seems better to work with it than explain it away.
Artaud’s theories, or speculations, are permanently subject to the threat
9
This aspect of his writing is compounded by the fact that Artaud’s editor Paule
Thévenin controversially opted to publish all Artaud’s papers, including his notebooks.
The work-in-progress style, unsurprisingly evident in his notebooks and correspondence, is
also strongly in evidence in the texts written for publication.
54
of gommage (and Artaud will later nurture an extreme technique of
ceaseless erasure discussed in Chapter 5). This technique does important
conceptual work under Artaud’s pen, for it allows the text to Xoat terms
free of their moorings and buVet them about. Artaud’s disregard for
contradiction leads to a technique of repetition-with-diVerence that
vitalizes his writing and allows complex, luxuriant meanings to be built
up.10 In the case of the conXicting accounts of ideational loss, the
conclusion that may justiWably be drawn from the four incompatible
characterizations quoted above is that Artaud is not documenting an
experience of loss so much as stating that he experiences loss because his
thought does not fully possess itself, is not constant, is not wholly
vitalized, and does not display an instinctual ability to group ideas
around a core. In other words, the deWnitions of loss do not report a
failing but tell far more of Artaud’s point of reference: an ideal of selfpresent, dynamic thought.11 Artaud’s complaints about language,
thought, and the body may most proWtably be viewed as a means of
speculating about an implicitly invoked ideal.
Before it be thought that the claims being made here for Artaud’s
credentials as a thinker are being overstated, let it be made clear that it
is certainly not being suggested that all of what he says about his
experience of loss of thought is really a covert theorizing. A signiWcant
proportion of Artaud’s commentaries do seem to refer to some real
psycho-physical impediment. When he claims that ‘[s]’il fait froid je
peux encore dire qu’il fait froid, mais il m’arrive aussi d’être incapable
de le dire’ (i**. 188), the text is best taken as referring unproblematically
to a (real or imagined) mental dysfunction, not reconceptualizing
thought and language. Quite apart from such instances, it certainly is
not being claimed that all the linguistic exuberance of the more speculative texts is really a fruitful conceptual reworking. Not infrequently the
pleasures of language direct the course taken by what wears the mask of
analysis. If there is method in Artaud’s extravagance, this does not mean
extravagance is a persistently and deliberately adopted methodology.
When, for example, Artaud states: ‘Ce sont les assises physiques, et
10
Post-Mallarmean poetry is often a poetry of erasure, where writing is conceived as a
limiting process to be outwitted by form: language deWnes and form liqueWes and reintegrates. For Artaud form might liquefy, but this does not lead on to a reintegration. Erasure
is not used to counterbalance deWnition but to compound instability.
11
There are further reasons for being cautious about taking the early Artaud’s statements at face value. In the context of his account of thought, the fact that he dropped the
term ‘maladie’ after the Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière suggests he may have recognized it
as a misnomer.
55
physiques jusqu’aux racines même de l’impondérable, de toute pensée,
qui sont malades en moi’ (i**. 165) he is indulging in hyperbolic obscurantism. The supposed precision of ‘et physiques jusqu’aux racines même
de l’impondérable’ amounts to an abdication of analysis at what purports to be the heart of analysis. ‘Impondérable’, ‘indescriptible’,
‘insoupçonnable’, and cognates attract Artaud’s pen, but the claims to
such uncanny, unsayable, unthinkable precision can only be bluster. He
claims to be ‘celui qui a le mieux senti le désarroi de sa langue dans ses
relations avec la pensée’, but, even were such a claim true, it could not
authorize him to make the further claim that he is ‘celui qui a le mieux
repéré la minute de ses plus intimes, de ses plus insoupçonnables glissements. [ . . . ] Je suis celui qui connâit les recoins de la perte’, for such a
claim is logically impossible (i*. 99). Boastfulness is one of the less
pleasant characteristics of Artaud’s writing, and it is not until the 1940s
that it is tempered by deadpan humour. Artaud’s writing might well
engage with issues in challenging and original ways, but it is also shot
through with literarity and a theatrics of self-display. If Artaud is a
thinker, there are frequent moments when thinking is subservient to
the joys of language. The bravura of many of Artaud’s self-analyses
papers over the cracks, and, in fact, it is when he is despairing at those
cracks that much of the real thinking is done.
In fact the term ‘maladie’ pulls in two directions, for Artaud uses it to
signal both the unpretty facts about thought’s true nature and to smuggle
in an implicit comparison with what thought would ideally be (but which
cannot by deWnition be stated, since it is linguistic inadequacy that makes
this ideal unrealizable). The texts thus have not one but two gravitational
centres: Artaud’s experience of thought and an ideal form that could
circumvent or transcend the impediments inherent to everyday thought.
These are not two discrete accounts but the reverse sides of the same
coin, the documentary complaint necessarily invoking the speculative
critique. The speculation about pure self-present thought needs, then, to
be written back into the complaint of ill thought. It is the frame idea that
brings the account of linguistic loss into new focus.
The Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière nicely illustrates the dual work
done by the idea of linguistic lack. In two oft-quoted, key passages where
Artaud describes his experience immediately prior to loss of thought
there are ambiguous undertones that have gone surprisingly unremarked. In the Wrst extract, Artaud oVers conXicting descriptions of
what happens to his thought, and then describes what is lost in surprisingly positive terms:
56
Il y a donc un quelque chose qui détruit ma pensée; un quelque chose qui ne
m’empêche pas d’être ce que je pourrais être, mais qui me laisse, si je puis dire, en
suspens. Un quelque chose de furtif qui m’enlève les mots que j’ai trouvés, qui
diminue ma tension mentale, qui détruit au fur et à mesure dans sa substance la
masse de ma pensée, qui m’enlève jusqu’à la mémoire des tours par lesquels on
s’exprime et qui traduisent avec exactitude les modulations les plus inséparables,
les plus localisées, les plus existantes de la pensée. (i*. 28)
First, thought is said to be destroyed, that is, structurally altered but not
annihilated. Second, Artaud says that a furtive something robs him of his
words and so desubstantializes that thought. Structural breakdown and
substantive dispossession are incompatible, and the fact that there should
be this kind of self-contradiction already suggests that the account of how
loss occurs (the insuZation by an other voice that Derrida identiWes in
Artaudian inspiration, for example) is less important than what is lost.
And indeed this lost thought is something far rarer and more precious
than everyday thought, for it is the expressive form Artaud has found
that exactly conveys the Wnest points about the essential characteristics of
his thought (‘qui traduisent avec exactitude les modulations les plus
inséparables, les plus localisées, les plus existantes de la pensée’). An
accurate idea of the most intimate workings of the most tellingly existent
forms of thought—nothing less than perfect apperception—is what
Artaud claims to have lost. Something very similar is apparent in the
second key passage, where Artaud describes the moment immediately
prior to loss of thought:
avoir en soi la réalité inséparable, et la clarté matérielle d’un sentiment, l’avoir au
point qu’il ne se peut pas qu’il ne s’exprime, avoir une richesse de mots, de
tournures apprises et qui pourraient entrer en danse, servir au jeu; et qu’au
moment où l’âme s’apprête à organiser sa richesse, ses découvertes, cette révélation, à cette inconsciente minute où la chose est sur le point d’émaner, une
volonté supérieure et méchante attaque l’âme comme un vitriol, attaque la masse
mot-et-image, attaque la masse du sentiment, et me laisse, moi, pantelant,
comme à la porte même de la vie. (i*. 42)12
12
Compare the close of this passage to Nathalie Sarraute’s observation about how static
language is unable to say the dynamic minutiae of tropistic activity: ‘A peine cette chose
informe, toute tremblante et Xageolante, cherche-t-elle à se montrer au jour qu’aussitôt ce
langage si puissant et si bien armé, qui se tient toujours prêt à intervenir pour rétablir
l’ordre—son ordre—saute sur elle et l’écrase’ (‘Ce que je cherche à faire’, in Nouveau roman,
hier, aujourd’hui, ed. J. Ricardou and F. van Rossum-Guyon, 2 vols. (Paris: 10.18, 1972), ii. 37).
Both writers underline the heavy-handedness of all language when it comes to holding the
gossamer inner life.
57
It is ‘richesse’, ‘découvertes’, ‘révélation’ that are lost. The ‘clarté matérielle du sentiment’, the ‘masse du sentiment’, are more than a feeling;
they are feeling incarnate, the material stuV of thought. There is also a
signiWcant ambivalence in the description of the attack upon thought as
‘comme un vitriol’. Littré lists ‘faire le vitriol’ as, for the alchemist,
‘séparer le pur de l’impur de la pierre philosophale’. It would be unwise
to read too much into this were it not that Artaud, like many French
Surrealist writers, frequently drew upon alchemical imagery, and that
further this attack places Artaud ‘à la porte de la vie’, echoing Artaud’s
aspiration to write a book ‘comme une porte ouverte [ . . . ] une porte
simplement abouchée avec la réalité’ (i*. 50). Written in Wligree, then,
into this account of loss of thought is a second, positive account where
insight arises out of loss, a loss that might enable Artaud to sift impure
forms of thought from pure expressions of his private inner self and so
pass through the door poetry pierces in the prison of discursive practice
into surreality.
What the ‘maladie’ reveals, then, is that Artaud has an extraordinarily
strong deWnition of what would count as thinking: he wishes to know
‘dans sa substance la masse de [s]a pensée’, to be so much one with it that
he would be sensitive to and able to express its ‘modulations les plus
inséparables’ (i*. 28). He wishes to observe the minutest details of its
structure. His impossible goal is to think in such a way that thought
would be able to contemplate itself without this act of contemplation in
any way altering the object contemplated (consciousness). This is the
‘révélation’, the insight that Artaud always Wnds slips beyond his pen. It is
only by a comparison with this impossible union of thinking subject and
thought that Artaud does not possess his thought. In a footnote to an
open letter he explains:
je n’appelle pas avoir de la pensée, moi, voir juste et je dirai même penser juste, avoir
de la pensée, pour moi, c’est maintenir sa pensée, être en état de se la manifester à
soi-même et qu’elle puisse répondre à toutes les circonstances de la vie. Mais
principalement se répondre à soi. (i*. 65 n.)
The ideal kind of thought of which Artaud speaks is not just a process, a
way of thinking, but the apprehension of that process by itself in its
entirety. It must apprehend itself in all its ramiWcations, and this whilst in
the throes of dynamically grasping after itself, to be truly thought. The
kind of thought that Artaud desires would be perfectly present to itself
without this presence introducing any split between observing and observed thought. It would be a form of thought where reXexive thought
58
would so perfectly overlay non-reXexive thought that there would be no
doubling within this self-reXecting thought: ‘penser [ . . . ] c’est se
rejoindre à tous les instants, c’est ne cesser à aucun moment de se sentir
dans son être interne [ . . . ] c’est sentir toujours sa pensée égale à sa
pensée’ (i*. 66 n.).
But this ideal self-present thought is impossible, for it entails an inWnite
regress where the observing consciousness always needs to be integrated
into the Weld of observation by a meta-observer. Underlying Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière is the impossibility of fully saying this kind of selfconsciousness. What Artaud Wnds (but refuses to accept) is that thought
cannot be immediately present to a thinking subject who would think
about thought. Any willed, conscious attempt to think about selfconsciousness and simultaneously to think in a fully self-conscious way
about this undertaking sends thought spinning in a void. The whole idea
of a sought self-presence, whilst apparently invoking a unity, in fact
resides on an inherent dualism that splits the self into observer and
observed. The only way, for Artaud, to avoid this regression is for it
never to get under way, for self-presence to occur not in conscious
thought but (and his thought is vague and murky here) in the body,
which unlike consciousness does not have the capability of self-reXexive
awareness and so cannot set up the regressive process of doubling. This is
the reason why Artaud hypothesizes about constructing identity out of
bodily awareness and the ‘esprit dans la chair’ (i**. 51).
The move away from the conscious ‘I’ towards the level of simple
awareness means that Artaud seeks not to grasp the medium- or largescale currents of conscious thought but instead to convey a sense of its
lowest-level ripplings. Artaud is in fact focusing on a level of mental
activity similar to that which interests Sarraute, the region of unselected,
unwilled, bodily-rooted Xuxes occurring beneath the level of the articulate self. Sarraute describes what she seeks to transcribe as the ‘mouvements indéWnissables, qui glissent très rapidement aux limites de notre
conscience’, which constitute ‘la source secrète de notre existence’.13
Artaud describes it as ‘le grouillement immédiat de l’esprit’, from
which will arise ‘une nouvelle connaissance’ (i**. 54). He wishes to give
tongue to the most language-shy truths of his self, such evasive qualities
as density and sonority (i**. 145). If he views such nebulous impressions
from the vantage point of reXection, the hubbub and the Xows that make
them up are imperceptible. So, to be able to call his mental experience
13
Nathalie Sarraute, L’Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard, 1956) 8.
59
thought, it must meet two impossibly exacting criteria: he must usher
into consciousness the Xeeting, language-shy, normally liminal activities
of pre-consciousness, and he must further be conscious of his consciousness of this newly enlarged realm. It is only full, perfect, total selfpresence that Artaud is willing to count as thought.
Even though so stringent an ideal of self-present thought is unattainable, Artaud speculates about the kind of language necessary to grasp it.
To grasp self-present sub-thought would require language to be identical
to thought, ‘cette fusion du mot et du terme, de l’expression avec la
pensée’ (i**. 210) thus oVering a ‘vue synthétique expressive, immédiate
et spontanée’ (i**. 194). This is the ‘nouveau langage’ of which he will
write a decade later in Le Théâtre et son Double (1937), ‘dont la source sera
prise à un point encore plus enfoui et plus reculé de la pensée’ and of
which he admits that ‘la grammaire est encore à trouver’ (iv. 106). It is so
as to speak of the ‘grouillement’ that this more symbiotic, lower-level
linguistic form is needed.
For Artaud, the Wxity of language is incommensurable with the dynamism of the experience of the thinking subject and so deforms thought:
‘je pose en principe’, he writes in his ‘Deuxième lettre sur le langage’ in
Le Théâtre et son Double, ‘que les mots ne veulent pas tout dire et que par
nature et à cause de leur caractère déterminé, Wxé une fois pour toutes,
ils arrêtent et paralysent la pensée’ (iv. 106–7). This idea of language
mutilating the dynamism of thought was already present in Le Pèse-Nerfs:
‘Tous les termes que je choisis pour penser sont pour moi des t e r m e s au
sens propre du mot, de véritables terminaisons de mes j mentales’ (i*. 96).
Artaud would be in full agreement with Sarraute’s view that language
‘assèche, durcit, sépare ce qui n’est que Xuidité, mouvance’.14 For Artaud
the rigidity of conceptual discourse disrupts and denatures the fragile
Xows that occur on the edge of consciousness: ‘si par extraordinaire l’idée
est saisie elle s’eVondre, se dissout’ (i**. 161). Language is too rigid even to
name what it is that it destroys. In pointing towards what it would say it
actually puts paid to it: ‘le mot n’est fait que pour arrêter la pensée, il la
cerne, mais la termine’ (iv. 114). This imposition of stasis is mutilating
when it is a matter of discoursing on conscious thought, and when it
comes to discoursing on the kind of pre-linguistic inner self that Artaud
would talk of it is fatal.
Yet Artaud, typically, interweaves his destructive and constructive
theorizing. He does not just rail against the static grid language places
14
Sarraute, ‘Ce que je cherche à faire’, 37.
60
over the dynamism of reality; he also theorizes about an experimental
form of discourse that would be more apt to convey the entire realm of
mental experience, taking in the very limits of its domain. Even in the
denunciation of the crushing weight of language Artaud implies that
language as a destructive force is a culturally speciWc development, hence
one that could be overturned: ‘au point de vue de l’Occident [ . . . ] la
parole s’est ossiWée [ . . . ] les mots [ . . . ] tous les mots sont gelés, sont
engoncés dans leur signiWcation, dans une terminologie schématique et
restreinte’ (iv. 114). His new language will be capable of overthrowing this
tyranny of stasis in favour of recreating the dynamic Xuctuations of the
pre-verbal arena: ‘Il refait poétiquement le trajet qui a abouti à la
création du langage [ . . . ] toutes ces opérations par cris, par onomatopées, par signes, par attitudes, et par de lentes, abondantes et passionnées
modulations nerveuses, plan par plan, et terme par terme, il les refait’
(iv. 106).
The new language able ‘englobe[r] la sensation et le terme’ (i**. 194),
‘refai[re] à chacune des vibrations de [l]a langue tous les chemins de [l]a
pensée dans [l]a chair’ (i**. 50) would, for Artaud, be capable of generating images that would reveal his inner reality. This is the prime
function of images: to articulate a mute inner arena: ‘images [ . . . o]ù
ma personnalité se retrouve, fait le tour d’elle-même’ (i**. 145). Images
are the key to insight for Artaud, and, given that he is seeking powerful
insights, he is seeking images capable of doing the seemingly impossible:
‘Images Wxant de magiques situations de l’esprit. Magiques façons de
l’esprit de se retourner au milieu des correspondances des phénomènes.
Vue instantanée de ces correspondances’ (i**. 170–1). The language
Artaud requires would not only deWne each of the many diVerent
perspectives that could be adopted relative to an idea, but would also,
and at the same time as doing this work of deWnition, simultaneously
yield the view from all possible vantage points. If language is unable to
state the myriad Xuctuations of the unstatable inner self, perhaps images
will be able to evoke it. The Surrealist inXuence is clearly present here,
for the Surrealist image is a profoundly transgressive, magical act that, in
Breton’s words, gives over the textual space to ‘la valeur émotionelle des
mots. Cette vie émotionnelle des mots, très loin de n’être que fonction de
leur sens, les dispose à ne se plaire les uns aux autres et à ne rayonner audelà du sens que groupés selon des aYnités secrètes’.15 Images hold out
the possibility of making new meaning in which words break free of their
15
André Breton, Second manifeste du surréalisme (Paris: Éditions Kra, 1930).
61
limiting signiWcations. Just as Sarraute has recourse to metaphor to
articulate the inarticulate pre-verbal experience of tropistic movement
that occurs beneath consciousness, so Artaud theorizes about imageconcepts that would retain the authenticating vivacity of pre-reXective
experience as a thinking subject, a vivacity debarred from expression in a
static, rationalistic discourse.
But without a new language this level of not quite verbal, not quite
conscious activity buckles under the weight of Artaud’s words. He is
tantalizingly aware of this activity, which always frustrates expression:
‘les images qui naissent au moment où le subconscient les enchaı̂ne et va
automatiquement leur donner forme, ces images, ces représentations,
ces formes s’amusaient [ . . . ] à tantaliser l’esprit en se résorbant’ (i**. 181).
The fact that this pre-conscious, pre-verbal realm makes itself felt in
consciousness without ever becoming accessible to the gazing ‘I’ will
eventually lead Artaud, in the later stages of his career, to think of the
undermind as alien and hostile, an intruder in his mental space that seeks
to usurp his place. In the 1920s, however, he is convinced that, if this
labyrinthine undermind could be revealed by images, then an epiphanic
full mental self-presence would result: ‘Dans ce dédale de murailles
mouvantes et toujours déplacées, hors de toutes les formes connues de
pensée, notre Esprit se meut, épiant ses mouvements les plus secrets et
spontanés, ceux qui ont un caractère de révélation’ (i**. 38).16
Images, if they were ‘nées et non provoquées’, would provide the
means of articulating, hence knowing, this ‘révélation’ (i**. 146). But
Artaud has an insuYcient knowledge of himself and so no such wellspring of self-validating images of his inner realm. Because of the
‘Wssures’ that open up in his images produced by ‘l’intervention de la
volonté’ he is aZicted by an
absence de persistance [ . . . ] qui m’empêchant de prendre valablement et durablement conscience de ce que je suis [ . . . ] m’empêche aussi de garder présentes
à l’esprit un certain nombre d’images types correspondant à mes sensations et
représentations personnelles, et par conséquent de prendre et de garder conscience de moi. (i**. 185–6)
16
This comes close to contradicting the statement made above that Artaud does not
wish to recuperate the unconscious in consciousness. Artaud saw the Surrealist aim of
revealing the unconscious as an attempt to reach new, wondrous ecstasies of achievement,
whereas his desire to be at the same level as the ‘grouillement’ of the mind is more a way of
coming to rest in a state of non-separation with the mind. His reference to images generated
from the unconscious has nothing to do with liberation into the surreal. Instead his concern
is with healing the ontological schism he feels characterizes his inner space.
62
Without self-knowledge there can be no ‘images types’, but without
‘images types’ there can be no ‘conscience de moi’. The only images
Artaud can Wnd are lacking in eVervescent spontaneity, since he has
no language capable of being one with his thought, and so they are, in
his judgement, useless inert simulacra. They are eYgies, not living
images:
Tout ce que je trouve comme images, idées, on dirait que je le trouve par raccroc,
que ce n’est qu’un ressouvenir collé qui n’a pas l’aspect de la vie neuve [ . . . ] elles
n’ont plus de valeur, n’étant que des eYgies, des reXets de pensées antérieurement ruminées [ . . . ] non actuellement, et personnellement p e n s é e s . [ . . . ]
C’est une question de vivacité fulgurante, de vérité, de réalité. (i**. 145)
To be bearers of knowledge images must, for Artaud, be born of his inner
present and retain its manifold characteristics. Instead, his images are
mere remembrances lacking the aVective illumination and energy of the
lived moment. Unable to deploy his full latent linguistic battery Artaud is
unable to become fully aware of himself: ‘je ne puis appeler à moi toute
ma réserve intérieure, éclairer à volonté le champ entier de ma conscience’ (i**. 191). Deprived of the sort of intellectual spontaneity
whereby all the aspects of thought would burst into and all be held by
consciousness at one and the same time, ‘un mot, le mot essentiel,
manque’ (i**. 202). In particular what is lacking is the aVective element
that authenticates language by searing it with Xashes of personal reality
(‘la fulguration des choses’ (i**. 52)) that would fulWl a similar authenticating function to the Barthesian petit fait vrai. It is ‘le trésor aVectif de ma
sensation personnelle interne à propos de cet acte, ou de cette image
évoquée [ . . . ] la vibration aVective qui accompagne ce souvenir que je
ne parviens plus à évoquer’ (i**. 192). For Artaud language ought to be
forever remodulated by the lived instant if it is to be anything other than
a paralysing, empty shell of words.
To Artaud’s way of thinking this failure to be fully aware of all of his
self is catastrophic, for this partial awareness does not oVer suYcient
footing, he feels, for the ‘Révolution intégrale’ that was to bring about a
diVerent form of reality (i**. 60 n.). With only a fragmented and incomplete awareness of his self and his thought, there is no possibility of a
suYciently profound investigation:
Je ne peux mener à bout le travail de révision des valeurs, d’investigation
intellectuelle profonde que je me suis proposé et qui me paraı̂t être ma Wn,
ayant l’impression que, même dans le cas où je pense, je ne saisis qu’un côté de
moi, une face superWcielle de ma pensée. (i**. 191)
63
Apart from the pretension to be the new Nietzsche of Surrealism, what is
striking here is that Artaud conXates insightful thinking with the ability
fully to penetrate his own mental activity. This is an extreme idea: there
are major unavowed premisses behind the idea that the only sure critical
platform is constructed on a thoroughgoing unshakeable self-knowledge.
Artaud is working according to Cartesian precepts in the desire to erect a
world view from a purely Wrst-person perspective. In engaging—albeit
from an aphilosophical position—with what may be broadly called
Cartesian views, the tenor of Artaud’s project is at times suVused with
philosophical idealism as the structural elements of the reviled world
view are sucked into an undercurrent of his account. The desire for
perfectly self-present thought, for example, may be seen as a correlative
of Descartes’s pinning his faith on ‘clear and distinct’ ideas.
What we have seen Artaud to be lamenting is not any loss within
thought but the impossibility of self-present language and thought; hence
in turn the irrealizability of his dream of manifesting a stock of inner
potentialities, a nebulous ego-entity of which he is but dimly aware but
which he calls his (true, inner) self. It is not just self-present thought that
he cannot achieve, but what could be called total thought, thought
that would be the summum of all he has been through time: he complains that it is impossible ‘m’envisager dans toute mon étendue externe,
de retrouver de mémoire le trésor de toutes mes élucidations passées, de
faire renaı̂tre la masse globale de mes représentations’ (i**. 192). Artaud
yet again describes what he is seeking with a list of alternative characterizations, suggesting the unsayable totality at which he would aim. This
total thought would amount to a self-enlightenment, a quasi-religious
revelation of non-contingent truths about himself. At times Artaud goes
even further in his claims for what it is he is seeking. It is absolute
knowledge and absolute co-presence of subject and object of thought:
‘L’idée de la connaissance absolue se confondait avec l’idée de la similitude absolue de la vie et de ma conscience’ (i*. 131). It is absolute pure
thought that eludes him whenever he feels on the brink of catching hold
of it: ‘il s’agit de l’absolue pensée, c’est-à-dire de la vie’ (i**. 146–7).
Artaud’s ideal is an impossible extreme where there is perfect identity
between subject and world and absolute identity between consciousness
and self, and so, when he complains that ‘il n’y a plus de vue de l’esprit,
d’image, de conception, d’aperception mentale possible’ (i**. 162), the
epithets ‘whole, perfect, magical’ should perhaps be inserted before each
of the terms of his grievance. He is complaining that he has not found the
eidos of the self, the eidos of thought, and the eidos of life.
64
Yet this feeling of loss is the spur to write. It is the impetus to Artaud’s
project and not, as he implies, something preventing him from writing.
Loss provides the basis for a new knowledge: ‘il me paraı̂t impossible
que je n’aie pas quelque chose à dire [ . . . ] c’est la notion de ce
vide intellectuel particulier que je voudrais éclairer une fois pour toutes’
(i**. 183). His knowledge will not be knowledge of reality, but a secondorder knowledge of loss. It is nevertheless a powerful form of selfknowledge Artaud seeks, allowing him to step outside the perspective
of inherited conceptual and lexical models to reveal pure, elemental
thought:
ce que je poursuis à travers le trouble et les tiraillements d’une confusion éperdue
n’est rien autre chose que le fait de la pensée absolue. Ce que je cherche à isoler et à
cerner, ce en face de quoi je veux me trouver au moins une fois dans ma vie est ce
point de pensée où, ayant dépouillé les illusions et les tentations les plus communes
du langage, je me trouve en face d’une utilisation absolument nue. (viii. 64)
Stark thought beheld and conceived with a minimum of distorting
linguistic eVects is what loss is to reveal. There is no modesty about
Artaud’s project, no trimming of his sails to Wt the wind of desolation
sweeping through his inner void. Loss will allow him ‘[m]ettre à nu les
jointures de la conscience, j sentir ce que c’est l’esprit, j que l’agencement
physico-intellectuel de l’esprit apparaisse tout à coup à nu, j montrant les
lacunes, les liaisons fragiles de la pensée’ (viii. 69), where the lineation
serves to set out all the more boldly Artaud’s ambition. Loss of thought
oVers the possibility of knowing the very structures of consciousness for it
is emptied of its clutter of thought: ‘Devant cet échec de la parole
intérieure il [l’esprit] en revient à une sorte de conscience pure’ (viii.
66). This idea that loss of thought may be used to reveal pristine thought
is closely related to the idea that the painful body is potentially a source
of insight; in both the unhealthy is the basis of a greater form of health.
As Artaud observes: ‘Cette conscience que j’avais de moi-même, de
l’étendue de mon intime dévastation, n’était-elle pas une sorte de vision
supérieure’ (i**. 213). It is from the depths of loss and not from the
pinnacles of reason and self-possession that lucidity may theoretically
be born. However, precisely at this moment of ‘conscience pure’, Artaud
goes on to say, consciousness reveals itself to be not only ‘vide’ but also
‘désubstantialisée’ (viii. 66). For Artaud, then, the diYculty in thought
reveals the possibility of absolute thought, only to snatch away any
hope of grasping it. Loss of thought is that which both prevents and
provides the possibility of insight.
65
So far, then, we have seen that Artaud seeks not just ideas, but ideas
indissociably accompanied by all their inner ramiWcations, ideas and
their complete aVective and experiential fabric as spun through time.
And this as and when his mind reaches out to touch them. What would
count as thought for Artaud is an experience that would take in, in its
totality, all the many reXections and resonances that a cluster of thoughts
has undergone in its passage in the mind. It is as if he desires the ability
not just to capture the sparkle of a gem, but also to be able to apprehend
in its entirety all the inner reXections and refractions between the inner
faces of the stone, at the same time and in a movement of all-perceiving
intuition: ‘il faut tenir compte des mille impressions internes, des mille
froissements intérieurs dont la mélodie, dont le tissu éveille par associations inconscientes la pensée’ (i**. 165). Further, this insight must be
cradled by a dynamic, ever-shifting linguistic optic: ‘Connaı̂tre ¼ le
moment où l’on s’est infusé le sens à travers les variations et les errements
d’un langage mouvant et [ . . . ] plastique essentiellement’ (viii. 69). The
fourfold reference to Xuidity is telling: the degree of linguistic dynamism
sought is impossible.
If we read Artaud’s texts in the light of such demands placed on
knowledge and on thought, passages that would otherwise appear setpiece bravura may be seen afresh. For example, if we do not take into
consideration the exceptionally strong emphasis Artaud places on language’s tendency to circumscribe, channel, and obstruct experience,
then it would be tempting to take the following famous passage as the
diatribe of one punch-drunk on his own rhetorical felicity:
Tous ceux qui ont des points de repère dans l’esprit [ . . . ] tous ceux qui sont
maı̂tres de leur langue, tous ceux pour qui les mots ont un sens, tous ceux pour
qui il existe [ . . . ] des courants dans la pensée [ . . . ]
—sont des cochons.
[ . . . ] Et je vous l’ai dit: pas d’œuvres, pas de langue, pas de parole, pas d’esprit,
rien.
Rien, sinon un beau Pèse-Nerfs.
Une sorte de station incompréhensible et toute droite au milieu de tout dans
l’esprit.
Et n’espérez pas que je vous nomme ce tout, en combien de parties il se divise,
que je vous dise son poids, que je marche, que je me mette à discuter sur ce tout,
et que, discutant, je me perde et que je me mette ainsi sans le savoir à
p e n s e r . (i*. 100–1)
A text such as this might appear to be a dream of a ‘pure’, pre-linguistic
form of thought where Artaud is blaming the tools of his writerly trade
66
for his lack of precise wordsmanship. But this is neither a naive dream of
a pre-Babel state nor mere bluster. It is true that this is in part a
denunciation of scholasticism, but it is more than that. Insight, Artaud
is saying, is extraordinarily fragile in comparison to language and what is
commonly called thought is what destroys real thought. Insight arises
from holding to mind the ‘tout’ about which one is not entitled to
discourse and the ‘Pèse-Nerfs’ that would allow Artaud to become one
with his thought is essentially ‘incompréhensible’. The linguistic subject
lives in a Fallen state in Artaud’s opinion and so extreme patience and
sensitivity are needed if one is not to be duped by words.
The incompatibility between total, self-present thought and inXexible,
inadequate language is the subject of the following passage, drawn from
a letter of 1932, that is crucial to appreciating where the true emphasis
lies in Artaud’s reXection on thought and language, but that has gone
unremarked by Artaud criticism. The text borders on self-contradiction,
Artaud suggesting that the dynamic totality of true thought is so complex
and energized that it must be a mirage:
ma pensée chaque fois qu’elle veut se manifester se contracte [ . . . ] l’expression
s’arrête parce que le jet est trop violent, que le cerveau veut dire trop de choses
qu’il pense toutes en même temps, dix pensées au lieu d’une se précipitent vers la
sortie, le cerveau voit d’un bloc la pensée avec toutes ses circonstances et il voit
aussi toute la multiplicité des points de vue auxquels il pourrait se placer et des
formes dont il pourrait les revêtir, une immense juxtaposition de concepts tous,
semble-t-il, plus nécessaires et aussi plus douteux les uns que les autres que toutes
les incidentes de la syntaxe ne suYraient jamais à traduire et à exposer, mais à
bien analyser un état semblable ce n’est pas par trop-plein que pèche à ces
moments-là la conscience mais par pas assez car cette juxtaposition grouillante,
et surtout instable et mouvante est une illusion. (i**. 186–7)
Overwhelming potential—consciousness is instantaneously aware of the
entire range of perspectives on and forms of a thought manifold—here
drowns out the possibility of actual achievement; perhaps there is a slight
Testeian element to Artaud’s problem after all. What Artaud is describing is not the workaday experience of thought, but a rare glimpse of an
altogether richer form of thought that would be pregnant with unrealized insight. The enthusiasm driving along the expansive on-run of this
sentence is unmistakable, and the striking similarity of rhythms mark it
out as the positive twin of the far better known ‘avoir en soi la réalité
inséparable, et la clarté matérielle d’un sentiment [ . . . ]’ (i*. 42) quoted
earlier. His thought may be ‘avorté’, as he often says, but only in
comparison to this ideal total thought. Yet here this ideal is dismissed
67
as an illusion because such moments of anarchic intellectual ‘jouissance’
have resulted only in stillborn images devoid of their multifaceted inner
resonances that made them so potentially revelatory. The ‘juxtaposition
grouillante’ is no longer the stamp of immediacy from which a new
‘Connaissance’ will Xow but instead a sign of ‘relâchement, confusion,
fragilité’ (i**. 187). Artaud’s true point here, and one that he glosses over
rapidly, is that ‘la syntaxe ne suYrait jamais à traduire’ insight-laden
thought, of which the essential features are its plurality and non-linearity.
The play of the mind is too multiplicitous for the linear strictures of
syntax, and it is because of the impossibility of translating such thought
into language that the form of thought is found wanting. Such wonderful, total thought is, as Artaud concedes, an illusion, but not in the way
the text implies: it is not illusory but an ideal.
For Artaud, then, there is an incompatibility between the linguistic
structures of the mind and insightful thought, and consciousness must be
outwitted if thought is not to be denatured by taking on its alien garb:
‘Seules, dans le domaine du déterminé, les phrases directement issues de
l’inconscient arrivent à s’épanouir entièrement. Mais si par hasard la
conscience se réveille [ . . . ] c’est alors que je me rends compte des
obstacles qui s’opposent à l’accomplissement de ma pensée’ (viii. 58–9).
Any conscious, reXexive eVort on Artaud’s part sends thought scattering:
Dès que si peu que ce soit une volonté intellectuelle intervient [ . . . ] dès
qu’on essaie de prononcer de façon lucide et claire quelqu’une de ces paroles
intérieures [ . . . ] la maladie manifeste [ . . . ] on dirait qu’il suYt que l’esprit ait
voulu jouir d’une idée ou image intérieure pour que cette jouissance lui soit
enlevée. (i**. 184–5)
The work of endowing the ceaseless Xux of words with clarity and
lucidity is unrealizable, for it would mean rendering concrete the inherently Xuid. The intellect intervenes and hence damages the kaleidoscopic
Xuidity that characterizes the pre-verbal image and that endows it with
its primitive value. Jouissance and insight are impossible if sought. Deliberate, self-reXexive thought and self-presence are incompatible. The way
things stand reXexive thought and mummiWed language preclude selfpresence, and so the text will not be able to articulate the wellsprings of
Artaud’s inner self.
Perhaps it is time to return to a question raised above concerning the
status to be accorded to Artaud’s early texts in the light of their selfacclaimed fusion of life and work. Artaud’s texts need to be seen as both
inside and outside the literary camp. And this is in fact true not just of the
68
early writings under discussion here but, as will become apparent, of all
his work. On the one hand, they are not literary Wction but a site where
Artaud carries forward his theorizing. But on the other, they must not be
taken as an exposition of a body of thought in which language is
subservient to a guiding idea. Artaud tries out his ideas in his texts and
frequently the writing carries him away from his idea—hence the jumpy
syntax and forward-tumbling rhythms that characterize the long, expansive, and multi-directional sentences marking key moments in his texts.
Artaud does not transcribe conclusions but does his thinking in his
writing. His writing is a conceptual Wction, where insight is the potential
gain. Frequently he makes extravagant claims about what he is seeking—he is not seeking to understand the complexities of thought but to
discover ‘le fait de la pensée absolue’ (viii. 64)—and serious reXections are
heavily coloured with literarity. Conceptual Wction, speculative theories,
an adventure in conjecture—all such characterizations, whilst gesturing
towards the kind of writing that Artaud habitually produces, fail to
pinpoint the peculiar mixture of the poetic and the (anti-)philosophic
that is his intellectual signature. If, then, the early writings about thought
are diYcult, this is not purely a result of their highly abstract subject
matter and the problematization of thought processes that Artaud carries out, but also and more importantly a result of the way Artaud does
his thinking and the place in which he situates his discourse. His texts
are positioned in a domain particular to him, one of the interstices
between the theorizing of a conceptual system and the writing of a univers
imaginaire.
The concern with self-presence that may be detected in Artaud’s
reXections on thought and language will inform and direct all his subsequent writing. It will be carried over to writings of the mid-1930s and
Le Théâtre et son Double in the idea of the double, and beyond to his later
account of a self-present God as the double of man. In Le Théâtre et son
Double the theatrical double is the positive correlate to the negative
doubling within self-alienation, and so will reveal ‘l’identité métaphysique
du concret et de l’abstrait’ (iv. 57), the quintessential, primary underpinnings of reality. Artaud’s thought relating to questions of presence has
undergone a shift in emphasis from his early texts. In L’Ombilic des Limbes,
Le Pèse-Nerfs, and Fragments d’un Journal d’Enfer Artaud’s descriptions of his
feeling of pain and ‘impouvoir’ are confessional outbursts in the Wrst
person; with the idea of the Theatre of Cruelty, suVering is now to be
performed. In the image of the preface, the actor’s body is to be a
hieroglyph burning with metaphysical forces. The Theatre of Cruelty,
69
then, brings forth secret violent truths: ‘faire venir au jour [ . . . ] cette part
de vérité enfouie sous les formes’ (iv. 68), and, by identifying with these
forces, it allows for the emergence of a new man who wields these forces to
his own end: ‘rejeter les limitations habituelles de l’homme [ . . . faire advenir] la vie
renouvelée [ . . . ] où l’homme impavidement se rend le maı̂tre de ce qui n’est pas, et le fait
naı̂tre’ (iv. 14).
At the heart of this theatrical vision is the idea of a non-representational language of bodily and spatial conWguration. By a controlled
anarchy and dissonance Artaudian theatre is to decompose traditional
signifying patterns, and by the rigorous deployment of multiple planes of
sound, light, materiality, and movement somehow generate a new world
of signs hewn out of the very stuV of life. Artaud’s ideas on performance
are clearly inscribed within his search for a Surrealist poetic able to
rewrite in renewed epic terms the basic thought modes and framework of
existence. Already in his writings on Wlm in the late 1920s Artaud
suggested that Wlm should expose the modalities of psychic drives,
enacting ‘la vérité sombre de l’esprit’ (iii. 19). To this end he sought to
disarticulate Wlmic language to the point where it shed intellectually
recognizable syntax; ‘Cinéma et réalité’ even speaks of an anti-representational language that would ‘faire oublier l’essence même du langage’
(iii. 19). In similar vein Le Théâtre et son Double calls for a theatre that would
replace spoken language with a ‘langage physique [ . . . ] matériel et
solide’ (iv. 36), and ‘Le Théâtre alchimique’ develops this idea of a
regeneration of language, suggesting that, as the alchemist seeks to
dissolve base matter to reconstitute it as gold, so true theatre seeks the
puriWcation of base human language. More radically, ‘Sur le théâtre
balinais’ evokes a ‘Parole d’avant les mots’ (iv. 57). This is not an ineVable
original language but a signifying process in which poetry, no longer
conWned to words, is realized in the Xesh of the performer, thus reworking Artaud’s idea of an ‘esprit dans la chair’.
The Theatre of Cruelty has the same aim as the 1920s project of
writing self-presence and it may legitimately be seen as an extension of
Artaud’s earlier thought about alienation within discourse. Both have as
their goal eidetic knowledge of principles that would allow for the
reconstitution of the individual.17 With the Theatre of Cruelty Artaud
17
In her introductory essay to a selection of Artaud’s translated writings Susan Sontag
argues that the images used in Le Théâtre et son Double echo his earlier writings about selfalienation so strongly that it may be read as a ‘manual on the reuniWcation of mind and
body’ (‘Approaching Artaud’, in Artaud, Selected Writings, trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), p. xxxvi).
70
takes as his starting point the conclusion of his thought in the early
collections, that self-presence is impossible, and he suggests, perhaps
despairingly, that co-presence with the dissipating forces that prevent
self-presence will in an archetypally magical manner bear similar epistemological and ontological fruits.
In the context of a discussion of the ways Artaud’s writings are overshadowed by the metaphysics they attack, Derrida observed that
Artaud’s texts illustrate how all destructive discourses inhabit the structures they demolish.18 This interdependency is indeed one of the leading
features of Artaud’s thought. More striking still than the parasitical
relation of Artaud’s texts to orthodox metaphysics is the way that positive
speculation and negative critique are inextricably bound up with each
other within a given statement—a feature to be found throughout his
writings. His account of an ideal of self-presence is conducted, as we have
seen, by an account of the inadequacies inherent to thought and language. It is the idea of a ‘maladie’ that sets up a creative tension between
his experience of self-alienation and a dream of self-presence with which
he Wghts against that alienation. Driving Artaud’s writings on over
twenty-six volumes is the gulf to be closed between his recorded experience, on the one hand, of loss, ‘impouvoir’, and the associated failure to
eVect self-identity, and the vision, on the other hand, of human existence
as one of perfect plenitude within a self-present intelligent body. It is
paradoxical that writings springing from an aesthetic of total and perfect
coincidence between life and the text should tend towards increasingly
outlandish Wctions of a more authentic form of life culminating in the
corps sans organes. And it is ironic that Artaud’s thought on thought shows
him, the man who claims that his early works ‘roulent sur cette absence
profonde, invétérée, endémique de toute idée’ (xii. 230), to be a true man
of ideas. Only the idealist can write ‘ta pensée n’est pas accomplie [ . . . ]
dans quelque sens que tu te retournes tu n’as pas encore commencé à
penser’ (i*. 123).
18
Derrida, ‘La Parole souZée’, 291–2.
3
ANGELIC BODIES, DEMONIC BODIES
tout le monde fait de la magie [ . . . ] la conscience universelle est un
crime perpetré par la masse imbécillisante des êtres contre quelques
individus.
(xiv*. 134)
In the many texts written in the last Wve years of his life Artaud continued
to write about the issues at the heart of his 1920s writings. Over thousands of pages he insists, with an urgency surpassing anything to be
found in the earlier work, that neither his body nor his self belongs to
him. From his arrival at Rodez in 1943 to his death in 1948 he developed
a rapidly mutating, fantastical theoretical framework to explain this
sense of alienation. His body and self are said to be at the centre of an
ontological war pitching Artaud against all reality, and they are stolen by
his parents, by his past, by demons, by society. Most especially, he came
to decide after a complex engagement with theology and theologically
overseen philosophies of language, they are stolen by God, the archparasite who, to come into existence, must penetrate and possess
Artaud’s body. As a cure to this alienation Artaud preconized an anatomical transformation that, by shutting down the Wssures and oriWces by
which they gain entry, will ward oV these competitors for inner space. It
might seem premature to suggest this extraordinary diagnosis of the
human condition be taken seriously as intellectually digniWed ‘ideas’,
but for the rest of this study Artaud’s 1940s writings will be examined as
systems of thought of variable quality. His late writing is puzzling, and a
good part of the puzzle lies in the impression of precarious coherence or
near coherence they generate as conceptual systems. Any reading of
them will soon run up against the question of what his thought might be,
how it could Wt together, and how it evolves over time.
Yet it could seem not just premature but foolhardy to suggest that we
take seriously what will be called the early Rodez writings, those from the
period dating from his arrival at the asylum in September 1943 to the
second quartile of 1945 when he rejected his Catholic beliefs and started
developing his better-known anti-God stance. This chapter, however,
will chart Artaud’s writings from this period, during which his energy is
72
angelic bodies, demonic bodies
directed, on the one hand, towards exposing his idiosyncratic and
unstable theology, which prohibits all sexuality, and, on the other
hand, explaining that he is imprisoned in an abject body, his daily
movements surrounded by demons unleashed by groups of hostile
‘envoûteurs’. He switches rapidly between the two positions, presenting
himself as a saintly divine emissary inhabiting a pure, virginal body and a
Fallen man who nevertheless yearns to leave behind his sexuated, demonized, Xeshly carcass. Angels and demons, abjection and puriWcation,
theological enlightenment and magically induced metaphysical myopia
are the stuV of his thought during this period. With the mature post-1945
texts written after his relinquishment of Christianity it is at least clear—
despite their diYculty—that we are dealing with texts that, in their
expression of the dissolution and dreamt-of reconstitution of subjecthood, are an exciting aesthetic and intellectual challenge. But the earlier
Rodez writings seem less in the penumbra of delirium than wholly in its
shadow. If there is some disagreement over the merits of such late Artaud
writings as Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu or Suppôts et Suppliciations, there
is an extensive consensus that the writings of 1943–5 are disappointingly
woolly-headed and monotonous, and little more than the documentation of psychosis. The early Rodez writings, it is said, do not reveal the
Artaud beloved of the critical avant-garde for his assault on the founding
tenets of Western thought. They are but the dull and deluded outpourings of a Christian convert.
It is true that the reaction on turning to the early Rodez writings after
the earlier Wrst-person writings discussed thus far is likely to be bewilderment, and it can seem tempting to let Artaud’s biographer Maeder
have the last word—‘A cette époque la philosophie d’Artaud était, en
termes psychiatriques, «un délire mal caractérisé», et elle est diYcile à
reconstituer car ses aspects changeaient à de brefs intervalles’1—and
then pass on to the more purposeful late Rodez and post-Rodez writings.
It is also true that the early Rodez writings are of inferior calibre, and
were it not for the great Wnal performances that came out of the other
side of Rodez these texts of 1943–5 would be no more than curios. But,
despite the outlandishness and volatility of his beliefs in these early
Rodez years, and despite the disappointing quality of Artaud’s writing—frequently a tired pastiche of evangelic and mystic tropes—the
material from the period 1943–5 contains many seeds of his later
enigmatic ideas. The corps sans organes, for example, which will resist
1
Thomas Maeder, Antonin Artaud (Paris: Plon, 1978), 236.
73
divine interference, may be traced, surprisingly, to theological ideas
expounded during this period. It is, then, as this chapter shall suggest,
by understanding the early Rodez period that the framework may be
provided that allows for a sympathetic exploration of his mature
thought.
The Wrst and most simple point to make about the Rodez writings is
that from 1943 to mid-1945 Artaud wrote hardly anything other than
letters. The Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière had shown how Artaud
could use an interlocutor to develop his ideas, for his habitual way of
thinking is by refutation or magniWcation, and his letters from Rodez
give the impression of searching for the form of a body of thought that
has not Wnished evolving. If this thought is metamorphosing, we are
nevertheless confronted with the basis of an entire world view far
removed from orthodox ideas about life and the world. And the texts
in no way hint that the extraordinary universe described in Artaud’s
letters be taken other than literally. If subsequently Artaud will draw
upon the ideas and images of these letters of 1943–5 to develop a textual
universe that Xaunts its textuality as its most important and liberating
feature, the early Rodez texts do not authorize this kind of sophisticated
reading. They are a literal explanation of reality, and the honest way to
read them is as an exposition of Artaud’s delirious world view. Yet it is
also possible to go beyond questions of conceptual orthodoxy and perceive these texts in a diVerent light. What they may be seen to oVer, once
we no longer focus on their conceptual extravagance, is a theological and
philosophical system of real coherence and considerable economy, and
this mental world is unexplored by criticism. What at Wrst seems a largely
unordered and self-contradictory reality can be seen, once charted, as a
systematized mytho-theological explanation of the sense of corporeal
alienation evident in the early writings.
It must be remembered that six years of writerly silence separate the
journey to Ireland and subsequent internment from his arrival at
Rodez, and many of the initially more surprising aspects of his thought
may be traced to this period of Artaud’s life, of which there are but few
publicly available records.2 Whilst his increasingly esoteric writings
2
Paule Thévenin wrote in 1974: ‘Nous aurions aimé réunir en un tome les lettres écrites
de Ville-Évrard, mais, dans l’état actuel des recherches, cette correspondance aurait été par
trop incomplète. Toutes les lettres écrites par Antonin Artaud n’ont pas été envoyées; bien
souvent elles [ . . . ] sont restées dans des «dossiers médicaux» auxquels nous n’avons pu
avoir accès, quand elles n’ont pas été sorties par la suite et cédées à des collectioneurs’
(x. 267 n.). There is still no body of texts to which the Artaud critic may refer.
74
dating from the years before his internment were informed by a highly
unorthodox vision of reality, they gave no suggestion that his thought
would develop in this manner. Even with hindsight the shift from the
pagan esotericism to the Christian mysticism of Rodez can seem a rift in
his thought, and to a certain extent Artaud’s heretical thought in the
early Rodez texts has to be taken as given, as a new starting point for
critical enquiry.
Yet, if Artaud’s Rodez writings seem to spring from nowhere, they in
fact share a largely unchanged framework with his writings from the
1930s. In both existence is conceived as an imprisonment—‘Le déterminisme vaut sur tous les plans, l’homme n’est pas libre’ we can read in a
1933 notebook text (viii. 75)—and both are underpinned by a highly
polarized dualism. Héliogabale (1934), Le Théâtre et son Double (1938), D’ un
voyage au pays des Tarahumaras (1937), and Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être
(1937) are each constructed, at times explicitly, around an interpretation
of reality as a place of alienation from primordial unity, and all evoke the
idea of an apocalyptic return to this unity.3 This idea is one of the core
tenets of Gnosticism.4 For the Gnostic, the world, created by an evil
demiurge, has a radically Xawed ontology that condemns man to alienation from his true self. In the Gnostic world there is an ongoing war of
cosmic principles and the cycle of Creation will come to an end when
this conXict is resolved and Xawed Being can then return to the primary
unity of Non-Being (of God). Before we turn to the Rodez writings where
the Gnostic inXuence is most visible, it is useful to examine the 1930s
texts to see how they articulate Artaud’s sense of alienation, which
undergoes a shift with the change of mode. In the 1930s Artaud largely
abandoned the Wrst-person analytical fragment that was the favoured
mode of his earlier writings, producing instead third-person modes:
3
The date given is of publication of Le Théâtre et son Double as a collection, but all the texts
were written in near-deWnitive form by 1935. D’ un voyage au pays des Tarahumaras was the title
of the 1945 edition (Paris: Fontaine) of his texts relating to his 1936 visit to the Tarahumara
Indians. This was a collection of texts written in 1937 and partially edited at Rodez. Artaud
continued to modify and expand his Tarahumara writing until the end of his life, and the
later edition that appears in the Œuvres complètes is known under the slightly diVerent title Les
Tarahumaras.
4
Jane Goodall’s Antonin Artaud and the Gnostic Drama presents Artaud’s writings within the
framework of Gnostic doctrines (previously highlighted by Sontag as of special relevance to
Artaud’s sensibility). However, she is arguably a shade quick to translate Artaud’s texts into
the terms of Gnosticism, thus losing the speciWcities of his writing and ultimately drowning
out the texts themselves, which are subjected to conceptual but not literary analysis.
Further, whilst the framework to Artaud’s late thought deWnitely has a very important
Gnostic element, that is not to say that his entire career may best be described as that of a
modern-day Gnostic, and even within the late phase many other factors are at work.
75
tracts, essays, Wctions, and prophecies. This move away from speaking in
his own name coincides with an increasingly acute sense of ontological
fracture, spurring him on to increasingly frantic attempts to say through
art the underlying principle of reality.
In Artaud’s 1930s writings, the idea of an apocalyptic resolution of
dualism is developed not within a theological framework but within what
he calls a ‘métaphysique’, a vast term under his pen referring to any
appeal to underlying principles of reality.5 Artaudian metaphysics draws
upon a broad base of cosmogenic, esoteric, and mythic narratives and
images; for example, Héliogabale, l’Anarchiste couronné retells the story of the
anarchic, violent reign of Heliogabalus, the second-century Roman
emperor and incarnation of the sun god, in a discursive framework
drawn from alchemy and ancient solar religions. This kind of reliance
on speciWc lexicons has led to Artaud being interpreted variously as an
alchemist, an occultist, and a Gnostic. But, as Dumoulié shrewdly
observes, Artaud employs the metaphors and thematics of such esoteric
forms of knowledge without thereby reducing his metaphysics to the
conceptual matrix from which he draws his language. ‘La «métaphysique» désigne la forme la plus haute de la poésie’, he suggests, and so in
Artaud’s 1930s writings metaphysical borrowings are subservient to
aesthetic considerations, not a jargon importing a ready-worked-out
metaphysical framework.6 It would therefore be misguided to interpret
the 1930s texts through a rigid Gnostic interpretative grid. For Artaud—
even during his religious period at Rodez—theology is ultimately subservient to metaphysics, and religious thought oVers another discourse
within which he can explore his feeling of alienation from reality. The
use during the 1930s of ideas drawn from heretical and esoteric religions
is best seen as borrowing and adaptation, not aYliation. It is only after
Artaud’s religious crisis and internment that it is justiWable to refer to his
thought as Gnostic, since only then is it set out in a speciWcally theological context.
As suggested above, then, in the writings of the 1930s through to the
mid-1940s Artaud employs new lexicons to work on the same ideas that
occupied his 1920s writings. What is new in the 1930s texts is the overt
and increasingly paroxysmal attempt to lift art up to the level of grand
5
Artaud frequently placed the word ‘métaphysique’ between inverted commas, admitting the unusual usage made of the term (see, for example, the pugnacious apology for
referring to ‘métaphysique’ (iv. 35)); the provocative quasi-oxymoronic idea of a metaphysics of the Xesh examined in the opening chapter is a good example of his moving
‘métaphysique’ away from its accustomed territory.
6
76
myth, which is the counterpart to the increasingly pronounced sense of
linguistic and identitary alienation expressed in his writing. If one reads
through Artaud’s 1930s writings, it is hard not to sense a feeling of
increasing oddity. Already in Le Théâtre et son Double, supposedly an
exposition of a dramaturgical theory, Artaud proceeds through a series
of extended metaphors to set forth an inspired, unclear, and in fact
impossible vision. For example, ‘Le Théâtre et la peste’ deploys plague
imagery to evoke the violence and viscerality of Artaudian performance,
and to suggest the devastating conceptual transformations a Theatre of
Cruelty would unleash, resulting like the plague in either the death or
healing of Western man.7 The stage is conceived as a space of metaphysical immediacy where the unsayable nature of things is realized in virtual
form. Human existence is no longer represented on stage; instead its
prime metaphysical energies would be made real and organized in
bodies and space. Theatre, in fact, is to be the equal not of individual
life but of the life beyond human individuality, of which human individuality is only a representation.8 By becoming the simulacra of a
simulacra, theatre is to become metaphysics incarnate. Such a vision of
theatre as myth, magic, and metaphysics has an extravagant grandeur
bordering on the megalomanic.
Behind the explicit images and narratives is a structuring Gnostic
sensibility as may be seen in the famous Artaudian idea of cruelty.
Cruelty, Artaud’s key notion, refers not to ‘sadisme’ and ‘sang’ (iv. 97),
but to ‘les idées métaphysiques’ (iv. 100), the far larger idea of implacable
necessities sempiternally operating at all levels of a reality of conXicting,
primordial cosmic forces:
la création et la vie elle-même ne se déWnissent que par une sorte de rigueur, donc
de cruauté foncière [ . . . ] Il y a dans le feu de la vie [ . . . ] une espèce de
méchanceté initiale: le désir d’Éros est une cruauté [ . . . ] la mort est cruauté, la
résurrection est cruauté [ . . . ] Dans le monde manifesté et métaphysiquement
parlant, le mal est la loi permanente. (iv. 99–100)
7
A secondary automythographic line of reading identiWes Artaud with both poetry and
plague: he becomes the scapegoat of Western culture, eVecting its magical recovery of true
meaning at the cost of his own existence. This announces the logic of Les Nouvelles Révélations
de l’Être.
8
Derrida identiWed this desired shift away from representation towards generative
performance as the most subversive aspect of Artaud’s theories, for it amounts to a desire
to jump clear outside the logic of representation and signifying processes. Indeed this desire
to exceed representation is fundamental to his late poetry, which claims to dissolve the
order of reality and recreate the body of the poet from the primal Xux of words.
77
Human existence is literally cruelty incarnate, fundamentally marked by
self-division. Cruelty is one of the underlying cosmic principles, and the
very life force itself (‘le feu de la vie’) is tainted with cruelty, just as for
Gnostics all matter is tainted by its origin in an evil demiurge. The
Gnostic strain is made explicit when Artaud explains that he understands
the word ‘cruauté dans le sens d’appétit de vie, de rigueur cosmique
et de nécéssité implacable, dans le sens gnostique de tourbillon de vie’
(iv. 98–9). A Theatre of Cruelty would vicariously live out the warring
principles of the ontological order of cruelty, thus reuniting them in an
apocalyptic dissolution of being: ‘C’est avec cruauté que se coagulent les
choses, que se forment les plans du créé [ . . . dont] la face interne est un
mal. Mal qui sera réduit à la longue mais à l’instant suprême où tout ce
qui fut forme sera sur le point de retourner au chaos’ (iv. 100).9 Theatre’s
function is to be a virtual, apocalyptic enactment of the dynamics of
metaphysical rupture: the way out of self-alienation is a dramatic orgy
of self-alienation. This is a direct derivative of a major strain of Gnostic
thought that preaches a transcendence of evil and return to originary
non-being by homeopathically plunging into evil.
Artaud’s other major works from the 1930s adhere to the homeopathic
programme set out as the principle of the Theatre of Cruelty and aim at
a reuniWcation of metaphysical forces by taking the underlying principles
of reality to a frenzied paroxysm. Despite extensive historical and
mythological research, Artaud’s Héliogabale is primarily a poetic projection of the view that had so heavily marked Le Théâtre et son Double of
existence as a metaphysical drama; indeed, the work may legitimately be
seen as the best approximation to the ideals of the Theatre of Cruelty.
This is particularly so of the Wgure of Héliogabale: for instance, the
torrential Xows of blood, sperm, and faeces circulating at his birth and
death illustrate how he issues from, embodies, and returns to an anarchic
unity transcending life. Artaud’s Héliogabale undertakes the ‘démoralisation systématique et joyeuse’ (vii. 94) that pushes principles to their
logical, anarchic conclusion. He instigates a carnivalesque travesty of the
metaphysical order, plunging the Roman Empire into an orgiastic topsyturvy procession of sexuality. Dignitaries are appointed for the size of
their member, the emperor delights in prostituting himself, and his
triumphal arrival in Rome is a parody in which he walks backwards,
his buttocks exposed, being symbolically sodomized by the city. This
9
The apocalyptic overtones to Artaud’s 1937 stance are already present here in these
writings from 1932.
78
sexual anarchy he unleashes is described as a theatricalized, metaphysical programme to unite the warring principles of Masculine and
Feminine:
Rien de gratuit dans la magniWcence d’Héliogabale, ni dans cette merveilleuse
ardeur au désordre qui n’est que l’application d’une idée métaphysique et supérieure de l’ordre, c’est-à-dire de l’unité. [ . . . Il l’applique] avec un sentiment de
perfection rigoureuse où il y a une idée occulte et mystérieuse de la perfection et
l’uniWcation. (vii. 94)
Here the insistence on rigour brings to mind the deWnition of cruelty, and
key moments in Héliogabale’s career are excessively dramatized, particularly his coronation and gruesome death. But the most signiWcant
similarity with the Theatre of Cruelty is that Héliogabale operates on a
virtual, abstract level. For example, he mimes castration in disguising
himself as a woman and lending his bodily apertures to sexual penetration. He is not, therefore, the symbol of a refound unity but is double,
both masculine and feminine, anarchist and king (the subtitle of the work
is l’Anarchiste couronné ). Héliogabale thus operates according to the ambiguous logic of Le Théâtre et son Double and brings about an oscillation
between masculine and feminine, order and violence, and is both victim
and celebrant of a dramatized ritual of dissolution, transgression, and
dispersal, turning life into a stage and, in the name of unity, letting slip
the forces of anarchy. As such, it is possible to see Héliogabale as a
prophetic announcement of the course Artaud was to follow at Rodez,
for it is precisely by pursuing a tactic of maximum dispersal and dissolution of his identity that he aims to bring about a state of perfect, simple,
textual (that is, once again, virtual) self-identity.10
During the mid-1930s Artaud’s view of reality as one of conXicting
cosmic forces moved away from the choreographed formalism of Héliogabale towards a magic primitivism in which mind and cosmic forces are
not yet separated and all elements of the cosmos are seen as an interrelated system. The metaphysical lies just beneath the surface of the
physical, and, although this is threatening, implying as it does a return of
10
Héliogabale also extends a process at work in Artaud’s 1920s writings, where he had
developed parallels and fusions between his writing self and historical Wgures such as
Abelard and Uccello. In the context of writing a textual identity, it is most signiWcant that
Héliogabale should be so strongly marked by incantatory cadences, hypnotic litanies, and
complex rhythmic patternings. The oralization of Artaud’s prose, which comes to dominate
his writing, is a technique of incorporating and identifying with his text and his textual alter
ego. Increasingly Artaud sought to embody his metaphysics in textual alter egos, and
Héliogabale projects this concern with self-writing onto a larger and more complex plane.
79
the original cosmogenic violence, Artaud interprets the threat as a
necessary dissolution before a return to unity. In tandem with this he
came to conceive of his bodily self as the site for his Theatre of Cruelty,
and in 1936 he left France for Mexico, hoping that there ‘le théâtre que
j’imagine, que je contiens peut-être, s’exprime directement’ (viii. 287).
The purpose of this voyage was to visit the Tarahumara, a North
Mexican Indian tribe whose culture Artaud saw as exemplary of the
organic primitivism necessary for a return to the metaphysical sources of
existence. His writings about his visit tell the story of a frustrated odyssey
in a mythic, hallucinatory landscape alive with divine forces:
Le pays des Tarahumaras est plein de signes, de formes, d’eYgies naturelles qui
ne semblent point nés du hasard [ . . . ] la Nature obstinément manifeste la même idée
[ . . . ] des têtes de dieux connus apparaissent sur les rochers [ . . . ] tout un pays sur
la pierre développe une philosophie [ . . . ] Il me sembla partout lire [ . . . ] une
histoire de genèse et de chaos, avec tous ces corps de dieux [ . . . ] cette Sierra
habitée [ . . . ] souZe une pensée métaphysique dans ses rochers. (ix. 35–8)
Artaud presents Tarahumara culture as a perpetual reading and writing
of a metaphysical dialogue with nature. They treat the landscape and
their movement as inscriptions, and the opposition of cosmic forces,
already disclosed in the landscape, is heightened by the marks they
make on the environment; thus Artaud describes ‘arbres brûlés volontairement en forme de croix, ou en forme d’êtres, et souvent ces êtres sont
doublés et ils se font face, comme pour manifester la dualité essentielle des
choses’ (ix. 38). Artaud’s hopeful insistence during his Surrealist days that
‘[à] travers les fentes d’une réalité désormais inviable, parle un monde
volontairement sibyllin’ (i**. 33) is now aYrmed literally of the warring
cosmic principles emerging from the rocks and vegetation. The appeal to
Artaud of this kind of primitive ontology and metaphysics lies in the fact
that, if the cosmos is a smooth ontological continuum, then man partakes
of the same essence as the gods and so potentially has the same magical,
generative powers. To the Artaud of the late 1930s magical primitivism
therefore promises victory over self-alienation.
Until the end of his life Artaud reworked his Tarahumara texts in the
light of his Xuctuating religious and metaphysical dispositions. The
earlier texts interpret the Mexican rites as part of a universal esotericism
(linking Atlantis to the Grail to the Rosicrucians to the Bible). Those
written in the early 1940s develop a mystical Christian interpretation.
A text written just before his death describes the Tarahumara rites as an
act of provocation against a perverse God and homeopathic passage
80
through abjection, resulting in the emergence of scarred yet autonomous
man. The most important text is ‘Le rite du peyotl chez les tarahumaras’,
which describes rituals involving the ingurgitation of a powerful hallucinogen, peyote, which Artaud expected to amount to a rebirth to
himself: ‘Le Peyotl ramène le moi à ses sources vraies’ (ix. 27), theoretically allowing him to be ‘reversé de l’autre côté des choses, et comme si
une force terrible vous avait donné d’être restitué à ce qui existe de l’autre
côté’ (ix. 25–6).11 Artaud identiWes peyote with perfect knowledge of the
essence of things: ‘le Peyotl c’est l ’h o m m e non pas né, mais i n n é ’
(ix. 27). Once the god present in peyote has acted as a dissolvent for the
self, the true, innate kernel-self will be revealed and Artaud will return to
the other side of things. As Dumoulié argues, this is initially conWrmed in
the rite by the Wgures Artaud sees the dancers making with their feet,
which he describes as resembling the letters S, U, and J, the Wrst three
letters of the word ‘sujet’ announcing imminent self-presence (ix. 22).12
But the inscriptions end on ‘une sorte de J qui aurait eu à son sommet
trois branches surmontées d’un E triste et brillant’ (ix. 26). If there has
been any dissolution of the layers of socio-cultural and linguistic accretions that smother his inner self, he is still only present to the ‘I’, the selfreXexive, linguistically constituted self. Instead of receiving a revelation
of innate ontological truths, Artaud is still trapped by language. Once
again Artaud’s hopes of self-presence are disappointed and he experiences the peyote rite as another aborted event, reminiscent of those
described during the 1920s, when the possibility of eVecting self-identity
was oVered only to be snatched away at the last moment by linguistic
collapse.
This sense of failure and distance from himself becomes ever more
acutely expressed. If we progress through his 1930s works in chronological order, it is hard not to hear the note of increasing desperation to
Artaud’s creed of apocalyptic unity. After the failure of a controlled
opening-up to the forces of dissolution in the rites of the Theatre of
Cruelty and of the Tarahumara Indians, the already wild tempo quickens and Artaud seems to hurtle towards frenzy, then madness. Identity
dissolution is no longer hedged around by the security measures of ritual.
With the eclipse of his hopes to discover the principle of reality by a
theatrical enactment of metaphysical principles, Artaud places a Wnal
hope in a cognitive epiphany theoretically to coincide with a paroxysmal
11
The idea is not, of course, unusual; others of his generation, such as Aldous Huxley
and Henri Michaux, wrote of the existential qualities of hallucinogens.
12
81
destruction of the self. ‘Il fallait désormais que le quelque chose d’enfoui
derrière [ . . . ] fût tiré dehors, et qu’il servı̂t, qu’il servı̂t justement par mon
cruciWement’, Artaud writes towards the end of Les Tarahumaras; ‘A cela je
savais que mon destin physique était irrémédiablement attaché. J’étais
prêt à toutes les brûlures, et j’attendais les prémices de la brûlure, en vue
d’une combustion bientôt généralisée’ (ix. 49–50).
This idea of a Wery, apocalyptic revelation of the underlying principles
of reality at the expense of his own identity is the basis of Les Nouvelles
Révélations de l’Être, a series of short, fragmented oracular texts of anguished self-interrogation. Explicitly an apocalyptic reading of Tarot
cards, it announces the destruction of the world in which Male will
triumph over Female, overseen by a King mistaken by all for a madman.
Through this vision Artaud announces an ambiguous cognitive epiphany coinciding with the annihilation of self and world. In a savage
hymnlike chant prefacing the Tarot reading Artaud claims that the
destructive, purifying force of Wre has removed him from reality: ‘Si l’on
a fait de moi un bûcher, c’était pour me guérir d’être au monde. [ . . . ] C’est un vrai
Désespéré qui vous parle et qui [ . . . ] a quitté ce monde j [ . . . ] en est absolument
séparé ’ (vii. 120–1). Yet, whereas in the preface to Le Théâtre et son Double
Artaud had expressed the desire to be ‘comme des suppliciés que l’on
brûle et qui font des signes sur leurs bûchers’ (iv. 14), contact with the
incandescent metaphysical forces has resulted not in the union of self and
signiWcation but in his separation from reality and the dissolution of his
identity. Although the title of the work implicitly claims that the surrender of self to dissolutory cosmic principles has indeed resulted in a
revelation, one that has allowed Artaud to free himself of ‘les formes
([ . . . ] toutes les formes) dont la délirante illusion d’être au monde a
revêtu la réalité’ (vii. 120), it is clear that this is a negative epiphany in
which Artaud unblinkingly confronts his ontological alienation, his notbeing-in-the-world. Nevertheless, this dissolution is presented as a heroic
act of the sort propounded in the Theatre of Cruelty—‘Héroisme:
admettre l’épidémie’ (ii. 160).13 Just as the plague symbolizes life for
Artaud, so dissolution is a return to his innate state of existence:
Voilà longtemps que j’ai senti le Vide, mais que j’ai refusé de me jeter dans le
vide.
J’ai été lâche comme tout ce que je vois.
13
This reference, of course, indicates that the quotation is not drawn from the text of Le
Théâtre et son Double. It is, though, drawn from notes for a play dating from 1932, when
Artaud was writing and delivering the lectures that were collected to form Le Théâtre et son
Double.
82
Quand j’ai cru que je refusais le monde, je sais maintenant que je refusais le
Vide.
Car je sais que ce monde n’est pas et je sais maintenant comment il n’est pas.
Ce dont j’ai souVert jusqu’ici, c’est d’avoir refusé le Vide.
Le Vide qui était déjà en moi.
(vii. 119)
But there is once again an ambiguous logic at work, for, if Artaud is now
in some sense outside his previous state of alienation, this does not equate
to self-presence. For all the cognitive claims made, and despite the
hammering, visionary refrain—‘Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire? j Cela
veut dire que . . . ’—that punctuates nearly every page of the text, the
closing words of the preface to Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être belie the
forced note of epistemological triumphalism. The elision with the principle of Being has not resulted in the self-presence for which the sacriWce
of his identity is made: ‘Je ne suis pas mort’, the text records in a diminuendo, ‘mais je suis séparé ’ (vii. 121).
Already in relation to D’un voyage a au pays des Tarahumaras Artaud had
written to Jean Paulhan that it must be published anonymously, that it
must not even carry his initials, and that his name must disappear (vii.
178, 180). Similarly, Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être does not appear in his
name but is signed ‘LE RÉVÉLÉ ’. This signature implies that, in writing
under dictation from Being, Artaud becomes not just a conduit for Being
but also Being itself, and, acceding to the capitalized status of the proper
noun, He who is revealed. But this is not without its ambiguities, for
writing Being has therefore eVectively expelled Artaud from his role as
author and so forced him out of reality:
Or, n’étant plus je vois ce qui est.
Je me suis vraiment identiWé avec cet Être, cet Être qui a cessé d’exister.
Et cet Être m’a tout révélé.
Je le savais, mais je ne pouvais le dire, et si je peux recommencer à le dire, c’est que
j’ai quitté la réalité.
(vii. 120)
Knowledge has been bought at the price of existence in the world as an
individual identity. Artaud has now dropped down from the heights of a
nameable self to the state of ‘une irrémissible Brute’ (vii. 119), an unadorned and so, given the supreme value Artaud places on pristine
original states, all-powerful bodily existence: ‘un corps qui subit le monde, et
dégorge la réalité ’ (vii. 120).
83
Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être announces that ‘UN CYCLE DE
MONDE EST ACHEVÉ’ (vii. 141), and it is tempting to see this as
referring not just to the destruction of the world by Wre (the major
revelation of the text) but also to a cycle of Artaud’s own work: ‘Il faut
Wnir. Il faut enWn trancher avec ce monde’ (vii. 120). This idea of closure is
apparent in one of the last letters he wrote before his internment, where
he has the presentiment that he will soon appear under another name:
‘Je signe une des dernières fois de mon Nom, après ce sera un autre Nom’
(vii. 209). He was arrested and interned before the month was out.
When we next hear his voice, then, it is six years later and Artaud,
now interned at Rodez and calling himself Nalpas, his mother’s maiden
name, is setting out his Gnostic theology tinged with an apocalypticism
brought over from the 1930s. The dominant feeling is still one of
ontological exile, only now ‘l’Être’ has been renamed ‘Dieu’, and Artaud
experiences his sense of alienation as banishment from divine plenitude.
Simon Harel, in his psychoanalytic reading of Artaud’s later writings,
makes the shrewd observation that the Rodez texts are ‘tout un questionnement sur le statut de «l’originaire»’,14 worrying away at the idea of
a Divine origin as well as the many given facts of Artaud’s life, especially
his name, his birth, and his mother tongue. Whilst at times Artaud
perceives the origin as a state of plenitude to which he should return,
in general he equates them to an original moment of separation, hence of
doubling and alienation. The only unproblematically valued state is the
pre-original, as already evident in a 1920s answer to a Surrealist questionnaire on suicide:
je suis mort depuis longtemps, je suis déjà suicidé. ON m’a suicidé, c’est-à-dire.
Mais que penseriez-vous d’un suicide antérieur [ . . . ] qui nous ferait rebrousser
chemin, mais de l’autre côté de l’existence, et non pas du côté de la mort. Celui-là
seul aurait pour moi une valeur. Je ne sens pas l’appétit de la mort, je sens
l’appétit du ne pas être, de n’être jamais tombé dans [ . . . ] le moi d’Antonin Artaud.
(i**. 20–1)
A pre-origin of a-Being is the only valued site, Artaud here writes. Birth
is an imposed suicide from which the only possible respite would be a
return to a before-time. The fact of an original moment means for
Artaud that existence is thereby an exile from an original plenitude in
a foreign, vitiated ontological state. An outside origin means, for Artaud,
necessary ontological impoverishment. This newly important theme of
14
Vies et morts d’Antonin Artaud: Le Séjour à Rodez (Longueuil, Quoébec: Éditions Le
Préambule), 84.
84
the origin is a historicization of his previous thought about self-presence
and self-identity: he is seeking a cause (and will Wnd a culprit) for his
inability to attain self-presence. Artaud displays an obsessional need to
attribute blame for his failure to realize this ideal and it is this that leads
to an extraordinary interpretation of his life pitching demons and sexuality against God and angels.
Artaud’s most immediate diYculty in the early phase of his return to
writing at Rodez is to Wnd a place from which to speak in the midst of this
ontological warfare. Enunciative positions were problematic for Artaud,
as Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être shows. Eventually Artaud will have
invested his voice with enough authority to feel able to speak in his own
name—not only in the minor sense that he will be calling himself Artaud
but more importantly in that he will construct an account that does not
require outside support and substantiation, and even in the fullest sense
that he will claim not to have inherited but to have forged the right to the
name Antonin Artaud. But initially at Rodez he feels the need to anchor
his voice and claims to be speaking in the name of God, insisting, in the
letters dating from the beginning of his internment at Rodez, upon the
absolute orthodoxy of his unorthodox, basically Gnostic views and presenting himself as the only true believer of a deliberately occulted doxa.
This Gnosticism is no longer, in the early Rodez years, a fruitful metaphysical lexicon as it was in the 1930s and will become again once he
starts dismantling its terminology in 1945. It has for the time being
hardened into a theological framework circumscribing his thought.
Gnosticism’s theology and metaphysics are a function of its distinctive,
highly conXictual cosmogeny.15 According to Manichaean cosmogeny,
before Genesis the two Principles of Light (God) and Darkness (Matter)
were separate, but the latter desired to conquer the splendour of the
former. To repel his adversary, God sent Primordial Man with an army
that was eaten by the demons of Darkness. This initiates the mixing of
the two cosmic Substances that underpins the inherent dualism of all
Creation for the Gnostic. In a second moment of Creation, God kills
some but not all the demons and creates the earth out of their bodies and
excrement. After a series of further skirmishes the remaining demons
consume their oVspring in order to concentrate within themselves all the
stolen traces of divine Light, and they then copulate. The issue of this
union is Adam and Eve, whose demonic function is to imprison the
15
The following account of the main ideas of Gnosticism is much indebted to Mircea
Eliade, Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses, 3 vols. (Paris: Payot, 1978), ii. 353–76. The
most complete form of Gnosticism is attributed to Mani (a d 216–77).
85
remaining stolen parcels of Light. Humanity, then, is born as the result of
a series of repugnant acts of cannibalism and sexuality, and retains the
stigmata of this origin: the body, which is the animal form of the demons,
and the libido, which pushes humankind to reproduce and so keep the
divine Light imprisoned in human bodies. For the Gnostic his true being
is a divine spark held captive by the body in a state of ontological exile
from his homeland of Light. Birth is nothing short of a life sentence in a
demonic carnal prison. The Gnostic therefore has a dual identity, being
both an abject, demonic body and a divine inner spark.
The reader of Artaud’s Rodez texts will recognize many of these ideas.
Artaud holds himself to be the victim of occult cannibalism, proscribes
all sexuality as inimical to God’s plan for the world, and regards the
human body as prone to demonic ‘envoûtement’ due to its very nature
and anatomy. The idea of a double self in particular is one that is familiar
from Artaud’s early writings where the everyday, socially constituted self
is an aberration in comparison to an inner self banished to latency. The
appeal Gnostic thought has for Artaud is simple: it holds out an ideal of
self-presence in a world seen as a place of contamination. In other words,
it corresponds exactly to the desires structuring Artaud’s earlier analyses
of self-alienation. Given that in Gnostic thought God is removed from
the world, this world is necessarily (not just incidentally) a place of selfalienation, and so Artaud’s engagement with Gnostic thought will mesh
with and exacerbate his already extreme ideas about the exiling forces
within thought, language, the body, and the self. Yet perhaps the most
important feature for the development of his thought is that, on a
Gnostic account, humanity is necessarily, if unwittingly, in a state of
antagonism to God. This is an idea that Artaud will make much of later
in his development of it into a very diVerent account where God makes
covert attempts to control Artaud’s identity space. Artaud’s study of
alchemy, Tarot cards, the Cabala, astrology and solar religions during
the mid-1930s, all decadent hybrid Xowerings of Gnostic thought, would
seem to have nurtured an underlying Gnostic sensibility that comes
Wrmly to the fore in the early Rodez texts.
Artaud’s theological pronouncements are indeed strikingly Gnostic,
despite an explicit denial of any link to Manichaeism (so as to avoid being
branded a heretic and thus abnormal (x. 40)). God is said to have lost his
soul (NER 35) and it is man’s job to help Him recover it and so complete
this cycle of creation (x. 30). At times Artaud’s Gnostic terminology is
explicit: ‘l’Apocalypse de Dieu ne peut pas naı̂tre, hélas, si le Mal n’a pas
achevé d’épuiser la lumière qu’il avait volée’ (x. 89) and ‘l’Antichrist et ses
86
démons [ . . . ] ont fait la pathologie humaine’ (x. 83). The oscillation
displayed by his letters during the early Rodez period over whether he
inhabits a pure, angelic body or a demonic sexual carcass takes over the
Gnostic account unchanged. Even incidental features of Gnosticism are
drawn into Artaud’s world view: the Gnostic Primordial Man transpires
in Artaud’s idea of the pre-Adamite and as his thought progresses he will
identify ‘le caca’ as the fundamental essence of existence.
The Gnosticism is not conWned to theology. There is a broad sensibility
at work that leads Artaud to perceive existence as a cosmological drama
in which diVerent ontological orders Wght out existence in a combat
centred on him: he is ‘au centre d’une eVroyable bataille où le ciel et
l’enfer ne cessent de se heurter à toute heure’ (x. 21).16 Often Artaud’s
letters explain it is Heaven and Earth that are moved to action in ‘la
bataille occulte que le ciel depuis des éternités livre contre l’enfer’ and
that is now concentrated around Artaud’s body (x. 19). At times divine
Wgures appear in person to intervene in his favour as occurred in ‘l’horrible et merveilleuse bataille [ . . . quand] le ciel entier s’y est manifesté et
que la Vierge Marie elle-même y est apparue aux côtés de Jésus-Christ, et
que le Saint-Esprit y a fait éclater toute sa tablature de Xammes’ (x. 72–3).
The Wery visions he describes are reminiscent of the apocalyptic prophecies of Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être, and this Xurry of divine and angelic
activity is but a foretaste of greater violence he claims will come, for the
world is (still) heading for dissolution: ‘les temps annoncés dans l’Apocalypse de saint Jean sont proches’ (x. 22). A multitude of celestial armies,
perhaps even led by the Christ, are said to be advancing on Rodez to
reclaim him as their own (x. 52–3, x. 68; NER 40). Artaud’s letters are full
of a Gnostic warring of principles tinged with megalomania.
One of the most visible eVects of Gnosticism on the future development of Artaud’s thought stems from his engagement with Manichaean
ideas on the body and the concomitant view of sexuality as inimical to
unity. Much of Artaud’s letter space during the early Rodez period (and
well beyond) is given over to denouncing all forms of sexuality, and, if
this distrust of sexuality is nothing new, it is now taken to extremes under
the inXuence of Gnosticism. In the 1920s he had found female sexuality
abhorrent, reproaching his partner, Génica Athanasiou, with what he
16
There are also frequent references to neo-apocalyptic battles led by André Breton to
liberate Artaud in which whole sections of the population rose up in the various places
where he had been interned only to be gunned down in their thousands by a brutal state as
they sought to storm the place where he was being held prisoner and tortured (x. 70, 79, 84;
NER 27–8, 43).
87
saw as her translation of their relationship into terms dictated by her
female sexuality (see the three ‘Lettres de ménage’ (i*. 103–8)). In the
1930s he explained in his letters to Marie Dubuc, a voyante with whom the
haughty Artaud was unusually open, that he had left Cécile Schramme,
brieXy his Wancée, because of her ‘bestialité monstrueuse’, and that all
women partake of ‘la même immondité du corps’ and so of ‘cette brutalité sexuelle d’une femme’ (NER 171, 172).17 This long-standing sexual
aversion is now rewritten in explicitly Gnostic terms: ‘la copulation
sexuelle c’est prier matériellement le diable et lui donner de ce fait
barre sur l’Ame prêtée par Dieu [ . . . ] et s’y livrer c’est retarder [ . . . ]
l’Avènement du Royaume de Dieu’ (x. 35–6). Artaud insists that ‘la
Religion véritable [ . . . ] veut la chasteté intégrale [ . . . ] de tout homme
[ . . . ] hors du mariage e t DANS le mariage’, even at times going so far
as to maintain that ‘la reproduction humaine n’a pas lieu par l’exercice
de toute immonde copulation’ (NER 28). The pugnaciously anti-sexual
stance continues even after he has abandoned the religious superstructure within which his previous distrust is transformed into this counterfactual extremism. Not only will he continue to exhort those around him
to avoid all sexual contact (Jacques Prével’s memoir of Artaud between
his release from Rodez and his death in 1948 reveals with what urgent
insistence Artaud attempted to forbid his acquaintances having any
sexual relations); he will also, as set out in such texts as ‘Centre-Mère
et Patron-Minet’ and ‘L’exécration du père-mère’ (xii. 21–6, 33–54),
come to deny his biological birth because of what he sees as the alienating consequences of having issued from a sexual act.
Artaud’s defence of the religious orthodoxy of his ethic of total sexual
abstinence seems tireless. He frequently insists that he is wholly chaste
and ‘ancestralement vierge’ (x. 14), although this particular claim is in
part attributable to the wish to counter the diagnosis that he was suVering from a hereditary syphilis and its implicit charge of insanity. The
repeated insistence on the orthodoxy of his views on sexual activity
deserves to be seen in the light of his leading claim that humanity is
separated from Being, a claim Wguring under one guise or another from
the Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière through Le Théâtre et son Double to Les
Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être. Once God has been identiWed as the name of
17
In this same letter Artaud makes the fascinating statement: ‘quelque femme qui me
revienne l’amour pour moi a Wni d’exister sur le plan où les choses se séparent et où les êtres
sont séparés’ (NER 172). In 1945 the sexual drive is deWned as divisive: ‘libido sexuelle:
coupure de l’homme et de la femme, de moi et des êtres, de l’être et de moi’ (xvii. 33). It is
tempting to speculate that Artaud’s horror of sexuality arises from the separation, the
doubling, of the sexes.
88
Being, Artaud translates this separation into theological terms, presenting it as a forgetting of the true Will of God. Artaud’s faith cannot
therefore be orthodox; were it to be so, the claimed separation of modern
man from Being would have to be withdrawn or substantially reduced in
scope. The oddness of all Artaud’s world views is at least partially written
into their founding belief. For instance, his insisting that his sexual
morality is the true, divinely underwritten orthodoxy, even though he
also admits that it runs counter to ecclesiastical teaching, is an unlikely
yet logical outcome of his belief that the world is ontologically Xawed and
riven by metaphysical warfare, and it demonstrates the kind of longrange coherence to be found in Artaud’s thought even when his ideas are
at their most unusual.
Artaud’s hostility to all things sexual leads him to imagine that in a
time of original unity there could have been no sexual diVerences. Given
Artaud’s future status as seemingly androgynous creator of his ‘Wlles de
cœur’, it is interesting to note that original non-diVerentiation should at
this stage imply not androgyny but asexuality. The Fall, for Artaud, is
quite simply the change from asexuality to sexuation (x. 61, 76–7). Prior
to the Fall, reproduction occurred: ‘dans un sens diamétralement opposé
à celui de la reproduction sexuelle qui est une infamie immonde fomentée de toutes pièces par les démons’ (x. 34). Or rather there was a divinely
overseen production in which ‘chacun [s’éloigne] au plus loin de leur
corps [ . . . ] et s’élanc[e] vers l’esprit de Dieu, aWn de lui demander de
laisser échapper une forme’ (x. 35). Such details of Artaud’s rabid antisexualism would be of little signiWcance did they not contain the seeds of
future ideas governing Ci-gı̂t and Suppôts et Suppliciations, his great Wnal
collections of poetry. The idea that God is intimately involved in the
production of a child will subsequently come to mean that His is the
dispossessing presence at the moments of copulation and birth. Further,
extrapolating from the idea of a demonic origin to sexuality, Artaud will
conclude that the sexual organ is non-essential to human being. Already
he is insisting on the need to redraw the human anatomy: ‘dompter le
corps de l’homme, je veux dire maı̂triser son Arché-Type Sacré [ . . . ] ce
corps Sacré, dis-je, puisse se maintenir sans sexe’ (x. 36) and speciWcally:
‘l’élimination irréductible de tout ce qui peut être sexualité’ (NER 28). The
Sacred Archetypal human anatomy is the conceptual forefather of the
corps sans organes, whilst divine involvement in the creation of pre-Fallen
humankind means that God is essentially (that is, when things corresponded to their archetype) implicated in the original moment of an
individual life.
89
Pushing further towards the origin beyond the moment of Creation
Artaud writes of an ‘état Pré-Adamique’ when humankind existed in a
form untainted by the weight of matter. This Pre-Adamite is man’s true
state, and is closely associated with the idea of the angel, one of the key
Wgures at Rodez in Artaud’s cosmic drama, for ‘les espaces sont peuplés
d’êtres en eVet mais ces êtres sont des Anges’ (x. 26).18 The angel plays an
important role in Artaud’s thought because body and soul are enemies
for the Gnostic Artaud, and he is looking to make one term subsume the
other so as to end his self-alienation: ‘suis-je l’esprit d’un corps ou le
corps de mon esprit, et que suis-je, moi qui pense ce débat entre le corps
et l’esprit?’ (xi. 71). The angel is pure transparency, the emanation of its
eidos, and, untainted by solid Xesh, is nothing but volatile, Xuidic energy.
It is therefore one possible form of self-identity. Artaud oscillates between
the desire to reduce everything to the body, and the desire to vaporize his
Xesh and dissolve into such an abstract angelic Wgure. If Artaud’s letters
show some hesitancy over whether to opt for bodyhood or angelhood, it
is because, whilst it might seem that the angel represents self-presence, it
is in fact an ambivalent Wgure. The angel is the reXection of God, the
archetype of divine creation, but, as the Wrst being to emanate from the
breath of God, the angel is also the primordial exemplar of alterity. The
angel is the archetypal double.
Initially Artaud favours angelhood. He Wgures in his letters as an angel
struggling with evil forces, as do his friends whom he exhorts to adopt a
chaste, seraphic life. On arriving at Rodez, Artaud was denying he was
the man Antonin Artaud, but was rather his angelic continuation:
‘Depuis [la mort d’Antonin Artaud] Dieu a refondu son corps qui
correspond occultement à l’Arché-Type sacré de l’homme [ . . . ] Dieu
a envoyé dans ce même corps plusieurs Anges [ . . . ] et à la Wn il a produit
un Être [ . . . ] Cet être attend que sa douleur cesse pour s’en aller du
Monde’ (x. 37). Artaud aspires to be a Xeshless angel in order to return
against the current of time to a stage before all origins, to leave Creation
behind and so reach a stage prior to alienation and exile. After rejecting
Christianity, Artaud will still yearn for an archetypal existential form that
will now be corporeal and human, not immaterial and angelic, but the
underlying desire for an existential form allowing him to be one with
reality will remain unchanged. In a typically Artaudian semi-paradoxical
way, for extremes frequently meet in his image-concepts, the ultra-bodily
corps sans organes has its part of angelic properties.
18
For a fuller discussion of the angel in Artaud’s writings, see Florence de Mèredieu,
Antonin Artaud: Les Couilles de l’ange (Paris: Blusson, 1992), 57–88.
90
These accounts of his more than human spiritual identity are supplemented by the multiple religious identities and aYliations to which
Artaud lays claim. Given his sense of existential instability, the spiritual
genealogies he invents are, unsurprisingly, numerous. He claims that the
(defunct) Artaud was told ‘«Il paraı̂t que tu es Dieu.» Ce qui était une
erreur mais correspondait à une vérité profonde’ (x. 38–9) and that
Artaud was ‘le support corporel de Dieu sur terre’ (x. 70). The link
with the Wgures of the Christian Godhead is made fully apparent in the
appellation ‘Nanaqui le Saint-Esprit’ (NER 35), Nanaqui being a pet
name given to Artaud by his mother. Artaud is also said to have been
Saint Hippolyte (NER 29; x. 39, 70), no doubt due to the fact that
Hippolytus was consecrated and reigned in opposition to the Roman
pontiWcates. There is even a ‘Saint-Artaud’ (x. 57). The internment of
Antonin Artaud and his subsequent death are determined by their
parallels to the Christ: the defunct Artaud is portrayed as an innocent
scapegoat who accepted his lot for the sake of humanity and whose
suVering and death were occasioned by his religious mission (x. 37, 39,
66, 70; NER 28). This multiplicity of religious identities, whilst eloquent
on the insecurity of Artaud’s identity, also shows him to be trying to Wnd
an anchorage for his voice that would invest it with suYcient authority to
act as the unique exponent of God’s will. The many Wctive recastings of
his life and identity are a search for a powerful enunciative position from
which to tell the true story of reality and so mount a challenge against the
alienating forces at work in the world. These many religious identities
are the early and disorganized stages of what will emerge as the leading
strategy of constructing a new ever-shifting, ever-emerging mythic textual identity.
The impulse to deWne himself in mythic and world-deWning terms is in
fact already apparent in the early Rodez period. On arriving at Rodez
Artaud had been calling himself Nalpas, his mother’s maiden name,
leading to the widespread interpretation that this revealed, in Dumoulié’s words, a ‘mouvement régressif, à l’univers maternel’.19 But this
prevalent interpretation does not explain why, despite the assumption
of the name Nalpas, he repeatedly denied any parenthood with her:
‘Euphrasie Artaud [ . . . ] était la mère d’Antonin Artaud mais [ . . . ] elle a
oublié la réalité matérielle et objective [ . . . ] et elle ne peut pas croire que
je ne sois pas son Wls’ (NER 45). The problems for this interpretation are
further compounded when he adds the factually correct information that
19
91
‘Euphrasie Artaud est une demoiselle Nalpas et qu’elle est née à Smyrne
en 1870’ (NER 45). Even when naming her Nalpas he rejects any Wliation
with her. Instead he informs Ferdière, the head psychiatrist at Rodez,
that he has ‘une autre famille composée d’un père que s’appelle Joseph,
d’une Mère qui s’appelle Marie et dont le nom de famille est Nalpas’
(NER 45). The claim that his parents are named Marie and Joseph is not
just a straightforward adoption of a Christic posture (although this is
surely one of the connotations): Artaud’s full name is Antoine Marie
Joseph Artaud. There is therefore already a hint of the claim that he is
auto-generating. And what this suggests is that the adoption of the name
Nalpas functions less as a return to the security of the maternal universe
than it does, like the religious genealogies, as a means of asserting his
autonomy.20
But in September 1943 the name Nalpas was relinquished, marking
the end of a six-year period of extreme nominative, and hence enunciative, insecurity. Since Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être Artaud had not been
speaking in his name. Yet it is worth underlining the perhaps obvious fact
that this return to his name does not coincide with any clean break in the
ideas structuring his textual universe, and Artaud carries over in its
entirety the thematics he had developed as Nalpas. If, however, the
mainstays of his thought are still in place, they are not quite so foursquarely present nor so assiduously defended. For example, though
Artaud is still a believer, his correspondence is no longer organized
around the explanation of his personal theology. Any theological formulations appear more as asides, formulaic pieties, than as the backbone of
his writing. Artaud’s attitude to religion, if not his religious doctrines, is
no longer that of a passionate, missionary heretic and is now closer to
that of an assiduous devotee.
One set of seemingly mad ideas Artaud carries over from his Nalpas
days without any subsidence of the zeal with which he propounds them is
his belief in demons and ‘envoûtement’. Given the important conceptual
work this idea and its descendants will perform in his later theorizings, it is
worth examining it in more detail than it might initially seem to warrant.
Artaud’s belief in ‘envoûtement’ pre-dates his arrival at Rodez, and, if he
does grudgingly relinquish his belief in demonic interference in reality
after reverting to his name, he retains the underlying idea of attacks
being made on the autonomy of his body. In its more digniWed (1945 on)
20
Grossman suggests that Nalpas is Wrst and foremost the name that symbolizes the
rejection of all names, and in this context highlights the strong similarity between Nalpas
and the line denying all Wliation drawn from Ci-gı̂t: ‘ja na pas j a papa-mama’ (xii. 99).
92
guise, ‘envoûtement’ comes to refer to all impediments encountered in the
work of creating a new reality: ‘le but de ces envoûtements est d’empêcher
une action que j’ai entreprise depuis des années et qui est de sortir de ce
monde puant et d’en Wnir avec ce monde puant’ (ix. 165). Indeed, he
promotes this idea to occupy a lead role in his later thought where God is
accused of existing vicariously by an ‘envoûtement’ through which he
displaces Artaud’s inner self from his body.
But in the early Rodez period ‘envoûtement’ is a literalist account of
the magical doings of an evil society (x. 56):
[j’étais] interné à la faveur de [ . . . ] manœuvres d’envoûtement [ . . . ] la magie, je
dis magie au sens intégral du terme, avait une part capitale et unique dans ma
situation, que mon internement était une aVaire de magie et que c’était par magie
que les hommes [ . . . ] me maintenaient interné, en prolongeant à mon sujet
[ . . . ] l’illusion que j’étais fou parce que ayant moi-même à me défendre par magie
contre des agressions magiques occultes [ . . . ], j’en étais amené à employer tout
l’arsenal connu ou réinventé de la Magie Céremonielle Blanche la plus eYcace
contre les démons. (NER 38–9, emphasis added)
‘Envoûtement’, when it Wrst appears in Artaud’s letters, is a means of
exculpation: his internment is the result of occult attacks, and so any
defence he might deploy is ineVective, since the means of defence will be
perceived as an indication of insanity. Such a concept seems an unlikely
candidate for promotion to a central role in a serious account of the
fundamental determining inXuences on the individual. This, however, is
exactly what Artaud reserves for it in the major text Van Gogh, le suicidé de
la société (xiii. 9–64), where he states that ‘l’homme moderne [n’a] jamais
pu vivre, ni penser vivre, qu’en possédé’ (xiii. 21) and that ‘envoûtement’
was deployed against Van Gogh because of the ‘insupportable vérités’ he
pronounced by escaping the circle of ‘envoûtement’ to ‘déduire le mythe
des choses les plus terre-à-terre’ (xiii. 17, 18, 29). ‘Envoûtement’ is
therefore closely linked to Artaud’s truth-seeking art. By the time of the
Wnal texts its meaning has shifted and it refers to linguistic and conceptual blinkers and, by extension, to an inability to step outside an inherited
conceptual framework and its concomitant ruling as to what counts as
reality. It is this sort of ‘envoûtement’, Artaud suggests, that prevents
man realizing that ‘la réalité est terriblement supérieure à toute histoire,
à toute fable, à toute divinité, à toute surréalité’ and so prevents the
fulWlment of Artaud’s life-long aim, a life-in-poetry (xiii. 29).
At the early Rodez stage of its evolution, however, the idea of ‘envoûtement’ is ensnared within Artaud’s hermetic personal belief-system.
Nevertheless, the details Artaud’s letters provide on ‘envoûtement’
93
allow us to trace the development of his thought on corporeal alienation,
for ‘envoûtement’ is carried out by occult sexual acts and is directed
against his body. He claims he is ‘envoûté’ by ritual masturbation: ‘pour
la police française le cyanure de potassium n’est qu’un adjuvant car elle
en détient un autre pour brimer les révoltés et servir les manœuvres
d’envoûtement occulte qui sont son arme principale [ . . . ] Et ce poison
s’appelle le sperme, obtenu par masturbation r i t u e l l e [ . . . ] dans de
scènes d’envoûtement érotique de masses’ (x. 15).21 For Artaud all sexual
activity sends down lubricious demons on him (x. 80), and so copulating
humanity is demonic: ‘[l]es hommes [ . . . ] et je vous parle de l’humanité
entière, sont à l’heure qu’il est tous devenus des démons’ (x. 22). ‘Envoûtement’ is a universal phenomenon.
Artaud repeatedly denounces the sucking of his vital forces, the tasting
of his self and of his bodily Xuids as he sleeps; indeed the reason he is
interned is so that demonic humanity may feed oV his body: ‘le peuple
français [ . . . ] maintient [ . . . ] un homme dans un Asile d’Aliénés à seule
Wn de s’alimenter sur lui-même de ses humeurs séminales et de ses
excréments’ (x. 19). Littering his Rodez writings is the Wction that he is
subjected to the salacious activities of the Parisian population ‘qui connaissent la mesure occulte de mon entre-cuisses à mon cerveau, et
s’oVrent le luxe de me goûter de loin avec leur langue et toute la lippue
libido de la gourmandise d’accapareurs qu’ils peuvent y mettre, de me
goûter en tastant, comme le fœtus d’un nouveau-né’ (ix. 176). This is a
particularly luxuriant sexual ‘envoûtement’ written with typical relish for
enacting the content in the text—it is drawn from the slightly later, fullthroated Lettres de Rodez—and we can hear the salivating licking and
sucking of the thick-lipped gourmands. Bound up with the account of
‘envoûtement’, then, is the Wgure of the vampire, a predominant mode
21
Artaud’s traumatic experiences at the asylum of Sainte-Anne had led him to identify
medication with poison, and he maintained to the end of his life that he had been subjected
to many attempted poisonings administered by doctors in cahoots with the police (x. 14; xi.
212). The belief that he is subject to sexual rites of ‘envoûtement’ can be traced to his
journey to the Tarahumara plateau in 1936 when he saw Indians masturbating by the
roadside, and, in a state provoked by the sudden cessation of his heroin intake, believed
they were trying to bewitch him and make him turn back. Such an idea was probably
reinforced by his experience at Ville-Évrard. In Artaud et l’asile (2 vols. (Paris: Séguier, 1996))
André Roumieux, who worked for many years at Ville-Évrard, describes night-time in an
asylum dormitory thus: ‘Des pets. Des rots. Le bruit étouVé et précipité de masturbations
(à vrai dire, les seules manifestations physiques que les malades peuvent exercer en totale
liberté)’ (i. 75). Artaud’s existence at Ville-Évrard would seem to have been a period of
multiple, often intense hallucination. It is easy to appreciate how the half-waking hallucinations of demonic presences and the background noise of masturbation came to be
associated.
94
of existence for Artaud. The myriad incubi and succubi of Suppôts et
Suppliciations act vampirically, as will God, and humanity is said to ‘se
nourrir de sa vie et de ses viscères’ (x. 22). From its Wrst appearance in his
writings, the vampire’s appetite is said to be directed towards the viscera,
and this will lead to the project of creating the corps speciWcally sans organes
that has no innards to attract vampiric attack. The Xesh, for the Gnostically inXuenced Artaud, is no longer the positively valued ‘chair irriguée de nerfs’ (i**. 52) of his Surrealist theorizings but abject,
contaminated by bodily humours and deWned by the (imagined) characteristics of the abhorrent place of its emergence into being: ‘la chair s’est
préparée pendant 9 mois au milieu du sperme et des excréments’ (x. 43).
Whereas the angelic body is without Wssures and therefore immune to
vampirism, Artaud, instead, Wnds himself in a body to which he does not
have the freehold, as discourse means that others enter and manipulate
his body at will: ‘Le corps où nous sommes n’est qu’un produit
d’emprunt où nous sentons vivre avant nous la conscience de tout le
monde, et nous y sommes comme dans un carrefour habité par tout
le monde et où la conscience impure de tout le monde se prélasse comme
dans une maison de rendez-vous’ (x. 51–2). The body connives with its
own abjection and alienation, which is here at one and the same time
corporeal and discursive. It would seem that the polysemy of ‘la langue’
is here at work.
But Artaud’s literalist belief in the existence of demons obstructing and
interfering in his daily existence soon shifts towards an account that
employs theological imagery to explain an ontological phenomenon.
He thus privileges the ‘body’ side of the ‘envoûtement’ question over
the demonic aspect. The many ‘faits injustes et inexplicables ou révoltants de notre vie douleureuse à tous’ are perhaps occasioned by ‘un
problème religieux et moral’, but this is ‘lié à nos muscles et à nos
nerfs’ (x. 188). ‘Envoûtement’ is directly dependent upon physical anatomy and is possible only because the bodily structure is not impervious to
the occult assaults of others. The very possibility of ‘envoûtement’ is tied
up with the sexuated body. The atmosphere of sexuality is so all-pervasive that even a pure sentiment ‘éveille par correspondance et déviation
organique une vibration sexuelle abjecte qui a fait à la longue que tout ce
qui est du cœur a Wni par être axé sur le sexe’ (x. 228). Artaud is not just
speaking Wguratively here as he himself underlines: the human anatomy
has eVectively already undergone an organic transformation ‘de telle
sorte qu’on dirait que c’est par cet instrument d’immondice que l’être
humain a Wni par sentir et par penser’ (x. 228). The sexual organ has become
95
mankind’s heart, brain, and sensory organs. In a sense man is ‘envoûté’
by his body. Artaud’s proposed anatomical transformation will only be a
corrective to this ‘calcul de démons’ (x. 228). In the early Rodez period
Artaud does not yet invert the value placed upon the body to perceive it
once again as positive, but nevertheless the forerunner of the corps sans
organes may be detected in his thought on the dual body, and the idea that
the human body is other than it should be lays the foundation for the
organless body of the later, body-aYrming texts. Even in the Wnal texts
traces of the Gnostic hatred of the Xeshly body transpire in the desire to
redistribute the human anatomy. Indeed, Artaud’s attitude towards the
Xesh will not change; what changes is that, rather than aspiring to
replace the Xeshly body with an angelic body, Artaud will decide to
replace it with a material yet essentially non-Xeshly body. It might seem
obvious but it has been insuYciently remarked that the body of the bodyaYrming texts is a Xesh-free body. The later redrawing of the human
anatomy will be inspired by the lingering desire for an angelic body.
The most important lesson that Artaud draws from his ideas on
‘envoûtement’ and the body is that: ‘les hommes [ . . . ] ne sont plus à
proprement parler que des spectres, les spectres d’un autre, l’Autre qui
n’est plus là [ . . . ] spectres, c’est-à-dire démons’ (x. 205). Men are but
phantoms of a phantom, shadows of an absent Presence and so doubly
removed from Being. If humanity is demonic it is not because of the
abject sexual body but because of an essential absence. And the focus is
moving from the sexuated body to the psychic structures in the search for
the impediments to plenitude:
On perd son âme à la Wn à vouloir s’obstiner à vivre et à lutter au sein d’un corps
qui a été fabriqué et rêvé abominablement par des démons, qui ne cessent pas de
revenir rêver en lui à tout instant, contre nous et malgré nous, dans les ténèbres
de notre subconscient, ou, ce qui est pire, notre inconscient. (x. 208)
‘Envoûtement’ is no longer a purely occult phenomenon but relates to
the structures of the mind. It follows that, if Artaud is to achieve a state of
plenitude, this state must be one of perfect, transparent, and total selfconsciousness. Artaud is returning to consciousness as the battleground
on which the Wght for plenitude is to be waged.
As this survey of his neglected letters of 1943–5 reveals, his Wnal poetry,
whilst certainly Xowing out of the early frustrations with language and
the desire to make the self co-extensive with the world, is signiWcantly
inXuenced by the idiosyncratic religious doctrines developed as a Christian at Rodez. If the 1930s writings show a certain predisposition to
96
apocalyptic and Gnostic thought modes, it is in the early Rodez texts that
the thematic of the Wnal poetry is forged. It is these Rodez doctrines that
present the body-sieve as an impediment to epiphanic plenitude, and
the Gnostic elements to his thought that magnify the anti-sexual stance
displayed in his earlier refusal to yield to ‘l’automatisme sexuel de
l’esprit’ (i**. 53). From his Christian writings Artaud carries over the
belief in an alternative archetypal bodily form as the key to plenitude and
the idea that alterity is at the core of the subject’s psyche. As was
apparent in the 1930s writings, Artaud is adept at employing esoteric
discourse as imagery for exploring alienation, and, once he rejects the
Christian faith, he will continue to use its thematic to frame his exposition of his sense of ontological paucity. From the unpromising material
of his letters of 1943–5 setting out his extravagant religious doctrines,
Artaud the aliéné draws his Wnal poetry, which, theoretically, both explains and ends his alienation.
4
CREATING IDENTITY AND MEANING
Le verbe produit par les hommes est l’idée d’un inverti enfoui par
les réXexes.
(ix. 122)
Now suppose that belief in God has vanished: the question poses
itself anew: ‘who speaks?’1
During the early Rodez period Artaud’s writing principally expounds his
theologically dominated world view, and his letters treat mainly of
angelic and demonic bodies and their relationship to his identity. But
his correspondence is also concerned, at Wrst parenthetically but with
increasing purpose over the course of 1944, with how a philosophy of
language might Wt the theological superstructure. In Correspondance avec
Jacques Rivière Artaud had raised doubts over whether language belonged
to him or whether it was not ‘détruit’, perhaps ‘enlev[é]’, by a furtive
presence in his mind (i*. 28), and the primary issue for Artaud becomes
once again the proprietorship of language and meaning. Artaud initially
conceives of language and meaning as the prerogative of God: God is the
one truth, and so human meaning must be subordinate to the Divinity.
This is a literally theological world where philosophy—and poetry as the
highest exemplar of philosophical meaning-making—must tend towards
without attaining the divine truth. Poetry is a digniWed branch of theology and the poet is the seer or ‘initié’ whose poem is ‘un reXet d[’une]
initiation transcendantale [ . . . ] dans la mesure où il n’a pas perdu la
communication avec Dieu’ (NER 29–30). Hitching poetry to theological
revelation in this way leads Artaud to aYrm his world narrative with
conWdence, for his voice is anchored by speaking in the name of the
absent God. But on the crest of this new-found conWdence in the
authority of his voice he decides his speech no longer needs to be divinely
underwritten, and so unhitches the two. For the Wrst time since the mid1930s he no longer needs to write under the aegis of an absent guarantor
for whom he is the spokesperson. So, as Artaud’s Christian belief
subsides over the course of 1943–4, he reasserts the right to create
1
98
creating identity and meaning
meaning autonomously—indeed, as far as it is possible to tell, it would
seem that the collapse in Artaud’s faith is due to the unacceptable status
of poetic creativity in a divine universe that curtails his right to make
meaning. The Word of God even perverts the idea of what authentic
meaning might be, since it oVers a model in which the Creator leaves
behind a doubling trace in which God beholds Himself. Creation and
meaning are impossible in God’s universe.
Gnostic accounts function by sealing God oV from the world, but
Artaud reopens the frontiers between the human and the divine and
Wnds God both a guilty and an omnipresent God. He recasts his earlier
narrative of dispossession within thought and language, interpreting it in
terms of his new idea of foundational determining forces of which the
individual is habitually unaware (‘envoûtement’), and so concludes that
the reason it is not possible to write self-identity is because of the
insidious presence of the Word in linguistic and mental structures. The
logic of rebellion is thus turned back against the Gnostic rebellion that
has led Artaud to his current beliefs. In so far as it preaches rebellion,
Gnosticism is self-annulling, and Artaud, whatever the untidiness of the
surface features of his thought, displays long-distance rigour in his
appreciation of where the motive ideas of intellectual systems lead.
Artaud decides then that poetry, by denouncing God, will oust theology
and all discourses with claims to privileged epistemic status. Stylistically
the writings of this intermediary questioning phase still lack the force of
the Wnal aYrmatory writings, but it is here that the late Artaud unmistakably emerges. It is the point where the early magical–theological
world view mutates into the late linguistic–conceptual antagonistic narratives of self-alienation.
The seeds of contention between poet and Word of God are already
present in his celebration of the Divinity as formulated in 1943 shortly
after his arrival at Rodez. Whilst Artaud’s ideas during this period are
predominantly Gnostic, there are two decidedly non-Gnostic ideas that
with a shift in perspective easily lead Artaud to seeing the Word of God
as alienating. One is Artaud’s claim that it is possible to be conWdent in
human intellectual endeavour, since, though reason cannot ground itself
by a demonstration of the ultimate validity of its operations, God, as
creator of the universe, of its mysteries, and of curious humanity, acts as
guarantor for human understanding and for the posssibility of there
being meaning:
Dès que l’on pense tout est mystère et plus on pense plus le mystère s’approfondit mais Dieu de toutes parts dans ce recul interne de la pensée en inWni et dans
99
l’inWni a mis les plus sûrs repères [ . . . ] Rien n’a de sens et qu’est-ce que c’est que le
sens s’il n’y avait un Producteur InWni et sublime du Mystère même. (x. 25)
God’s presence within thought acts as a foundation, and so prevents it
from disappearing into an unstoppable regress (echoing the concerns of
Artaud’s early writing with the problem of the inWnite regress of reXexive
consciousness). This slightly desperate formulation invokes God to prevent meaninglessness Xooding out over Artaud’s thought, but only at
what will later be seen as the inadmissibly high price of sacriWcing the
possibility of autonomous human meaning-making. Such total authority
over meaning imposes repressive limits on the creative artist’s autonomy,
and so Artaud will subsequently come to hold that the creator of reality is
by deWnition in conXict with Artaud the creator of meaning. The second
signiWcant non-Gnostic element appearing in Wligree in the passage
above, and upon which he insists frequently, is that God is InWnite.
The term ‘InWni’ becomes the favoured name of God, of whom it is
said to be the deWning characteristic: ‘par déWnition Dieu c’est l’InWni’
(x. 45). Later this deWning characteristic of inWnitude will indicate that
God preys on humanity, since, if He is inWnite, no barrier can be set up
between God and man. Further, in literalist mode Artaud comes to
interpret ‘InWni’ as indicating that God is incomplete; if He is to exist,
He must therefore live vicariously through his creation. It takes only a
slight shift of emphasis for this InWnite God beneWcially present within
thought of the early Rodez writings to become the aggressive God
usurping Artaud’s inner space of the mature texts. His redeWnition of
God Xows from the dangerous ambiguities of earlier formulations. It
makes sense once again to talk of the rigour of Artaud’s appreciation of
deep structural ambiguities.
Shortly after recognizing that his previous beliefs (and in particular the
belief that he was called Nalpas) were delusional, Artaud announces his
intention to unpack all his ideas: ‘J’ai l’intention maintenant que les
choses vont mieux pour moi de me remettre enWn à écrire non pas
tellement pour dire des choses aux autres que pour me les élucider à
moi-même’ (x. 96); and in particular the rather odd trio: ‘Inconscient,
InWni, Éternel’ (x. 98). But the inherent mystery of this triad initially leads
him to philosophize in strikingly pessimistic ways on the potential of
human language, which he says is not just inadequate but inimical to the
expression of truth. God’s inWnitely superior wielding of language makes
a mockery of Artaud’s attempts to grasp the essence of terms, for such
essences belong to an ontologically superior and humanly unattainable
domain:
100
Dieu seul quelque part là-bas où les Êtres n’accèdent pas a pu inventer les
syllabes parfaites, «inventer», je veux dire faire découler ces syllabes de l’InWni.
Et L’InWni q u a n d o n y p e n s e qu’est-ce que c’est.[ . . . ] déterminer quoi que ce
soit de ce qui touche à une notion aussi insaississable et pure que celle de l’inWni,
c’est le nier et le tuer. En fait ce n’est pas possible. L’InWni est une chose qui se
manifeste, mais Dieu seul peut le manifester. Ce qui reste de l’InWni dans le
langage n’est qu’un souvenir du Verbe de Dieu que quelques grands Mystiques et
de rares très grands poètes ont capté. (x. 97–8)
This passage stands at a stylistic crossroads between the anguished selfinterrogation of Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être and the theatricalized
rhetorical questioning of Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu: ‘L’InWni q u a n d
o n y p e n s e qu’est-ce que c’est’ analeptically echoes the ‘Qu’est-ce que
cela veut dire’ of the former and proleptically the ‘Et qu’est-ce qu’au
juste [ . . . ]’ of the latter. There is nothing original in the ideas expressed
here: such a theologically inXected philosophy of language is as old as
Christian thought and is in no way speciWc to Gnosticism. But it is
surprising to see Artaud accord so humble a role to poetry and Wnd
even this is beyond its capacities, since the precise meanings of theological notions elude human language. And in fact the passage also
stands at a turning point in the development of Artaud’s theorizings on
language: the notion of the inWnite is still characterized here as ‘pure’,
but the balance is clearly tipping towards the rejection of all abstract
ideas with the suggestion that the notion is essentially ungraspable and
even that assigning it any inherent meaning is impossible. In the 1947
text ‘La question se pose de . . . ’ abstract ideas will be dismissed as a freeXoating diVerential system where each term merely refers on to another
in a round—and Artaud uses ‘l’inWni’ as the leading example launching
his cycle of unanswered questions about what such notions could mean
(xiii. 91–7). Whilst this text invites us to read the derivative status of
language as authenticating the discourse of mystic poetry, the idea that
human language is ‘un souvenir du Verbe de Dieu’, an echo or double of
the Word of God, will in fact lead Artaud into battle against Him.
For Artaud, as a consequence of his theology, has had temporarily
to relinquish his dream of the 1920s and 1930s to make language elide
with experience. It is God alone who can make language coincide with
experience and whose syllables are one with His nature. All that even the
greatest of poets can hope to do in the face of the inscrutable alterity of
the Word of God is go some way towards echoing it. Even then the
question remains: ‘à quel point l’écrivain a le droit de se croire le Maı̂tre
du langage [ . . . ] jusqu’où peut-il croire les [les mots] avoir maı̂trisés
101
quant à ce qui est l’Absolu de l’Essence de ce qu’il a voulu leur faire
signiWer, et de ce surtout qu’il a voulu lui-même rejoindre’ (x. 98–9). The
true, deep, intensely felt, personal, and at this stage no doubt divinely
authenticated meaning, ‘l’Absolu de l’Essence’ of his meaning, might fail
to be communicated and so still elude him. Artaud has lost faith in
poetry’s ability to generate original meaning, a loss of faith induced by
comparison to the potency of God’s Word. His Christian faith destroys
his faith in even the most patiently prepared human utterances. Whilst
God is in the picture, Artaud is condemned, by virtue of his humanity, to
epistemic and linguistic inadequacy.
Artaud’s hopes for the power of human language are at a low point.
He is keenly aware of the inadequacy of his linguistic powers when he
pits language against the idea of God:
Je suis un ignorant. Je me suis cru longtemps sûr du sens des mots, je me suis
cru aussi jusqu’à un certain point leur maı̂tre. Mais maintenant que je les ai
quelque peu expérimentés, il m’échappe.
Pourquoi?
Les mots valaient ce que je leur faisais dire, c’est-à-dire ce que je mettais
dedans.
Mais je n’ai jamais pu savoir au juste jusqu’à quel point j’avais raison.
Lorsque je pensais à un arbre, et que je prononçais le mot arbre, je sais que je ne
commettais pas d’erreur, car le mot arbre désigne quelque chose d’absolument
objectif, une réalité matérielle intégrale et dûment caractérisée.
Mais je ne sais pas où va mon esprit et ce que vaut ce qu’il me donne lorsque je
pense à l’InWni. (NER 64–5)
In this uncharacteristically analytic passage (of characteristically Wrm
paragraphization) Artaud has no uncertainties about the way a word
may indicate a concrete physical object. But he has no yardstick by
which to ascertain the validity of his abstract conceptualizing, for abstract ideas, unlike trees, are not rooted in reality. It is he who makes
abstractions mean what they mean—as Artaud’s syntax makes clear (‘il
m’échappe’), it is not words that he cannot master but the ‘sens des
mots’. So he might well have mastery over language, but this mastery is
seriously incomplete and remains mere felicity of expression, for it
secures no guarantee of meaning: ‘je me suis demandé si les mots étaient
capables de dire tout ce que je voulais les faire dire, et si surtout j’avais le
droit de penser qu’ils le disent vraiment et en fait’ (x. 97). For Artaud the
problem is not the unknowability of metaphysical entities, but the dubious plasticity of abstract concepts that undermines any real signifying
power they may have. Abstract thinking is a game of rational illusions.
102
But this is not just a form of radical nominalism, for there is a whispering
behind this passage, clearly heard in the last line, that maybe his thought
on the subject of God is ‘envoûté’, oVering unveriWable ideas from an
unknown source. In a letter of 1944 Artaud writes to André Gide of
‘l’aVreux combat que nous avons tous eu à mener autour et au-dessus de
la littérature [ . . . ] cet envahissement d’asphyxie que ne cessent d’opérer
sur nous les réalités ultra-conscientes ou sous-conscientes’ (x. 191).
Artaud is alert to the way meaning is subject to forces exerted by
linguistic and conceptual codes, and to the impossibility of stepping
outside these codes to ground meaning. In a world that is not of his
creation and a language that comes with hidden baggage, Artaud Wnds
that real meaning, meaning that would act as a secure place from which
he could speak purely in his own name, is unattainable.
It might be thought that the paucity and subservience of the poetic
word to the Divine Word would soon lead Artaud to rebel. But, even
though the tensions between poetry and religion are so great that the
poet can lay no claim to meaning in comparison to the Word of God,
Artaud does not initially conceive of a conXict between the creative artist
and the Creator. On the contrary, religion and poetry are said to cohabit
and even blend in his ‘idées [ . . . qui] sont les idées d’une conscience
Religieuse et d’une conscience d’un Poète’ (NER 57). Artaud claims that
those who see his behaviour as evidence of insanity are failing to perceive
that it arises from ‘une Attitude [ . . . ] à la base même de toute Réligion et
de toute Poésie’ (NER 55). Religion and poetry share the same basic
impulse and the same capitalized status. Poetry is serenely placed under
the aegis of religion; indeed, poetry must accept to be the handmaiden to
religion for the human word, unlike the Divine Word, cannot capture
the essence of reality: ‘là où la poésie qui n’est qu ’humaine ne fait que
nous inspirer le regret d’une chose qui n’existe pas, la poésie de Dieu
donne en nature et en fait ce que les rêves ne font que’promettre’ (NER
48–9). Artaud tranquilly recognizes that, whereas human language cannot fulWl its cognitive promise and human meaning is haunted by
absence, God is the archetypal poet whose poetry is reality.
Yet the subservience of poetry to religion does not in fact mean that
the claims Artaud makes for poetry are humble. On the contrary, it
means he draws his authority from the Divine Word and so his theologically guaranteed poetry is on a superior plane to socially endorsed
discourse. The Christian poet bathes in the reXected glory of his God of
truth, and so the chiming of his poetic word with the Word of God—
however great the qualitative shortfall may be—is in fact part of Artaud’s
103
process of investing his voice with authority. Thus, when the validity of
his speech is denied, Artaud accuses society of failing to take into account
the religious framework and divine inspiration that (for the religious
Artaud of the period) inform the poetic act. For Artaud ‘on ne traite
pas un poète comme un homme ordinaire’ (NER 82), because that would
reside on a misprision of the poetic undertaking, which is to act as a
Xashpoint where man may know the transcendent:
Me traiter en délirant c’est nier la valeur poétique de la souVrance qui [ . . . ]
bout en moi devant les merveilles du monde de l’esprit [ . . . ] Tout poète est un
Voyant. C’est de son illuminisme que Rimbaud a tiré les Illuminations et la
Saison en Enfer. Et William Blake avait vu dans le monde mystique de l’Esprit
l’objet de toutes les visions merveilleuses [ . . . ] je considère comme une révoltante impiété de traiter de délire les images que je me forge du ciel. (NER 96)
If the marvellous and the mystical cannot transpire in life they can
transpire in poetry, and so the poet must be given free rein to follow
his images without any imputation of delirium. The inXuence here is
double, Gnostic and Surrealist, for both privilege a form of voyance. The
Surrealist poetic act, aiming to reconcile self and world, seeks to go
beyond the current world to perceive the original state of man (and to
this extent Surrealism is a form of Gnosticism). Both thought modes seek
a hieroglyphic key to the world and have as their ideal the intuition of a
point suprême where all antinomies are resolved into Unity. The poet and
the Gnostic are to see là-bas (in the Rimbaldian sense) and the value of
their intuition is a function of the depth of insight into this beyond, and
thus a function of its subversion of the ordinary vision of the world. It
must perforce seem delirious.
So, whereas previously the attempt to provide a secure anchorage for
his voice had been conducted by an assertion of his true orthodoxy in
matters religious, it is now as both writer and believer—and increasingly
just as writer—that Artaud disputes the authority of social discourse. It is
because of society’s refusal to appreciate that the poet lives according to
aesthetic principles, Artaud claims, and more speciWcally because of his
attempt to make his aesthetic come, quite literally, to life, that he is
interned: ‘Si j’ai été interné il y a huit ans et maintenu interné depuis huit
ans, c’est du fait d’une action patente de la mauvaise volonté générale
qui ne veut à aucun prix que M. Antonin Artaud, écrivain et poète,
puisse réaliser dans la vie les idées qu’il manifeste dans les livres’
(ix. 165–6). Artaud is making general claims about the attempt to inject
life with poetry (the key Surrealist aspiration to transmute life into a
104
poetic rebellion against rational control systems—to make life an ongoing process of mythopoeisis) more than he is making speciWc claims
about his beliefs: ‘je n’admets pas que le poète que je suis ait été enfermé
dans un asile d’aliénés parce qu’il voulait réaliser au naturel sa poésie’
(ix. 175–6). In this context his madness is only the creative madness of
Surrealism: ‘Philippe Soupault qui réclamait dans l’une de ses œuvres un
crime gratuit, et Louis Aragon qui arrêté sur les Champs Élysées devant
un lampadiare électrique cultivait un état volontaire d’hallucination
étaient des fous avec tous les autres Surréalistes’ (NER 54). Because he
is interned, his speech is judged psychotic if it deviates from the social
norm, even though it might be better judged as a fusion of the religious
with the surreal, an Orphic voyance: ‘S’il [a psychiatrist] avait vu Robert
Desnos se livrer ici à ses improvisations médiumniques dans une cellule il
les aurait qualiWées de logorrhées, comme il ne cesse de me dire que
toutes mes idées et mes perceptions du Merveilleux et de l’Occulte sont
du délire’ (NER 50–1). In such statements Artaud is not making the
predictable claim that his insanities are true; he is claiming society
interprets his speech in the wrong discursive framework and so judges
it by inappropriate criteria. He claims to be operating in the sphere of
truth and not of social praxis. He thereby claims that his voice has a
superior epistemic authority to that of his judges, not on the grounds that
what he says is true, for, as he realizes, society will always declare his lone
voice wrong, but because he is concerned with fundamental truths where
society is concerned only with orthodox, socially determined truths.
Artaud claims to operate in a superior reality.
Continuing this process of investing his voice with authority, Artaud
complains that he is denied the right to articulate his experiences, which
are so similar to those revered by the society that has interned him.
Society is unprepared to admit within its ranks those who would live out
their lives in accordance with the ideas expressed in its most cherished
books:
Cela est beau dans les livres et délicatement goûté par le dilettantisme des
lecteurs mais aYrmé par un homme comme moi comme vrai cela vaut l’internement [ . . . ] aWn de lui enlever toutes ces idées folles de l’esprit. Mais vous
divaguez, mon enfant, nous allons vous guérir de votre être. Le merveilleux n’est
pas de ce monde et nous l’y avons jamais vu. (x. 235)
In this passage, stylistically foreshadowing the later texts and particularly
Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu in its ironic self-accusation of madness
and its image of hypocritical dainty eating (mouths and orality Wgure
105
prominently in his late texts), Artaud is contemptuous of society and its
anti-poetic discourse. He is now able to adopt another’s voice, not to
replace his but to mimic social discourse. He is trying to bring about the
professed aspirations of society and make manifest his ‘être’ but is held to
be mad for so doing. Society, which extols self-expression and the
Surrealist value of the ‘merveilleux’ in books, would eradicate them in
Artaud’s life, he who had proclaimed at the outset of his career that he
abhorred the artiWcial distinction between life and work. What is at stake
here is the status and control of meaning.
For Artaud, society and culture asphyxiate critical creativity and the
poetic. His attempt to redeWne culture, weighting it towards the creative
and the poetic as opposed to the political and the socio-economic, and to
live according to this conception of a rejuvenated culture is certiWed as
insane by the society he had been trying to awaken.2 Anyone who would
undertake a truly revolutionary critique of society encounters its inertia,
and subsequent condemnation for it confers maximal signiWcance to
political and ideological debate, which are only incidental to changing
the human condition in Artaud’s view. For the Artaud of the Lettres de
Rodez (written for publication in late 1945) these fail to engage with the
foundational concepts that actually determine the way we live:
ce monde servile, asphyxiant d’idiotie [ . . . ] qui se complaı̂t dans cette asphyxie.
Les gens sont bêtes. La littérature, vidée. Il n’y a plus rien ni plus personne, l’âme
est insane [ . . . ] tous les corps sont repus, les consciences résignées [ . . . ] il n’y a
plus qu’une immense satisfaction d’inertes [ . . . ] de serfs de l’imbécillité [ . . . ] de
serfs aussi plats que cette lettre où j’essaie de manifester mon exaspération contre
une vie menée par une bande d’insipides qui ont voulu à tous imposer leur haine
de la poésie [ . . . ] dans un monde intégralement embourgeoisé, avec tous les
ronronnements verbaux des soviets, de l’anarchie, du communisme, du socialisme, du radicalisme, des républiques, des monarchies, des églises, des rites, des
rationnements, des contingentements, du marché noir, de la résistance. (ix. 166)
There is no possibility of a truly revolutionary critique of Western culture
but a mere pretence, the ‘ronronnements’ of a self-perpetuating and
irrelevant political sideshow that Artaud typically delights in listing and
excoriating. It should be remembered that Artaud’s break with the
Surrealist movement was occasioned by a disagreement about whether
2
In a series of conferences given in Mexico in 1936 prior to his departure for the Sierra
Tarahumara, Artaud had portrayed the Surrealist movement as just such an attempt to
create a rejuvenated, renovatory, base-level culture (see Messages Révolutionnaires (viii. 137–
263), especially pp. 141–68, 189–92, 225–8). What he describes reads better as a sketch of his
activity than of 1920s French Surrealism.
106
a true revolution could be in any degree political, Artaud arguing that
the true revolution was necessarily of the mind. He still seeks some such
revolution and this can be occasioned only by a conceptual shift in what
it is to be a human being. Literature and social debate, bogged down in a
self-satisWed and replete imbecility, are blind to such revolutionary issues.
This stupefying self-deception means that, as a seeker for truth, Artaud
is cast out by the interning word of society, and Artaud is always quick
to sing the superiority of his quasi-mystical search for deep truths in
comparison to the humdrum aspirations of material realism:
des envoûtements ont lieu, jour après jour dans tout Paris, pour m’empêcher de
sarcler mon âme, d’en reprendre l’oriWce enfoui, que toute religion a eu le
puYsme de déclarer frappé d’interdit, on ne continuera plus à me dire, et nul
ne viendra me dire ici que je suis fou de rechercher ce dictame corporel de l’âme,
matière magique de poésie. Car c’est de quoi on m’accuse et c’est pourquoi je
suis depuis huit ans interné, et que j’ai été mis en camisole, empoisonné, et endormi
à l’éléctricité, c’est pour avoir voulu trouver la matière fondamentale de l’âme. (ix. 175)
The three deWnitions Artaud gives of his aim (‘reprendre l’oriWce enfoui
[de l’âme]’; ‘rechercher ce dictame corporel de l’âme’; ‘trouver la matière
fondamentale de l’âme’) all imply the discovery of a secret, foundational
truth about the soul.3 Artaud’s poetry is beneWcially to reveal the essential ontological principles of existence and heal their schisms. Mythopoeisis is the only revolutionary force, yet mythopoeisis is unacceptable if
its fruits are presented as reality.
But it is not just in relation to the superWcial level of socially endorsed
debate that Artaud claims to be speaking weightier truths. He claims that
he is thinking and working at a deeper, more personal, and therefore (for
him) more revolutionary level than philosophers and thinkers traditionally engage with. It is because of the diYculties of thinking at such
foundational levels, Artaud claims, that he has recourse to poetry to
implement his ideas. His approach is necessarily idiosyncratic, but this
idiosyncracy will lead to greater ontological authenticity: ‘Nous ne
sommes pas [ . . . ] sur le véritable plan du monde, et j’ai sur ce point
une idée que les autres hommes n’ont pas [ . . . ] faire tomber par dessins
où poèmes un pan complet de la mauvaise conscience et permettre aux
âmes d’aboutir enWn à [ . . . ] la vie vraie sur le plan de la terre vraie’
3
It is also noticeable that all three unite physical characteristics with the soul, and thus
postulate a fundamental ontological unitarism towards which Artaud hopes to move as he
leaves behind alienation and doubles in favour of simplicity and self-identity. And poetry is
presented as magical and healing, for ‘dictame’, though it looks like a derivative of dictare, in
fact refers to a medicinal plant balm.
107
(xi. 81). Artaud will continue to insist on the superior epistemic status of
his knowingly eccentric approach to truth, provocatively choosing after
his release from Rodez asylum to present his source of inspiration as a
hearing of voices:
Je n’ai jamais vu la vie comme les autres la voient.
Entendre des voix, comme on le dit de certains,
n’est pas une hallucination ni un délire,
cela indique des sens un peu plus aiguisés que la normale et c’est tout,
cela indique qu’on n’est ni sourd ni aveugle alors que tout le monde
est aveugle et sourd.
(xiv**. 193)
By this late stage (this passage was written in 1946) Artaud will have
become so conWdent in his own voice that he is able to taunt social
orthodoxy by grouping himself with a band of fellow insane seers
(Nerval, Van Gogh, Nietzsche).4 The ‘monde volontairement sibyllin’
(i**. 33) and the ‘grouillement immédiat de l’esprit’ (i**. 54) now make
audible sense, Artaud claims, and his conWdence in his newly forged
authority will be such that he will play the role previously imposed on
him—the madman.
But at the early Rodez stage Artaud is keenly sensitive to the delusional status imputed to his ideas, and retorts that a true poet is always
viewed as insane by society since his ideas are necessarily unorthodox
and since, as a poet, he endows images with the force of reality thanks to
his command of language:
Qu’est-ce qu’un poète sinon un homme qui visualise et concrétise ses idées et ses
images plus intensément et avec plus [ . . . ] de vie que les autres hommes et qui
par le verbe rythmé leur donne un caractère de fait [ . . . ] et il n’y a pas un
charbonnier ou épicier, fournisseur dans la vie, de l’un de ces poètes qui ne l’ait
jugé en son cœur comme un maniaque ou comme un fou. (xi. 11–12)
It is quite probably true that poetic images are frequently presented with
the force of fact (which Artaud revealingly attributes to rhythm, which
comes to be one of his major poetic concerns) and that poets are cursorily
judged to be in some sense mad, but Artaud would not readily have his
images considered as merely poetic images, and hence of only nebulous
4
There remains, however, a certain ambiguity: in his late poetry Artaud cherishes the
notion to be absolutely new and absolutely unrenewable. He therefore determines to work
with devices deriving from nothing and begetting nothing. This implies a break with
literary continuity, but, just like Rimbaud before him, Artaud is very careful to supply
himself with an ancestry of fellow seers.
108
epistemic value. Artaud defends his images not as images but as truths.
God-serving poetry is accorded the highest epistemic status, and, when
Artaud severs the link between theology and poetry, its status will not be
diminished but enhanced. Artaud plays the philosopher, whilst at the
same time employing interpretational structures that are more commonly associated with poetry. Artaud’s implicit deWnition of poetry is a
form of thought apt to apprehend and convey truths that fall outside the
remit of other forms of enquiry.
The challenge to orthodox patterns of discourse and the associated
investment of his voice with authority is of great importance to Artaud
and he accords himself great linguistic freedom at the most unpromising
moments. In late 1943 Artaud undertook Wve translations of English texts
at the instigation of Ferdière, one of which was of a chapter of Lewis
Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1867).5 Although Artaud states that the
translation of Carroll will be done ‘en demeurant très près du texte’ (NER
64), what he actually produces is a dissolution and re-creation of the
original. Given that the translation is undertaken for Ferdière, the
guardian, given Artaud’s status as internee, of linguistic norms, it is all
the more signiWcant that Artaud does not opt for the greatest readability.
The most celebrated example of this unbridled creativity is the translation of the Wrst stanza of Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’, in which Artaud’s text
breaks rapidly out into linguistic excess. Although one of Artaud’s prime
concerns in his letters of the period is to demonstrate to Ferdière that he
is in full possession of his intellectual faculties, he produces a text of
which Gilles Deleuze was able to observe: ‘dès le troisième vers [ . . . ]
nous sommes dans un autre monde et dans un tout autre langage. Avec
eVroi, nous le reconnaissons sans peine: c’est le langage de la schizophrénie.’6 However contentious this judgement may be, it is true that the
third line has no correlate in the English and seems to be in danger of
becoming unstoppable, only to be checked as linguistic anarchy
threatens:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
Il était Roparant, et les vliqueux tarands
Allaient en gilroyant et en brimbulkdriquant
Jusque-là où la rourghe est a rouarghe
a rangmbde a rangmbde a rouarghambde:
5
Jean-Michel Rey’s, La Naissance de la poésie: Antonin Artaud (Paris: Éditions Métailié, 1991)
is devoted to unpacking the implications for his later work of the translations Artaud
undertook. Despite many judicious observations, Rey tends to overstate the case for their
importance.
6
Deleuze, ‘Le Schizophrène et le mot’, 733.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.7
109
Tous les falomitards étaient des chats-huants
Et les Ghoré Uk’hatis dans le
Gr a b ü g -e û m e n t
(ix. 140)
It is reasonable to recognize, on the one hand, that this is an extraordinary linguistic performance, but to rebut, on the other hand, any
attempt to ring-fence this as the language of schizophrenia.8 It may just
as readily be seen as the language of liberation. Not only does Artaud
refuse to employ the phonetic pool of modern French, but in the extra
third line he renders his version all but unpronounceable. He thereby
frees himself from the French language and from its norms. By so
thoroughly exceeding the act of translation, Artaud asserts his linguistic
autonomy. The twin impulse towards disorder and order already observed in the passage on Uccello is apparent in new ways here: the
disorder of the text, which seems almost to submerge the writing, is in
itself revelatory of the desire to transcend orthodox discourse. Artaud
outperforms the original, proving his linguistic potency and thus implicitly claiming the right to write untrammelled by orthodox linguistic
rules and conceptualizations.
When the Artaudian text starts to mount its challenge against the
Word of God (instead of social doxa), it is once again delivered through
linguistic creativity, this time in the glossolalia Artaud injects into his
writing and which he uses with increasing frequency until the end of his
life.9 For Artaud the appeal of glossolalia lies in its being essentially
performative with implicit claims to act directly on reality, something
Artaud clearly wishes: ‘toute Poésie Réelle’ is said to amount to ‘des
Actes de Magie Vraie’ (NER 58). The word is to transcend the space of
writing, and the generative power of glossolalia makes it not just magical
but thereby a challenge to the Word of God. The Divine Word is
language that creates, and Artaud’s glossolalia, by assuming similar
generative aspirations, both emulates and rivals it.10 The glossolalia
7
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass: and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan,
1948), 116.
8
For a devastating reply to Deleuze’s annexing of Artaud’s writing to the realm of the
schizophrenic, see Paule Thévenin’s magisterial article ‘Entendre/Voir/Lire’ in her collection of articles Antonin Artaud, ce désespéré qui vous parle (Fiction & Cie; Paris: Seuil, 1993), 200–10.
9
For a wide-ranging and in-depth discussion of Artaud’s poetics and its inXuence on his
ideas, see Evelyn Grossman, Artaud/Joyce: Le Corps et le texte (Paris: Nathan, 1996), in
particular pp. 155–99. Artaud’s glossolalia is discussed on pp. 175–91.
10
In other words, it is because Artaud in some sense takes the opening verses of Genesis (1.
3–26) as expressing literally a fundamental truth, and because, having rejected Christianity, he
110
heralds the emergence of Artaud the oracular poet-philosopher whose
word will eVace and build a world, revealing a desire for a language that
could bring about creation on his terms in a new Genesis.
Glossolalia is a way of going beyond the limits of the sayable, and so
arguably owes as much to Artaud’s madness as to his poetic maturation.
But, though Artaud’s glossolalia initially seems simply an instance of
magical speech, it soon evolves into something more signiWcant. Frequently the text functions as an echoing chamber where a multitude of
resonances and deformations, condensations and displacements, may be
seen and heard. Grossman quotes for example ‘e menin menila j ar
menila j e inena imen’ (xiv**. 31) and perceives here traces of the
terms anima, ennemi, amen, hymen. Another facet of Artaud’s glossolalic word-play, at least as it develops over the Wnal years of his career,
may be seen in lines such as: ‘je suis intelligible j seti lisible j stari minible j
moni tanible’ (xxiii. 363–4), where ‘seti lisible’ needs to be heard as a
fusion of the question in the popular language Artaud frequently
aVects—c’est-ti lisible?—and as the negative reply c’est illisible.11 Such a
strategy prevents the text being reduced to a meaning and so recuperated by a reader; for Artaud glossolalia is associated both with a return to
speech and with a being rid of language—it thus unites in the same
speech act the birth and death of the word, creating without leaving any
trace. This is perhaps the prime reason for Artaud’s recourse to it.
Generally divided into the categories of religious and pathological,
glossolalia is especially associated with the quest for an adamic, preBabelian language; this corresponds with the fact that it is in 1943, when
searching for a divine language, that Artaud started employing it. Glossolalia is an essentially oral practice, a speaking in tongues, and so its
literary variants—for instance, the expressive sound poetry of the Russian futurists Khlebnikov and Kruchonykh exempliWed by the meaningless ‘dyr bul shchyl j ubeschur j skum j vy so bu j r l ez’—are not strictly
glossolalia.12 Nor should glossolalia be associated too rapidly with the
phonic poetry of Dada, though it seems plausible that there be some
holds onto this truth, that his texts move further and further away from the material facts of
reality.
11
Quoted and analysed in Grossman, Artaud/Joyce, 156, reference given (xiii. 363–4)
inexact. See Grossman, Artaud/Joyce, 188–9 for further examples of such a strategy.
12
Quoted by G. M. Hyde in his article ‘Russian Futurism’, in Malcolm Bradbury and
James McFarlane (eds.), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (London: Penguin, 1991), 265. Hyde argues that the aim in this text, drawn from The word as such
manifesto, is that sonic powers should make their impact without any intermediate conceptualizing process. It is thus clearly diVerent from Artaud’s tongue of fragmented
linguistic debris.
111
Dada inXuence on Artaud. Whilst varied, the aims of Dada phonic poetry
are clearly diVerent from Artaud’s. The German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck employed savage rhythms to ‘drum literature into the ground’;13
Dada co-founder Hugo Ball, if mystical, seems to have sought a pure
language uncontaminated by all meaning; the poet-painter Schwitters
seems to have been interested primarily in the plastic eVects of disposing
words about a page. In all cases this phonic poetry is inXuenced by
Marinetti’s theories of ‘words at liberty’, and the aim is to free words
from literature. For Artaud glossolalia is to do with possessing language,
not liberating it. Further, the poetic experimentation of the futurists,
dadaists, and other avant-garde writers of the early twentieth century
make fun of language by dissolving it into sound; if Artaud’s late writings
are indeed concerned with linguistic fun, his glossolalia is not.
Artaud’s glossolalia is both phonic and graphic, and as such Grossman
suggests it is reminiscent of the hieroglyphic theatrical language of Le
Théâtre et son Double and a veritable spatialization of language. It therefore
serves to short-circuit the linearity of discourse and strictures of syntax.
This explains Artaud’s disappointment with the recordings of his glossolalia for the radio broadcast of Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu, where it is
subject to the linearity of enunciation, and only heard, not seen. Artaud’s
glossololia is destined not to be read so much as produced and created by
the reader, who must allow his ear and eye to react to the rhythm, as he
underlines in a letter to Henri Parisot: ‘mais celà n’est valable que jailli
d’un coup; cherché syllabe à syllabe cela ne vaut plus rien’ (ix. 172). It
needs to be read, heard, seen, and expressed simultaneously in all its
discordance. It is only on the page that the hesitations and play-oVs
between eye and ear take place, making the words dance.14
When it Wrst appears in his writing, however, glossolalia seems to
function primarily as a means of emulating the generative power of the
Word of God. And this is true not only of Artaud’s glossolalia, where this
jealous emulation is at its most evident; it is equally true of Artaud’s
theorizings. The Word of God is magical, enunciation amounting to
securing the truth of that speech, and Artaud develops an account of the
Word of God that is equally to become true by the very fact of its
13
Quoted in translation in Robert Short, ‘Dada and Surrealism’, in Bradbury and
McFarlane (eds.), Modernism, 296.
14
Artaud here beneWts from Symbolist poetic thought, where the poem is animated by
the eye, not the voice. As Valéry put it: ‘Longtemps, la voix humaine fut base et condition de la
littérature [ . . . ] Un jour vit où l’on sut lire des yeux sans épeler, sans entendre, et la littérature
fut tout altérée’ (‘Littérature’, Tel quel, quoted in Clive Scott, ‘Symbolism, Decadence and
Impressionism’, in Bradbury and McFarlane (eds.), Modernism, p. 207).
112
formulation. In ‘Révolte contre la poésie’ (ix. 121–3), a short, dense, and
opaque text that is largely unknown, God is said to be present within
language and so at the very centre of the (linguistically constituted)
subject. Artaud states that ‘le Verbe’ dupes and determines the writer,
dictating the rules regulating poetic composition: ‘Le poète qui écrit
s’adresse au Verbe et le Verbe a ses lois. Il est dans l’inconscient du
poète de croire automatiquement à ces lois. Il se croit libre et il ne l’est
pas’ (ix. 121). Whenever the poet speaks, he is the puppet of the ‘Verbe’
pulling the strings of his unconscious—mimicked here by the upswell of
the facile binary rhythms and overstated rhyme of the closing word of
each sentence (‘lois’, ‘lois’, ‘pas’). Entry into the linguistic order is bought
at the price of ceding autonomy to ‘le Verbe’. If ‘le Verbe’ is taken to
mean God, this means that God dupes the artistic creator into believing
he is free to mean as he wills, whilst actually determining the artist’s
activity. The ambivalence towards the Word of God previously evident is
giving way to a more straightforwardly contestatory attitude. The dual
meaning of ‘Verbe’ is exploited in what will become a characteristic
technique of connotative destabilization: ‘Il y a dans les formes du
Verbe humain je ne sais quelle autodévoration de rapace où le poète,
se bornant à l’objet, se voit mangé par cet objet. j Un crime pèse sur le
Verbe fait chair, mais le crime est de l’avoir admis’ (ix. 122). On the one
hand, ‘le Verbe’ refers here to the linguistic order that englobes the poet
and that is a travesty of the extralinguistic reality it cannot tell. On the
other hand, it can also refer to God, who subjugates the poet who would
speak of Him, and who should never have accepted to be incarnated, to
be the Word made Xesh (for the Xesh is, by Gnostic deWnition, abject). It
is by playing on the dual meaning of ‘Verbe’ that Artaud suggests the
characteristics of language are imputable to the ur-speaker, and that
God, by his continuous intervention in language, determines Artaud.
True poetry must therefore be an anti-Logos, written against both
language and the inaugural Divine Word—and Artaud’s glossolalic
writing is a prime instance of this strategy.
The basic idea here in ‘Révolte contre la poésie’ of the writing self
being determined by deep mental structures is of course a reworking of a
leading idea of a poet he nominates to his group of spiritual brethren.
Rimbaud might at times take the celebrated duality of the self (‘C’est
faux de dire: Je pense. On devrait dire: On me pense’)15 to imply the
radical newness of the ‘Je’, but equally it may imply the self is utterly
15
Letter to Izambard, 13 May 1871, in Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed. S. Bernard
and A. Guyaux (Classiques Garnier; Paris: Bordas, 1991), 346.
113
determined. As Georges Poulet comments: ‘Tantôt Rimbaud se saisit luimême comme se créant [ . . . ] sous la forme d’une puissance déterminante [ . . . ] Tantôt, au contraire, il se perçoit comme le résultat direct de
cet acte déterminant. Alors [ . . . ] il lui semble être déterminé par une
force démiurgique non spéciWée.’16 But Artaud, unlike Rimbaud, privileges the negative experience of determination, not the epiphanic one of
the writing self as auto-generating, and so, despite the extensive common
ground between the two, Artaud’s ideas move along a very diVerent path
from Rimbaud’s. They share the desire to invest the poetic voice with
demiurgic powers, as well as the ambition seamlessly to fuse the text with
inner experience so that the writing self is volatilized and becomes cosubstantial with the textual world. But, although Artaud writes of investing his voice with demiurgic powers, he does not enact this in the text,
unlike Rimbaud’s poetry, which, by creating the new mental worlds of
Illuminations, fulWls the demiurgic act in the realm of imagination. Artaud
only theorizes about a magically powerful kind of writing and viliWes the
Creator but never goes beyond the ranting and the theorizing to evoke
the experience of his projected textual world. He writes of what will
happen once he has gained victory over God and once language is his,
but his planned mental universe is always an elsewhere to be revealed in
an unspeciWed future. His texts oVer a conceptualization of a mental
world, not a poetic universe.
One of the most important lessons Artaud takes from ‘Révolte contre
la poésie’ is that he is locked into antagonism with God. Whereas
Rimbaud places his emphasis on emulating the demiurge and it would
be incidental were this to undermine His pre-eminence, Artaud subsequently places the full weight of his emphasis on dispossessing God of His
generative powers. Where Rimbaud is a Creator of mental worlds,
Artaud is a writer of imaginary theorizings and in his phantasmal
conceptual system endeavours to write God out of existence and to
establish himself as the unique Creator—in a notebook of 1945 we can
read ‘que Dieu ni personne [ . . . ] ne fasse une autre création à côté de la
mienne’ (xv. 201). Artaud’s megalomaniac aim is to theorize and rant
against God until, somehow, He is pushed out of existence, allowing
Artaud’s univers imaginaire to become a self-fulWlling prophesy. Artaud and
Rimbaud start from the same ideas—the self is other, the poet is to be
a second Prometheus stealing Wre back from God—but Artaud writes
as though he takes them literally. With Artaud they are no longer
16
Georges Poulet, La Poésie éclatée: Baudelaire/Rimbaud (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1980), 118.
114
metaphors inspiring an aesthetic but truths that mean that reality must
be mythically reinterpreted as a Wght between self and Divine Other.
Artaud is starting to deWne his position as essentially adversarial. He
will be the enemy of God, of language, of poetry, and, because of God’s
presence within language, of his own sense of self for the linguistically
constituted self covertly bears God. A constant in Artaud’s conception of
poetry since Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière has been that writing should
subordinate aesthetic considerations to capturing the self, but the contamination of the self by alienating language means that poetry is now
thought of as a Wght against the structures of the self: ‘une émeute contre
le moi et les conditions ordinaire du moi’ (ix. 130). Artaud no longer
thinks there are occasional breakdowns in his expressive capacity; instead language is at all times alienating because of the hidden principles
‘le Verbe’ smuggles into the subconscious. Writing the self in a pure form
is thus not possible: ‘Il est le Wls de ses œuvres, peut-être, mais ses œuvres
ne sont pas de lui, car ce qui était de lui-même dans sa poésie, ce n’est pas
lui qui l’y avait mis, mais cet inconscient producteur de la vie qui l’avait
désigné pour être son poète et qu’il n’avait pas désigné, lui’ (ix. 121). If the
poet can be said to be the ‘Wls de ses œuvres’ (precisely what Artaud
would wish), he is not thereby auto-generating, for he is not the only
producer of his works (see once again the over-marked assonances, here
focusing on ‘lui’). The train of thought here follows the pattern of the
Gnostic idea that, by reproducing, humankind is reinforcing its own
ontological prison and so prolonging its alienation from plenitude. This
structure is now exported from sexuality to aesthetics: by writing Artaud
allows the alterity within him to consolidate its hold, for he thereby acts
as the midwife to another (‘l’inconscient producteur de la vie’). Artaud
might believe he is creating himself by writing, but he is in fact acting as
the channel through which the other who has inWltrated the poet’s
identity structures continues to create himself.
God’s antagonism to the poet is therefore not just a rivalry over the
right to create meaning but more importantly a hijacking of the generative properties of Artaud’s poetic text. Any apparently successful speech
can no longer be thought of as being in the poet’s name, but instead
belongs to a lazy God for whom the poet is the unwitting stand-in. God
has displaced Artaud. Artaud might endeavour to invest himself in the
text, but ultimately this fails and he is consumed, as he puts it, or
subsumed by language, the language that bears God’s imprint. This is
the ‘autodévoration [ . . . ] où le poète [ . . . ] se voit mangé par [l’]objet’
(ix. 122) blamed on ‘le Verbe’. Since it is not himself that he has been
115
creating but another, Artaud’s life project of identity creation via the text
is not just Xawed but actively damaging; ‘la parole dont on a oublié les
mystérieuses possibilités’ (iv. 107) of Le Théâtre et son Double shows its
mysterious powers to be dangerously ambivalent.
As a result of the dangerous alterity in language and in the linguistically constituted subject, Artaud would seem to be compelled to conclude
that the self must in fact never appear in writing. However, he manages
to stop short of abandoning his project to write the self whilst accepting
that the self must not appear in the text. He does this by banning
speciWcally the representation but not the creation of the self in writing.
Creation according to the Divine model is unacceptable to Artaud, for
God created man in his image, and therefore created his own double; as
Artaud writes in a notebook six months after ‘Révolte contre la poésie’:
‘Le crime de Dieu est d’avoir voulu regarder la vie où il savait qu’elle
n’était plus et qu’il n’était lui-même qu’un spectre et de s’intégrer dans la
répresentation pour se voir vivre ailleurs qu’il n’était’ (xv. 322). Creation
that involves this sort of reXexivity is deemed in ‘Révolte contre la poésie’
to be unchaste, and the linguistically constituted subject, which is created
reXexively, is revealed as operating under Divine licence: ‘Le producteur
inconscient de nous-mêmes est celui d’un antique copulateur qui s’est
livré aux plus basses magies et qui a tiré une magie de l’infâme qu’il y a à
se ramener soi-même sur soi-même sans Wn jusqu’à faire sortir un verbe
de ce cadavre’ (ix. 123). Artaud refuses to have any reXexive relationship
between himself and his artistic creation: ‘Donner son soi à son poème,
c’est risquer aussi d’être violé par lui. Et si je suis Vierge pour mon
poème, il doit rester vierge pour moi’ (ix. 122). If the poem were to expose
his self, Artaud would lose his autonomy, since the self would be sullied
by a God-infested language.
A similar logic is at work in the paradoxical ideal that emerges in the
Rodez notebooks of a form of writing that, whilst creating and expressing
the self, would not oVer an incarnation of the self: ‘je ne me donne pas à
qui veut me prendre parce que je n’ai pas de me à donner, mon me est
toujours un autre’ (xvi. 196). This is one of the fundamental paradoxes of
Artaud’s Wnal texts: they are to give birth to a new identity but must
never express that identity, and this is why Artaud imposes the principle
that his project of creating the self through writing must be dynamic. He
tries to forestall a reXexive awareness of what he has been creating—that
is, he tries to prevent re-cognition. Artaud’s challenge is to be simply. To
be, to be fully aware of that state of being as and when he experiences it,
but never to be reXexively aware of it as an object of consciousness: ‘je ne
116
suis pas le possesseur de mon corps mais mon corps lui-même qui parle
et agit et ne pense pas’ (xiv**. 222). Artaud is chasing after an impossible
simplicity, a state not dissimilar to mystic fusion with the other except
Artaud wishes to fuse with himself: ‘La fameuse dimension totale est de
devenir en simple homme aussi fort que tout l’inWni’ (xiv**. 178). ReXexive being (and its attendant parasites) must be left behind if Artaud is to
attain self-identity: ‘Les êtres sont cette vie parasitaire virtuelle qui s’est
créée en marge de la vie vraie j et qui a Wni par avoir la prétention de la
remplacer.’17 The self—the limited self-deWning ‘I am me’—is to be
destroyed through a seemingly endless series of deformations and nearrepetitions in the text that prevent the reproductions of doubles and
indeed create ever new variants: ‘les ténèbres de ce d’où le moi a été tiré
[ . . . sont celles] non de moi mais de Je, non [ . . . ] Je n’a pas de moi et ce
n’est pas moi, c’est non. Et quant au révolté éternel contre Je ça non, Je le
creusera dans le ça par le non [sic]’ (xvi. 169), where the repetitive
rhythms almost make the text a chant of exorcism. The idea of a being
underlying the brute fact of experience is a Wgment of reXexive thought:
‘L’être est faux j L’homme est faux j [ . . . ] Les êtres ont inventé la vie j et
ils l’ont greVé ensuite j sur l’arbre mort qui était tout.’18
17
‘Les êtres sont’, 84, 5–6 (1948), 103. Such statements are legion in Artaud’s 1944
notebooks: ‘moi le refus éternel de l’être’ (xv. 107), ‘l’être ne me touchera jamais et je n’y
entrerai pas mais la question se posera toujours pour moi d’être’ (xvi. 247), or ‘J’existe mais
pas devant ce qui est car il n’y a rien que moi et ce n’est pas un être car l’être est un état
d’existence qui empêche mon existence à moi’ (xvii. 45). It would be unwise to consider
Artaud’s thought as amounting to a doctrine of being, but, as Steinmetz remarks, it is
certainly the case that the ontological substantive ‘être’ dominates the notebooks. Under
Artaud’s pen ‘être’ belongs to two feuding semantic families. On the one hand, it can mean
the most terrible imposition on the subject: ‘Il faut à tout prix sortir de cet être et de l’être
[ . . . ] il faut se débarrasser à tout prix de tous les êtres et de tout être’ (xvi. 243). On the other
hand, though less frequently, it can mean a possible access to authenticity: ‘Le principe de
l’être c’est d’être un être et de n’être quelque chose et soi-même qu’en tant qu’être’ (xv. 322).
But the one does not replace the other, nor does one meaning take over for a particular text.
The two coexist within the same text, sometimes even the same sentence or highly charged
proposition: ‘L’homme est le Double de l’Être’ (xv. 240), for instance. This refusal to let
words be pinned down by the logic of the excluded middle is reminiscent of Nietzsche. The
apparent sense is forever being dispatched with and replaced by another, only the many
senses reside uneasily side by side, energizing the writing and endowing it with its own
peculiar rhythm.
Being is, of course, what Artaud’s texts are all about—being Artaud. But after examination of ‘être’ in the Cahiers de Rodez, preliminary conclusions suggest that Artaud’s engagement with the term was perhaps more rhetorical than conceptual, with ‘être’ functioning
primarily as a shorthand term for God and the God-given universe. It is hard to discern any
‘high’ thought in such observations as ‘[l]’être est une crapule’ (xvi. 61). It would, however,
be exciting if further work were to reveal richer patternings in Artaud’s use of the term, for,
given the predominance of the term, it could provide new lines of reading.
18
Artaud, ‘Il fallait d’abord avoir envie de vivre’, K, 1–2 (1948), 129.
117
This—the idea that expressing the self in writing reduces it to a static
object, to the self-same, instead of a dynamic subject—explains why it is
that Artaud writes at such length in his notebooks against the notion of
being. It is only if the writer-creator can avert the introduction of
reXexivity and create without being doubled that the work can avoid
being a representation: ‘Je ne veux pas me reproduire dans les choses,
mais je veux que les choses se produisent par moi’ (ix. 123). The poet
must produce, but not reproduce, a self that must not represent itself to
be reseen: ‘Je ne veux pas d’une idée du moi dans mon poème et je ne
veux pas m’y revoir, moi’ (ix. 123). It is only by Wnding a form of writing
that is not an ‘aVreuse régurgitation’ of ‘l’idée du moi’ that Artaud will
Wnally be able to Wnd ‘ce non-moi où nous [nous] voyons tels que nousmêmes’ (ix. 130).
This, of course, has major implications for Artaud’s project, and
needs to be associated with the increasing insistence on the body.
Whereas Artaud’s 1920s texts lament the impossibility of being aware
of himself as a thinking, living body, his late texts show him to be
fundamentally opposed to any such attempt. If there is the brute fact
of consciousness and the brute fact of bodily existence, any attempt to
‘hold’ these states to mind as opposed to manifesting them makes the
category mistake of taking them to be objects of consciousness as opposed to existential states: ‘je n’ai pas de double ni d’écho qui me suive, je
n’ai pas d’esprit où je me juge devant moi [ . . . ] Et je n’ai jamais eu de
moi qui ait pu se retourner contre moi parce que mon moi est inséparable de moi mon corps’ (xviii. 141). Bodily existence is something that
can be experienced, but if ‘held’ in consciousness then that which is
essential to bodily experience, its unmediated presence, is irretrievably
lost: ‘l’esprit a toujours voulu comprendre le corps alors que le corps s’est
toujours refusé à toute pensée et tout esprit, j la conscience perçoit le
corps mais l’esprit ne peut pas le déWnir’ (xvi. 86–7). Hence Artaud Wnds
himself in the position where he wishes to create himself, but cannot
have any idea of what that self is. He must create without awareness
but with purpose: ‘Ne jamais se reconnaı̂tre être soi-même, faire des
êtres peut-être, soi jamais j [ . . . ] Je n’ai d’idée ni du moi ni du soi’
(xvi. 26), for any idea of a created self would introduce reXexivity and
hence alterity.
Poetry, then, is to be the means by which Artaud induces the emergence of a future self-identity from the wreckage of discourse, or, as he
puts it in ‘Révolte contre la poésie’: ‘Je ne veux pas être le poète de mon
poète, de ce moi qui a voulu me choisir poète, mais le poète créateur, en
118
rébellion contre le moi et le soi’ (ix. 121). In a companion text to ‘Révolte
contre la poésie’ called ‘Antigone chez les Français’ (ix. 124–6), Artaud
writes of the need to bury the ‘moi’. He compares himself to the dramatic
heroine and wonders: ‘Ai-je assez marché au supplice moi-même pour
avoir le droit d’ensevelir mon frère le moi [ . . . ] dont je n’ai jamais pu
faire ce que je voulais parce que tous les moi autres que moi-même,
insinués dans le mien propre comme je ne sais quelle insolite vermine,
depuis ma naissance m’en empêchaient’ (ix. 124). The self, Artaud
suggests, is and always has been penetrated and controlled by others.
For the creator, the self and the ‘I’ are limits imposed upon his free
creativity: ‘Le moi et le soi sont ces états catastrophiques de l’être où le
Vivant se laisse emprisonner. [ . . . ] Aimer son moi, c’est aimer un mort’
(ix. 123). Poetry must take the future as its axis, not the present. The self is
always already past, gone, and should be buried, and if it transpires in
the poem it is a revenant. To avoid this doubling, this loss of self-presence
in poetry, Artaud must rebel against the self and against being—against
the order of stasis, of identity, of the self-same—which is to be perpetually destroyed, making way for the ever-emerging manifestation of
Artaud’s creative life force: ‘je suis la force qui brise l’être non en
l’acceptant un temps pour le tuer, mais le supprime toujours, éternellement’ (xvii. 42). This, for Artaud, is the only way to be truly creative, to
create self-creating poetry.
So for Artaud the linguistic self is a subterfuge of the ‘inconscient’,
which is named as the individual’s greatest enemy and source of alienation. In what could be a motto for his entire career, he depicts himself in
a letter of 1944 as struggling with his mind: ‘moi qui au milieu de
l’abdication générale de conscience à laquelle nous assistons présentement, me suis accroché de toutes mes forces aWn de ne jamais lâcher
prise’ (x. 220). This refusal to ‘lâcher prise’ of his ‘conscience’ is motivated by the fact that he considers that humankind has never paid
suYcient attention to the inner workings, the inner drama of the psyche:
‘les hommes [ . . . ] n’ont jamais eu le courage de descendre au fond du
drame de leur conscience’, unlike him who ‘n’a jamais eu d’autre pensée
que de percer à jour le drame de sa conscience, aWn d’apprendre aux
autres à distinguer pour les détruire tous leurs ennemis intérieurs’ (NER
95). Artaud is returning to the project of elaborating an imaginative
‘abominable savoir’ of subconscious structuring forces. His imaginative
accounts of the hidden components of philosophical and theological
concepts and the ubiquitous, unrecognized determining inXuence these
119
hidden components are said to exert might seem fanciful, but the project
is serious.19
At the close of the early Rodez period Artaud describes his work as
‘des notes psychologiques personnelles qui tournent autour de quelques
remarques que j’ai faites sur les fonds de l’inconscient humain, ses
refoulements et ses secrets ignorés même du moi habituel’ (xi. 18). For
Artaud actions are not just dictated largely by unconscious impulses;
these impulses are in their turn subject to determining forces of which we
are blithely unaware. In Fragments d’un Journal en Enfer he had expressed
the conviction ‘[s]ur les routes où mon sang m’entraı̂ne il ne se peut pas
qu’un jour je ne découvre une vérité’ (i*. 114), and this would seem to
have come true at the least expected moment, as an internee at Rodez:
‘Voilà sept ans que je vis en face de moi-même et loin de tout. Et je ne
sais plus ce que les gens aiment qu’on leur dise, mais je connais par
contre toutes les vérités qui crient en moi, et de plus en plus chaque jour’
(xi. 21). For the underlying truth that fuels Artaud’s Wnal writings is that
the individual is ill and this illness is a fundamental aspect of his existence, dating from his emergence into being:
ce ne sont pas les peuples en masse qui sont malades mais l’homme individuel
[ . . . ] il n’est pas diYcile de déceler dans les consciences qui nous font face la
présence d’un ver rongeur [ . . . ] Car ce sont toutes les armées du moi fuyant de
l’homme qui piétinent dans la conscience de tous. Mais cela l’homme orgueilleux
et féru de lui-même ne veut jamais le reconnaı̂tre, et il ne sait pas quel Esprit
diVérend de jour en jour l’occupe, et que se croyant féru de lui-même c’est
toujours d’un autre et de l’Autre en vérité qu’il est féru. Et cet Autre non
seulement n’est pas lui mais son ennemi le plus obstiné. (xi. 22)
Consciousness harbours an alien parasite that feeds oV the self. The
individual’s consciousness is not his but a carrier for the consciousness of
others. Artaud, however, is now in a position to reveal the hostile ‘Esprit
diVérend’ within the human mind that prevents self-identity and selfpresence: ‘Ma conscience à moi ne changera pas, je sais que je suis au
centre d’une guerre interne sur laquelle j’ai essayé de jeter des lueurs au
19
Indeed, under the pen of deconstructionist theorists a not dissimilar (but less fanciful
and megalomanic) project is regarded as intellectually digniWed: just as Derrida reads the
ambivalence of a concept such as Plato’s pharmakon (in ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’ (in La
Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972)) ), so Artaud reads the ambivalence of Christian culture’s
inaugural Word of God. Such broad similarities between the Artaudian and the deconstructionist project explain in part the appeal of Artaud to Derrida and other theorists.
Artaud’s approach is both more earnest and more ludic.
120
temps de la correspondance avec Rivière, et cette guerre de l’âme au
milieu du moi je n’ai cessé depuis sept ans de l’éclairer’ (xi. 23). The
answer will be supplied by examining the fundamental structures underpinning existence, and so returning to the source of the problem: ‘Pour
comprendre sa propre vie il faut aller la chercher à la source et donc
devenir à soi-même son propre créateur’ (x. 27). Artaud is now ready to
develop his condemnatory account of the origin that will allow him to
become fully autonomous. The baulking against the restrictions placed
on the poet’s meaning-giving rights in a world of Divine provenance has
led Artaud to the overriding concern of the Wnal phase of his intellectual
trajectory, to dismantle the conceptual framework of Being that grants
genesic authority to the Divine Word, to wrest meaning from the Logos
and so ‘en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu’. But, as Nietzsche observed, we
shall not be rid of God until we are rid of grammar.
5
WRITING DOUBLES
Je suis un simple et je n’ai jamais de doubles en moi.
(xvi. 277)
Words make the uncommon common.1
In early 1945 Artaud Wnds his aspirations as poet and thinker can no
longer be accommodated within a Christian theology, and this marks the
opening of the Wnal phase of his writing career. Later, he pinpoints the
moment of his rejection of Christianity as ‘ce soi-disant dimanche de la
Passion où j’ai jeté la communion, l’eucharistie, dieu et son christ par la
fenêtre et me suis décidé à être moi, c’est-à-dire tout simplement Antonin
Artaud un incrédule irréligieux’ (xi. 120). But Artaud, if now an ‘incrédule’, is not ‘irréligieux’. For Artaud God most certainly still exists, be it as
transcendent Being or as inexpungible creation of the linguistic apparatus
of the mind. It would therefore be misleading to talk of the late Artaud
texts as atheist; he becomes, rather, an anti-theist concentrating all his
energies on writing against God. It is precisely so that he may, as he writes,
be ‘simplement Antonin Artaud’ that God must be expunged from the
ontological framework of reality. And it is the rejection of pro-God
theologies that sets in motion the drive that Artaud maintains to the
end of his career to eradicate from the self all that is other.
Coinciding with the swing from a pro-God theology to an anti-God
stance is a huge creative upsurge. Artaud starts to draw the dissected,
perforated bodies that have generated much interest in the past decade
and to Wll exercise book upon exercise book with notes. He continued to
write copiously, some might say compulsively, until his death three years
later and the Cahiers—divided into the Cahiers de Rodez (xv–xxi) and the
Cahiers de retour à Paris (xxii–xxv)—run to over 4,000 pages. Although the
Cahiers are fragmented, discontinuous, unstructured jottings, the post1945 material intended for publication is drawn directly from their pages,
at times with only minor reworkings or synthesis.2 The Wnal works are
the public retelling of the private battle waged in the Cahiers.
1
For instance, the opening section of Suppôts et Suppliciations, ‘Fragmentations’, is a
selection of scattered fragments lifted straight from the Cahiers (see xiv*. 236 n.).
2
122
writing doubles
The function of the great outpouring of the Cahiers is to free Artaud
from God and his ‘suppôts’, and so they are the front line in the Wght for
identity and hence also of the development of his thought. But they are a
dauntingly large and diYcult set of texts and are among the most messy
reads in twentieth-century French letters. Steinmetz makes an important
observation in relation to the Cahiers du retour à Paris that applies to all
Artaud’s notebooks: ‘Veut-il [Artaud] représenter, redire ce qui lui passe
par l’esprit ou bien cela se crée-t-il au bout de sa plume, sans qu’il y ait
une pré-pensée médiate? L’abondance de ces pages laisse supposer non
pas un automatisme, mais un entraı̂nement scriptural où la main même
est tirée en avant par l’exigence de l’écriture.’3 The Cahiers texts do
indeed frequently appear to be a spontaneous fusion of thinking and
writing. Closing the gap between text and life has become even more
important to Artaud now that he explicitly wishes to end self-alienation
by forging a new self-identity through the text itself. Artaud’s Cahiers have
moved away from the text as a medium of self-representation to the text
as means of self-creation; but this performative function they supposedly
eVect, if the leading principle of Artaud’s poetics, compromises the
possibility of their intelligibility.
Artaud’s texts have long worked against the traditional abstract concepts of the Western world view, and in the private space of the Cahiers he
can operate heedless of the constraints imposed by an implied reader. He
is free to push to an extreme his strategy of reworking the semantic space
of terms by stylistic complexity, and makes the Cahiers diYcult to read
even by the standards of his other writings. In addition to their problematic supposed function and stylistic techniques, the Cahiers are repellent, not merely in culturally speciWc terms of good literary taste, the
writing dripping with lower bodily Xuids, but more importantly in terms
of their readability, with what can feel like a magnetic repulsion pushing
the concentration of even the best-intentioned reader away from the
closed meaning-world of the text. This is a factor of their hermetic
content, their Xouting and dissolution of syntax, and the diYculty in
attributing the text to secure enunciative positions. Their repellence is
further heightened by the boredom they will, at some stage in their 4,000
pages of spirallings and loopings, induce. The reader is exposed to many
hundreds of pages where Artaud appears to be carried uncontrolledly
along on a wave of rhetoric and hatred against God, or in which he
orchestrates, with the assertiveness of a monomaniac, a phantasmic
3
Jean-Luc Steinmetz, ‘Hapax’, in Signets: Essais Critiques sur la poésie du XVIII e au XX e
siècle. (Paris: José Corti, 1995), 278.
writing doubles
123
choreography of maimed bodily parts. Whilst it would be worse than
wearisome to catalogue the illisibilité of the Cahiers, an unbalanced portrait of the late Artaud writings would emerge were not their diYculty
and their frequent incomprehensibility underlined. There are twelve
thick volumes of notebooks and only four comparatively thin volumes
of material intended for publication, and it would give an erroneous
image of late Artaud if mention were not made of the noisy clusterings of
illisibilité that have to be muted in order to perceive his texts as a loose
conceptual system.
Artaud’s notes abound with passages resembling the following: ‘La
libération par l’état cœur: profus. j L’état vertébral hépatique de libération: étant-être réclamé plus que le profus, j mais le profus ne vient-il
pas de l’insoupçonné inétendu: poumon-gorge. j L’être extrême étendu
est manifesté par le non-étendu gouVre croix derrière la croix cœur du
christ Roi’ (xv. 41). Though clearly unreadable, the unreadability is
largely that of somebody else’s shorthand. Whilst such paratactic fragments heavily laden with nouns may be seen to carry out a semantic
destabilization by their phonetic patternings (here ‘croix’, ‘cœur’, and
‘christ’), it is hard to discern much more of critical use. What further
needs to be recognized, however, is that even written out ‘in full’ it seems
unlikely this would make the kind of sense that could shed light on
Artaud’s thought. The spatial, corporeal, and theological realms collide
and the resultant textual debris is too hermetic and dense a symbolic
world. Much of the illisibilité of Artaud’s Cahiers stems from this combination of hermeticism and ellipsis. It is surprisingly rare, given the general
climate of the Cahiers, to encounter syntactically well-behaved yet illisible
fragments such as: ‘Ri Douzes Kha Khor Elida est la marche des êtres
consciences niées par la Xamme qui les précède comme le précisant
précède le précisé qui le suit mais meurt en précisé pour ne pas rejoindre
le précisant qui le tue dans l’inWni’ (xvi. 292).
In general the Cahiers texts stand somewhere between the unreadable
and the not fully readable. It would be possible, perhaps, to say what sort
of work the text is doing, even though it might not be possible to follow
an elaboration and unfolding of meaning from unit to unit. The Wrst
major conceptual cluster that such passages speak of is the body, which
often Wgures in concentrated groupings of abstractions and substantives:
‘Qui par le cœur de la tête au ventre soigne l’esprit fuyant qui veut
toujours avoir une tête et prend l’esprit révolté de cette tête et le ramène
aux clous des sous-pieds par la croix du vide des tibias croisés’ (xvi. 158).
A second major clustering concerns the Wgures of Christianity, with
124
writing doubles
Artaud enacting a drama between the members of the divine family and
himself that is unintelligible to the outside reader-spectator: ‘Le SaintEsprit de Dieu et de la vie me retenait de manger par le cu de la sœur
putante de Dieu.—On la verra puter.—Car elle me conseillait de mourir
de faim dans ce corps-ci sous prétexte que Dieu se refait par loi du temps
alors que moi, Dieu, je ne me refais que par volonté’ (xvi. 154). If each
sentence is comparatively well behaved in such passages—the third
sentence, with the exception of the slippage in enunciative position
from ‘me’ to ‘Dieu’, is unproblematic—they do not give rise to the
kinds of meaning of lisible texts. The droning complexities of this new
anti-theology occupy even more of the Cahiers de Rodez than the anatomic
redistributions, with statements such as the following to be found
page after page: ‘C’est la Sainte-Vierge qui est le Père-Mère et non
Dieu Père Éternel qui est Lucifer et Satan et Jésus-Christ est la lumière
éternelle du christ Père. j C’est sur l’Enfer de Jésus-Christ que Satan
se faisant en Père a fait le Père’ (xv. 50). This is clearly not illisible, but
the rapid volte-faces and Xuctuations in this anti-theology and in the
kaleidoscopic human anatomy make it too great an eVort to follow their
evolution. This is not a matter of readerly laziness but a fact about
Artaud’s Cahiers: at some stage the reader will give up or get lost. They
reserve moments of excitement and fun for the reader, but especially
frustration—a fact that should not be lost from sight even when arguing
for their worth.
Frequently the Cahiers texts are a freewheeling churning out of semimeaningful, semi-incantatory phrases yoking together the two dominant
themes of Christianity and the body (‘Je ne suis pas le christ élevé par
refus au-dessus du charnier mais le charnier en marche éternelle luimême, j une invertissante. j Les âmes des pierres dans le pied droit avec
le gauche par-dessus j les âmes du cœur du pied gauche avec la droite
par-dessous j sont l’âme de ce qui doit monter et non la chair Xuidique de
l’inWni qui veut toujours les contenir’ (xvi. 237)). Even though it is being
argued that Artaud’s ideas on God and the body spearhead his mythopoeisis, the convoluted dramas of the negative mysticism and of the
anatomical redistribution played out in the Cahiers may safely be edited
out of the intellectual history traced here. Not only is it unnecessary to
follow the details; it is only by standing back from the Cahiers that the
evolution of Artaud’s thought is discernible.
Near illisibilité should not automatically be taken as evidence that
Artaud has lost control of his writing. In the dossier of Suppôts et Suppliciations, the apotheosis of Artaud’s late thought drawn from his Cahiers, he
writing doubles
125
notes that even this collection of writings—destined for publication and
described in the preamble as written to ‘permettre au lecteur de matérialiser vraiment le débat’ of his ‘aventure’ (xiv*. 10), and hence one
might deduce clear—is illisible: ‘type du livre emmerdant absolument
impossible à lire, j que personne n’a jamais lu de bout en bout, j même
pas son auteur’ (xiv**, 234). Despite this self-accusation it is rare to Wnd
unreadable passages in the texts intended for publication, and those
allowed into Suppôts et Suppliciations are carefully inserted at speciWc
points: ‘Ce qui est bien non dans la philosophie, mais dans la marmite
de pommes frites, carrée peut-être et avec le manche’ (xiv*. 14). It is the
word ‘philosophie’ that draws forth nonsense as Artaud enacts his
opinion of the discipline. This controlled injection of unmeaning fulWls
a deXationary, ludic role, frequently turned back against Artaud’s own
(authorially backed) statements: ‘Ils ont souZé des termes de cire morte
sur les corps réprouvés des êtres et en ont fait des rétentions stupéWantes,
qui, avant de naı̂tre, n’étaient pas, mais qui, j insuline par insuline, j se
sont crues être, j et pourtant l’artichaut branle au manche quand c’est la
vierge qui fait caca’ (xiv*. 14). Indeed, the self-accusation of illisibilité may
most proWtably be regarded in just this light, as a pre-emptive deXation of
any burgeoning pretences to the kind of intellectuality that Suppôts et
Suppliciations persistently attacks.
Although outright illisibilité and nonsense are rare, the tendency of the
text to erupt in anti-sensical crescendos amounts to an inner, rhythmic
compulsion. The following passage typically works through a process of
continuous sliding or movement of aposiopesis, an opening of the chain
of meaning staving oV completion. Here the comparison with Mallarmean syntax is useful. Mallarmé does away with the ‘direction personnelle enthousiaste de la phrase’ (as he describes it in Crise de vers),
destabilizing the sentence and challenging rather than anticipating resolution. But the meanings with which the Mallarmean line is pregnant are
able to coalesce in the black spaces at the end, or as he puts it in ‘Sur
Poe’: ‘L’armature intellectuelle du poème se dissimule et tient—à lieu—
dans l’espace qui isole les strophes parmi le blanc du papier: signiWcatif
silence.’ With Artaud, it is precisely in the noisy on-run of his prose that
syntax is destabilized and erasure mobilized, where there is no blank
space for mental exercise to collect and draw together meanings, and not
in his poetry. Artaud’s writing gets carried away on its own power to
create meaning in deWance of norms, and an unchecked jouissance in its
right to untrammelled linguistic performance can draw Artaud’s prose to
the limits of the intelligible and frequently beyond:
126
writing doubles
Ce siècle ne comprend plus la poésie fécale, l’intestine malheur, de celle, Madame Morte, qui depuis le siècle des siècles sonde sa colonne de morte, sa
colonne anale de morte, dans l’excrément d’une survie abolie, cadavre aussi
de ses mois abolis, et qui pour le crime de n’avoir pu être, de jamais n’avoir
pu être un être, a dû tomber pour se sonder mieux être, dans ce gouVre de la
matière immonde et d’ailleurs si gentiment immonde où le cadavre de Madame
Morte, de madame utérine fécale, madame anus, géhenne d’excrément par
géhenne, dans l’opium de son excrément, fomente fama, le destin fécal de son
âme, dans l’utérus de son propre foyer. (ix. 174)
This excerpt from the Lettres de Rodez is typical of Artaud’s late writing.
There is the infantile delight in naming lower bodily Xuids and processes,
the eruption of anti-sensical material dictated by phonological echo
(‘fomente fama’), and a characteristic crescendo of rant. Sentences such
as this scorn the unfolding of sense; instead the sentence gathers pace and
rhythm in its pitch and roll from one linguistically self-indulgent aside to
another, until all possible scraps of linguistic pleasure have been derived
as pace, intonation, and the sentence sink to a close.
Delight in naming lower bodily functions is not just an incidental if
eventually aggravating feature; more importantly it leads to confusion in
Artaud’s poetics. In the Lettres de Rodez Artaud develops an ideal of a
‘poésie fécale’ (ix. 174). Excretion is, of course, in Freudian terms a death
of the body to itself, and for Artaud death may exercise a positive,
dissolutory power: ‘La mort est une énergie intrinsèque, un état qui fait
crouler l’être’ (xiv*. 123). Hence: ‘la poésie fécale, l’intestine malheur
[ . . . ] Madame Morte [ . . . ] madame utérine fécale’ (ix. 174) may be
suggestive of a positive incarnation and digestion of words by the poet,
who supposedly dissolves and reconstructs language along new, personal
lines.4 But yet, defecation is a prime instance of doubling—the two
opening lines of one of Artaud’s most powerful late poems, ‘Le Théâtre
de la Cruauté’ (xiii. 107–18), reads: ‘Connaissez-vous quelque chose de
plus outrageusement fécal j que l’histoire de dieu’—and it is hard to see
how the indirect association of the fecal with the positive forces of
dissolution and incorporation can outweigh the doubling connotations
of the terminology. Although it is possible to eVect a partial reconciliation of ‘la poésie fécale’ with the rest of his ideas, it would nevertheless
seem that—here as elsewhere—Artaud’s desire to shock takes over and
undermines his thought.
4
Elsewhere Artaud writes of the need to take language into the body and literally
incorporate it if words are to yield their secret alchemy of meaning: ‘des opérations
d’alchimie si l’on peut dire salivaire que tout poète au fond de sa gorge fait subir à la parole
[ . . . ] avant de les régurgiter’ (ix. 129–30).
writing doubles
127
Indeed, an uncharitable view would see infantilely iconoclastic and
taboo-Xouting ranting as the normal Artaudian mode of discourse. Some
rants can be a delight to read for their inventive playfulness:
je ne puis admettre que des groupes d’envoûteurs pris à toutes les classes de la
société se disposent sur certains points de Paris aWn de chercher à inXuencer et
impérer ma conscience à moi, Artaud, eux, repasseurs, blanchisseurs, droguistes,
épiciers, marchands de vins, manutentionnaires, employés de banque, comptables, commerçants, Xics, médécins, professeurs d’université, employés d’administration, prêtres enWn, prêtres surtout, religieux, moines, frères convers, c’est-àdire incapables, inaptes, tous fonctionnaires de l’esprit, un esprit appelé par les
catholiques le saint-esprit et qui n’est que l’issue anale et vaginale de toutes les
messes, de tous les chrêmes, de tous les viatiques, de toutes les bénédictions, de
toutes les élévations, de toutes les extrême-onctions sans compter les ablutions et
le nard rituellement brûlé des brahmanes, les torunoiements des derviches, les
rosaces inchristées parce qu’ incrustées des cathédrales, les croisements rotuliens
avec les talons sous les fesses des boudhas, et les invocations intranaturelles des
lamas. (ix. 167)
Anybody who has heard the 1947 recordings of Artaud reading his texts
can imagine the venomous rumblings, the imperious scorn of ‘moi,
Artaud, eux, . . . ’, the meticulous, busy-lipped diction heightening an
almost voluptuous pleasure in gleefully listing the disgusting practices
of the enemy, and the playful black humour savoured in rolling such
verbal gems as ‘rosaces inchristées parce qu’incrustées’ or ‘croisements
rotuliens’ over the tongue. But this is rant at its best, and in the Cahiers it
is rarely accompanied by the rhythmic power, gleeful caprices, linguistic
inventiveness, and tight-reined rhetorical control brought forth here.
Regardless of the invigoration felt on reading such a passage, it is soon
superseded by one of annoyance as Artaud returns to his bugbears for
page after page of stultifying denunciation.
And yet, once we clear aside the distractions created by the dispersive
and excedentary pressures of Artaud’s writing, we can see at the heart of
all his Wnal texts a desire to systematize and conceptualize his sense of
alienation. The basis of Artaud’s Wnal writing is that, on the Wrst level, he
holds his true self to have been displaced by the presence of God within
himself. Further, the negative theology spearheads a more general revisionary movement, and so, on a second level, Artaud Wnds that not just
God but all terms used to structure a sense of self block the emergence of
the latent inner self his pen has been running after since his earliest texts.
In Les Tarahumaras the linguistic self was found to be illusory, a name
masking a void, and Artaud now further suggests the inner self is absent
128
writing doubles
too: ‘les déXagrations informulées du moi sont le trépignement psychique
d’un semis, la ponctuation eVusive d’un souZe, les nuées vibratoires
d’une ombre, l’introuvable tempo d’un vide dont le moi fait ses convulsions’ (xv. 16–17). Artaud is chasing the cloud of a shadow, the lost tempo
of a void. The formless, unrealized expressive potential of the authentic
self (‘les déXagrations informulées du moi’) that he would wish to make
manifest (‘tradui[re . . . ] les spasmes génésiques d’une pensée en pleine
formation’) cannot even be gestured towards other than in the most
ethereal metaphors (‘la ponctuation eVusive d’un souZe, les nuées
vibratoires d’une ombre, l’introuvable tempo d’un vide’). It is this essential ephemerality of the inner self that causes Artaud’s project to expand
to such voluminous proportions, for any manifested form of selfhood
may be denounced as an alien impostor. He takes this idea of the illusory
nature of the self and combines it with that of determining forces existing
unnoticed, because so ingrained, within the mind, to decide that, if the
self is empty, anything that seems to lend form and substance to its empty
space must be an alien ‘envoûteur’: ‘il y a dans le cœur plus de dix milles
êtres, et j e n’est qu’un être et il y en a d’autres mais les hommes ne le
comprendront jamais’ (xi. 92). Taken to its conclusion, the idea of the
nothingness of the self means that any notion used to refer to and thus Wll
out identity space is, in Artaudian language, a double, a hostile entity
existing parasitically within his identity space. Writing thus becomes
endless. The reXexive, linguistically constituted ‘j e ’ is only the most
obvious artiWcial construct, riding above many other unrecognized
alien forces.
All discourse about the self that treats it as having features
and presence is a deceptive myth for Artaud, and it is by revealing and
thus dislodging alien doubles that he will be able to reassume his true
position at the centre of himself (and thus his true status as the unique
creator of his world: ‘que Dieu ni personne [ . . . ] ne fasse aucune
création à côté de la mienne’ (xv. 201)). For Artaud, then, the way to
reacquire his latent creative force is to write the doubles out of himself.
The Cahiers aim to do just this. In the past they have been taken as
symptomatological products of a psychotic state, yet their undeniable
extravagance must not be allowed to preclude an appreciation of
the very real conceptual work they perform. Close consideration of the
Artaudian aesthetic shows that what at Wrst sight looks like an uncontrolled pouring forth of words may more fruitfully be seen as a way of
writing through alienation. If the early Rodez phase of Artaud’s development proceeds by writing about language, with the rejection of
writing doubles
129
pro-God theologies he starts to write against language—to work on the
linguistic medium itself and through it on the inherited conceptual
orthodoxy. Talk of their psychotic status is a useful shorthand term for
reminding us of their many frictions with orthodox interpretations of
reality and of the many threats to communication posed on each page of
the Cahiers; but it must be bracketed out if we are to see beyond their
hostility to orthodox discursive practices and appreciate the extent to
which they elaborate a mythic system.
The primary feature of language Artaud must combat, other than the
fact that it is in the hold of God, is its stasis:
On ne parle pas le mental [ . . . ] et on ne le parle pas en français. Silence aux voix.
La vérité ne se suppute pas dans l’esprit. On vit ses états de vérité, on ne les
discute pas. Parce que l’esprit ne peut pas les atteindre et que le Verbe n’est pas
assez rapide pour les enregistrer tous. [ . . . ] L’état qui manifeste le tout n’est pas
discursif, et il ne supporte pas le discursif. (xv. 261)
This poetics of living rejects language for the sake of being able to express
everything all at once. Life itself is to be the fully expressive new work
and lived bodily experience to become the medium for epistemic advances. This is an overreaction to Artaud’s misgivings about the diachronicity of syntax Wrst formulated in the early texts. Language is still
thought of as ill-adapted to the lightning Xash apprehension of reality by
what in the past he called the ‘esprit dans la chair’. Further to this
shortfall between language and ‘états de vérité’, Artaud claims repeatedly in the late texts that there are dangerous lacunae in the linguistic
fabric. Even as late as 1947, once he feels he has mastered language, he is
still complaining that it cannot say the most important: ‘assez de plaisanteries et de sornettes, et assez de tartuVeries, mais assez surtout de j de
quoi, bordel de dieu? j Ici un mot me manque qui m’a manqué dans la
vie chaque fois que j’ai voulu accuser une certaine chose.’5 Somehow
(that is to say, in Artaudian terms, owing to the intervention of divinely
wielded determining forces) language is unable even to gesture towards
the most dangerous forces arrayed against the individual. Language
cannot name the ‘ennemis intérieurs’ because for Artaud it is in the
depths of language that they lurk. By allowing these forces to remain
invisible, language is the greatest threat to self-identity.
Rilke famously described poetry as a wrestling with words and meaning. For the modern poet, writing is a hauling and straining in an
5
Artaud, ‘La conférence au Vieux-Colombier: Histoire vécue d’Artaud-Mômo (extraits)’, L’InWni, 34 (1991), 3.
130
writing doubles
obsessive attempt to say the unsayable. Far removed from the overXow
of self-expression, it is a stretching beyond. Such a conception of poetic
travail seems, however, anaemic in comparison to Artaud’s ideas about
forging a new expressive medium—a Sisyphean undertaking: ‘Je dois
donc dire que depuis trente ans que j’écris je n’ai pas encore tout à fait
trouvé, j non pas encore mon verbe ou ma langue, j mais l’instrument
que je n’ai cessé de forger’ (xiv**. 29). His ideas about language are
familiar from the early writings, but there is a change in textual practice.
Previously, Artaud had invoked the possibility of a private language
adequate to expressing the inner self; his theorizing now implicitly
rules this out. All discourse is inimical to truth, Artaud says, which may
be lived but not told. Yet, in a mismatch between theory and fact typical
of Artaud, whereas when he had theorized about a private language
there had been no attempt to forge such a tool, now that it is ruled out his
texts bear witness to a sustained attempt to forge just such a private
language. It is when Artaud’s ideas on language, which have clearly
come to an impasse, call for silence that his writing rises to a crescendo of
voluminousness and volubility. And yet, despite the inconsistencies between fact and theory, the ideal of non-linguistic expression does serve to
indicate the essentially non-linguistic characteristics with which Artaud
will endeavour to imbue his writing (as far as such a self-contradictory
thing is possible). In his writing Artaud tries to emulate the dynamism
and non-representationality of life, countering linguistic stasis by a strategy of textual motility.
The Cahiers texts in particular are exemplary of the strategy of motility
(the word is Artaud’s) and of Artaud’s emergent bewildering style. There
are a variety of techniques used to make his writings diYcult, but that
mark them neither as illisible nor as straight psychotic products. In
particular Artaud goes to extreme lengths to disrupt syntax. One recurrent trick is to transform a verbal into nominal syntagm: ‘ne pas toucher
à l’être, j or le ne pas toucher à l’être’ (xvii. 61). This disarticulation is
provoked by the inadequacy of language to express the new principles he
is formulating. However, it becomes less of a trick than a tic exerting ever
greater forces upon syntax: as we move through the Cahiers we move
from the internal discord of ‘Le je ferai . . . ’ (xvi. 170) towards the
cacophony of ‘Le que les souWs me tinrent . . . ’ (xxiv. 77). Whereas
initially this reliance on verbal syntagms results from the diYculties of
expression, it becomes a signatory device—employed even if it impedes
meaning, as when he ends a sentence ‘par contre j le que je suis seul
à avoir corps et savoir ce que c’est que l’être et qu’il n’existe pas’
writing doubles
131
(xxvi. 17)—to indicate that he has taken over the language and made
it his own.
Another means of indicating that language is being individuated and
made Artaud’s is the many neologisms that stud the Cahiers and the
poetry. Often Artaud’s neologisms are not meaning-bearing but instead
Wgure as a hiatus in meaning: ‘Je suis stombal, je n’ai rien devant moi, je
ne suis pas encore’ (xx. 38). Here, language has not yet been suYciently
dominated for Artaud to be able to state his meaning in orthodox
terms—not even suYciently dominated for him to be able to formulate
a meaning. The neologism marks his refusal to capitulate to a readymade language and its stateable meanings. That Artaud should create
deliberately unintelligible neologisms is indicated by his occasional portmanteau creations—‘dramnatif’ (xxi. 362) or ‘abdominable’ (xvi. 278)—
that stand out for their limpid intelligibility and striking synoptic
powers.6 Syntactic and semantic heresy are, for Artaud, the order of
the day. Language must Wnd a new aesthetic more in tune with the inner
forces of words that are normally repressed by grammatical rectitude:
‘les mots sont cacophonie et la grammaire les arrange mal’ (xviii. 115).
Finding a language is a matter of allowing words unrestrained by
linguistic orthodoxy to act under the impulse of their inner forces.
Artaud’s linguistic experimentation is thus very diVerent from futurist
poetry that attacked grammar and syntax whilst privileging the phonic
and pictorial qualities of language, precisely in order to break open the
encysted word to reveal the vibrant meaning within. The experiments of
Khlebnikov’s ‘Exorcism by Laughter’ (1910), where he takes the Russian
word for laughter and makes it perform extraordinary acrobatics as
diVerent inXexions build up words from this root, are an experiment in
morphology, not semantics, where the aim is the discovery of new
harmonies. If in their Slap in the Face of Public Taste manifesto Khlebnikov
and Kruchonykh declare their loathing for inherited language, it is in
favour of a regeneration for ‘the word is making new’.7 Artaud’s experiments are part of his battle to appropriate language, and their playfulness is more sombre. He seeks not vibrant new meanings and harmonies
but to combat linguistic determination and alienation. Linguistic pleasure is not Artaud’s aim here.
6
The examples of nominalized verbal syntagms and neologisms are borrowed from
Grossman, Artaud/Joyce, 192–6.
7
Quoted in G. M. Hyde, ‘Russian Futurism’, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane
(eds.), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (London: Penguin, 1991), 264.
132
writing doubles
Perhaps the most seemingly psychotic textual technique in the Cahiers
is the multiplication of enunciative positions. Artaud’s texts speak in the
name of God and Satan, of a mythical group of daughters he claims to be
creating, even of ontological categories such as the mind or the body
(‘Moi le corps’ (xv. 187)), or bodily part shot through with onomastic
traces (‘J’ai épuisé l’âme de l’homme Antonin Artaud, j’épuise maintenant l’âme ignoble de Dieu.—Et je l’épuiserai jusqu’à l’os car je suis le
taraud des os’ (xvi. 160)). Even an argument for the positive work done by
motility has to recognize that this multiplication of enunciative positions
also multiplies the diYculties the texts are working through. Lending his
position as speaking subject may be experienced as an infraction against
his integrity and so actively foster the ‘envoûtement’ by the doubles
in whose name he is speaking (whereas it is, of course, meant to Xush
them into the open). Artaud lays himself open to the danger of becoming dispossessed of his own place and hence his own name, which is
no longer his and his alone. As a result his name becomes a linguistic
object that may be submitted to the same forces as any other linguistic
object, hence the recurrent onomastic play on the name ‘Artaud’. The
proper name is only a Xagpost by which he may indicate the place
from which he is speaking, and the frequency with which the syntagm
‘Moi, Antonin Artaud’ occurs in his writings, whilst indicative of his
delight in self-naming, also indicates how ‘Artaud’ has to be continually
reappropriated.
Yet, if Artaud opens up the self to the threat of dispossession, his voice
is never wholly subsumed to any of the transitory speaking subjects, for, if
he takes up a variety of enunciative positions, he does not reduce himself
to these positions: ‘Je suis le Père, le Wls, l’esprit, Lucifer, la vierge, et
l’antechrist, j ils sont moi, mais je ne suis pas eux [sic]’ (xvi. 317). Even as he
gives over his enunciative space to the other, the subjacent authentic self
preserves its integrity as well as its primacy. Artaud grants the other
speaking time, through him, in his place. This is a diVerent logic from Les
Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être, where, by yielding his enunciative position,
Artaud had sought to become one with ‘Être’. But, if the logic has
changed, the technique of relinquishing his enunciative position is still
thought of as unleashing a transformative energy, allowing him, in
particular, to acquire the power of the Divine Word to which he gives
voice.
It is to God and His satellites that Artaud most frequently lends
tongue, and at any moment the voice of the shifting, shifty Divinity
can well up from beneath Artaud’s other concerns: ‘Je suis chaste un
writing doubles
133
temps, baiseur un temps, christ un temps, antechrist un temps, néant
un temps, merde un temps, con un temps, vit un temps, être un temps,
cu un temps, dieu tout le temps [sic]’ (xvii. 184). Of Artaud’s works it is
the Cahiers that come closest to mysticism, albeit a negative mysticism of
invective, for it is here that his voice is most Wrmly and extensively
quelled to allow God to condemn Himself by confessing his desire for
Artaud’s body. Elsewhere Artaud speaks for God; in the Cahiers he acts as
what we might, aptly, call His ventriloquist. But throughout the authentic self may be identiWed by its impassioned anti-theological discourse,
for Artaud is the privileged denouncer and prime adversary of God:
‘c’est bien mon être à moi qui ne supporte pas Dieu: l’abı̂me de l’inWnité
qui s’est toujours heurté à mon existence personelle d’être étant’ (xv. 142),
where the double formulation ‘être étant’ enacts Artaud’s derivative
status in a Divine universe. So it is that he develops his own parodic
litany of invective: ‘Canaille de canaille de Dieu, innommable fuyard du
ciel, intronisé exécrable de l’être’ (xv. 26). Goodall has remarked on how
the names of the protagonists evolve with this antagonism. The name of
God initially gathers a multiplicity of epithets—‘Dieu Rien Inétendu’,
‘Dieu l’indéWni’, ‘l’Indicible Pater Non-Etre’—until the name becomes
eVaced behind the epithets—‘l’indicible non-être avant l’être’, ‘le nondivisible indivisé Diviseur’. These epithets unite opposites until the Wgure
of God unites with His opposites: ‘Dieu le Mal’, ‘Dieu le Père criminel’,
‘Dieu démon’, ‘le Père Lucifer Satan Dieu’.8 These multiple renamings
carry out a work of redeWnition, for, by calling God names, Artaud
denies Him His autonomy and, inversing their respective roles, allows
Artaud to deWne Him.
This multiplication of enunciative positions and of names, if disconcerting, is not the most disruptive textual strategy of the Cahiers. The
Cahiers de Rodez are even more striking for their reliance upon just a few
terms, which provokes a large-scale instability. Rey has drawn attention
to this ‘répétition intensive’, where insistent reworking causes a blur
around certain keywords.9 Sets of metaphysical and ontological terms
(especially ‘être’ and terms relating to the self) are worked repeatedly
until, as a result of the pressures exerted by their many, rapidly changing
contexts they become semantically malleable. What is even more destabilizing, their semantic space is so frequently refashioned that meaning is
perpetually under threat of imminent erasure. The overall eVect is that
the conceptual landscape is restructured over the course of the Cahiers by
8
Goodall, Artaud and the Gnostic Drama, 185.
9
Rey, La Naissance de la poésie, 33.
134
writing doubles
the cumulative eVect of gradual, actively pursued slippage and erosion of
meanings. This intensive repetition can also be deployed on a local scale
where, by combining continual slight deformations with syntactic Xuidity, the signiWcation of a set of terms is rendered volatile:
C’est que ce n’est pas moi mais ce qui en moi fait l’esprit, l’âme, le cœur et le
corps, ce n’est pas le moi-même, ni le soi, ni le lui, ni l’autre, et ce n’est pas Dieu, ce
sera autre chose parce que je le veux car c’est Je.—Et mon je, à moi, ici, et pas le
précédent car c’est dans la lutte de Je à Je que Je suis et je garderai pour moi pour
l’instant sans Dieu ce 3me Je qui supprimera les 2 autres parce que, avant la lutte
de Je à Je par moi, il n’y avait rien que moi sans moi. (xvi. 167)
This sentence is striking for its jerky, switching, frenetic leaping from one
term to another as Artaud pounds the semantic space of ‘je’ and ‘moi’.
Equally the preponderant negatives carry out a continual gommage of the
volatile meanings of identity terms. By employing repetition in conjunction with erasure the semantic Welds develop in complexity. Each term
becomes less a Xag marking a spot in the semantic landscape than a
signpost, gesturing towards its evolving, dense, complex conceptual
space and its nomadic pre-history. In the above quotation the cumulative
complexity of the fragment Xoats the terms ‘je’ and ‘moi’ free from Wxed
meanings, volatizing any sense of identity. Both Artaud’s terminology
and his self are in the melting pot—the melting pot of the Cahiers.
However, this process of working and reworking on terms can move
out of control as the force pushing Artaud’s pen across the page—the
scriptural impulse Steinmetz refers to—takes over. The kneading and
moulding of a term can become a compulsive battering so that semantic
plasticity gives way to linguistic excess. The above quotation continues:
‘Et sans dans l’expulsion de ce moi de moi que j’interviendrai contre la
loi éternelle de Dieu car si Je: pue, c’est accidentel [sic]’ (xvi. 167). The
dissolution of terminology and syntax can easily give way to an inXux of
unmeaning.
Deformations, echoes, and a sheer pounding of terms are actively used
by Artaud to expose the dangerous presence of several referents within
apparently unitary referential Welds. For example, he habitually works
on the term ‘moi’ in the light of the duality of the self, switching back and
forth between the everyday and the pure, latent self that are referred to
by the same term: ‘je ne suis plus moi-même et je n’ai pas encore mon
moi mais c’est moi qui ne l’ai pas et non un autre qui l’a parce que mon
moi ne peut que remonter de moi’ (xvii. 74). Artaud is eager to reveal this
diVerence-within-identity of the semantic Weld of terms. He seems to
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hold that this kind of multiple referentiality (of non-polysemic terms)
goes unnoticed and that this is why language exerts powerful determining forces, for multiple referentiality impedes lucid self-awareness. Here,
the fact that we have a sense of self in everyday experience hides the fact
that this is not the real self of which we have a rather murkier sense.
Linguistic confusion encourages existential laziness. A sentence such as
the one quoted relies on the double usage, and Artaud does his best to
exacerbate this kind of duality within terms. Hardening a dual usage into
a polarity, Artaud makes it clear how far he is from attaining the kind of
selfhood to which he aspires, whilst at the same time holding out the
promise of eventual success. When he uses the term ‘moi’ to refer both to
his current, alienated self and to the inner, authentic self, it is made clear
that, despite its alterity, the self remains the self, and so bringing forth the
inner self is dependent upon Artaud’s will. In other words, this double
usage of ‘moi’, whilst accommodating his current alienation, gives
Artaud full autonomy (‘mon moi ne peut remonter que de moi’). This
technique of exposing and reinforcing multiple referentiality, applied to
the terminology of the self, allows for an ongoing creation, distortion,
and erasure of the fabric of Artaud’s identity space.
In the previous example Artaud uses the same term in diVerent ways
at diVerent stages in a sentence without any ambiguity, and this double
usage of terms performs the speciWc work of introducing autonomy into
the realm of alienation. But more frequently Artaud fosters ambiguity in
order to destabilize meaning and so create a favourable climate for the
emergence of a diVerent way of thinking. He is master in the art of
sentences that demand a dual reading, one of which may Xirt destabilizingly with the paradoxical, for example: ‘je crois que rien ne veut plus
rien dire’ (xxiv. 9). Does this refer to the absence of meaning in life, or to
the meaninglessness of negation (see the outburst in ‘La question se pose
de . . . ’: ‘non, k n o n k alors à la négation’ (xiii. 96))? Either way the world
of abstract meanings is up for grabs. This kind of semantic instability is
characteristic of all Artaud’s late work. Though employed widely, it is
most frequently trained on philosophical and theological targets. For
example, the idea of an identity-secure person is played and punned
upon by Artaud in the following passage of typical ‘double-think’, to
adapt a Joycean expression, drawn from his correspondence. Artaud is
here deliberately ambivalent, for ambivalence is infectious and destabilizes the semantic locality:
Il y a une orthodoxie qui croit en l’existence éternelle d’une personne située entre
le corps et l’esprit et qui fait de l’un et de l’autre des symboles de son ambivalente
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writing doubles
capacité. Moi je crois qu’avant d’être quelqu’un il faut n’être d’abord personne,
et je ne crois pas à la Personne de Dieu et je ne veux pas de la Personne de Dieu.
Il y a un état sans personne ni Dieu et qui est la douleur infuse d’une croix qui
n’est pas l’être d’une croix mais sa puissance d’écartèlement, sans déWnition
d’esprit, de personne ou de croix. (xi. 71–2)
Artaud controls the ambivalence of language to brush away the notion of
personhood: ‘avant d’être quelqu’un il faut n’être d’abord personne’
may be read in two ways. The Wrst would be: before being somebody,
one has Wrst to be nobody; the dissolution of identity is necessary prior to
reconstitution as authentic personhood. The second, depending upon
the homophony of ‘n’être’ and ‘naı̂tre’, would be: before being somebody, one has Wrst to be born as ‘personne’. This in turn plays upon the
polysemy of ‘personnne’: birth thrusts us into a form of existence as
‘personne’ and what characterizes this state is that we are both nobody
and person—that is, human existence is the locus of division from the
moment of birth. Having thoroughly destabilized the term ‘personne’,
Artaud contaminates another, ‘Dieu’, not so much by the multiplicity of
meanings as by the energized climate of instability. The ‘Personne de
Dieu’ refers, on the one hand, to the embodiment of God, the mingling
and thus negation of the ontological hierarchy. But, on the other hand, it
also refers to the non-existence of God. It can therefore be read as a
refusal to believe either in the Incarnation or in the non-existence of
God. Putting these two together Artaud would be insisting that, if God is
present in the world, it is not because He was made Xesh and so must be
because he stole bodies. Polysemy and ambiguity make a nonsense of the
concept of ‘personne’, and, by contamination, of ‘Dieu’. Once these two
concepts are left behind by the passage, what is left is the ‘état sans
personne ni Dieu et qui est la douleur infuse d’une croix’, the autonomous, free, suVering body (the body, for Artaud, is the cross on which
human existence is hung). This is the indeWnable, solitary state of
authentic existence as a sentient, conscious physical entity. Standing
back, it may be seen that this technique of forcing ambiguous multiple
meanings onto a term allows Artaud to reveal hidden, thus alienating,
connotations. Here—and it is worth insisting that most of the Cahiers
writing is not this purposeful—‘personne’ and ‘Dieu’ are found to be, or
made to become, dangerously related. Large associative swathes of the
term ‘personne’—all those aspects of personhood contaminated by divine inXuence—will therefore be excised from its semantic Weld, leaving a
pared-down version of the concept. What Artaud is doing to concepts
could be compared to what he announces he is doing to the human
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137
body: cutting out the alienating innards to create hardened blocks that
leave no room for parasitic alienating forces.
This technique of remodelling the connotative space of terms by strong,
localized pressure means the text combines its destructive and constructive
modes of thinking. He Xoats terms in syntactically ambiguous sentences,
so that they are lifted clear from traditional moorings and driven to
generate new associative networks by the excedentary forces of the poeticized propositions. This process of rethinking concepts poetically, whilst it
can lead to stormy texts, may also be found in apparently calm passages,
where the criss-crossing undercurrents barely ruZe the surface:
pour être le corps qui a voulu se détacher du désir d’avoir corps, il a d’abord fallu
se détacher du rêve et de l’image de son corps, mais il ne suYt pas de s’en
détacher en esprit il faut s’en détacher en corps, c’est-à-dire que le corps du
détachement est un corps qui sert à buter contre le corps qu’on rêve. (xi. 72–3)
It is in such apparent benign and muzzy-headed ramblings, where
Artaud’s writing seems to be churning in a void, that much of the
semantic destabilization takes place. It is not, of course, always as clear
as in this passage, but care must be taken not to dismiss the many
aesthetically unexciting passages in Artaud’s notebooks and correspondence—this passage is drawn from the Wrst letter Artaud wrote after his
rejection of Catholicism—as guV. The body willing to be shorn of the
desire for incarnation is, because of the pressures exerted by the past
history of the terms and the syntax of the sentence, highly ambiguous. It
could, Wrst, be the post-Christian body that is no longer deWned as the
obverse of a mystic body of Christ; or it could, secondly, be the body that
Xouts the givens of human biology and anatomy; in a third reading, it
could refer to the body untouched by sexual desire. Or, there again, it
could, and will, become a combination of these: a virtual Xeshless body
à venir deWned by its essential autonomous plenitude. This new body is to
come about by a detachment ‘du rêve et de l’image de son corps’. This
could, Wrst, mean from God (frequently designated ‘le Rêve’) and the
God-given image of the body. Or, if the syntax is read diVerently and
the ‘en’ of ‘s’en détacher’ refers to ‘désir d’avoir corps’, then to create the
new body involves purging the existent body of its sexual urge. If we take
a wholly diVerent line of reading through this sentence, ‘le corps qui
a voulu se détacher du désir d’avoir corps’ could be read as referring
to God (Artaud elsewhere condemns God for shying away from the
pain indissociable from bodily existence). In this case the ‘corps du
détachement’, God, opposes ‘le corps qu’on rêve’, the virtual body to
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be imaginatively created, in which case Artaud would be denouncing
(as he does elsewhere) the jealous God who is opposed to relinquishing his
monopoly on (body) creation. Supporting evidence for all these readings
may be found in other texts of the period and it would be unwise to rule
any out. Instead, they need to be all heard at once. By breaking the rules
of univocal rational discourse, the text is able to imply an alternative
conceptualization that is not deWned but only gestured towards. Here
Artaud takes three terms: ‘corps’, ‘esprit’, ‘détacher/détachement’. The
third term either deWnes the relationship that currently exists between
the Wrst two—the mind/body split—or else indicates what must be
brought about—the divorce between mind and body must be taken to
its extreme until one term, deprived of meaning, is subsumed by the other
in which all meaning is then invested. Artaud is therefore writing both of
what is and of what should be, of the actual and the virtual. The
destructive and constructive modes of thinking are bound together and
this contributes to the unpindownable nature of Artaud’s thought, something that, as we shall see shortly, Artaud values most highly in his
constructive thinking.
In his writing on concepts Artaud is clearly not doing philosophy, but
it is equally clear that his texts are performing conceptual work on
philosophical and theological terms. The textual pressures force the
language of philosophy to erupt, submerging a concept in latent linguistic energies. This poetically energized writing unleashes forces within
what had seemed stable terminology. For instance, Artaud splits words
up and imagines of what they may be composed, forcing new connotations on them and so debunking concepts that, to his way of thinking,
have been overprivileged. This must surely be derived from the wordgames played by Artaud and Michel Leiris in the 1920s where the
word-play fulWlled a speculative role; to take one example, ‘causalité’
broken down into ‘cause-alité’ suggests the illness of causal thinking.
There are especially strong parallels with Leiris’s Glossaire, j’y serre mes
gloses (1925), a fantastic lexicon based on the potential analogies between
the physical and phonic qualities of words and their meanings. In the
following example Artaud deXates the lofty pretentions of the idea of
consciousness by insisting that, for all the knowledge and prestige of
conscious thought, it may be also the embodiment of paralysing stupidity, of division, and the locus of sexual appetites:
tu ne le savais pas,
tu n’étais pas con-sciant,
tu es con et Sciant,
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139
tu es inconscient,
tu sais dans l’inconscience,
nous savons dans le con de la science,
nous sommes des cons et des Sciants,
nous sommes devenus conscients.
(xviii. 72)
This technique, if not dissimilar to that of post-structuralist criticism, is
far more ludic. The text Xags itself as playful, not philosophical: the eVect
of this passage is not to put the con back into science but to destabilize our
scientia with its conneries. Linguistic play is a serious technique of joyous
subversion.
The dynamism of Artaud’s writing allows his poetically injected prose
to run circles around philosophical terms. The consequence of this kind
of dismantling of philosophical terminology is to conWrm how meaningless, for Artaud, abstract ideas are. As he writes in ‘La question se pose
de . . . ’, one of the Wve texts of the justly famous Pour en Wnir avec le jugement
de dieu:
Ce qui est grave
est que nous savons
qu’après l’ordre
de ce monde
il y en a un autre.
Quel est-il?
Nous ne le savons pas.
Le nombre et l’ordre des suppositions possibles dans ce domaine
est justement
l’inWni!
Et qu’est-ce que l’inWni?
Au juste nous ne le savons pas!
C’est un mot
dont nous nous servons
pour indiquer
l’ouverture
de notre conscience
vers la possibilité
démesurée,
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inlassable et démesurée.
Et qu’est-ce que au juste que la conscience?
Au juste nous ne le savons pas.
C’est le néant.
Un néant
dont nous nous servons
pour indiquer
quand nous ne savons pas quelque chose
de quel côté
nous ne le savons
et nous disons
alors
conscience
du côté de la conscience,
mais il y a cent mille autres côtés.
(xiii. 91–2)
A similar impatience with metaphysical concepts is at work behind the
wonderfully ludic encyclopaedic list in Suppôts et Suppliciations cataloguing
the downfall of rationalism and biology, anchored around ‘pas d’ontologie’ and going on over four pages (xiv**. 13–16). Artaud is not a poet doing
bad philosophy, but a poet subverting the static terms and thought
strategies on which the philosophical endeavour has based itself. Our
ways of thinking about reality are connotatively charged with the idea of
Wxity, but dynamism, Xux, volatility, and ephemerality characterize
human existence. For Artaud, philosophical discourse goes wrong from
the outset. Conceptual systems must not therefore be too ordered: ‘l’ineptie de vouloir Wxer un axe, et mettre un axe à la base de tout’ (xi. 90).
Fixity, stability, and the idea of immutability have become bound up with
the idea of philosophical, hence ontological truth (and ‘être’ is the prime
example). But these characteristics are the characteristics of God, and so
traditional ways of thinking about reality are, even in their methodology
and aspirations, still the handmaiden of religion, propagating Divine
characteristics as true, this-worldly characteristics as Xawed.
Once the anti-philosophical and anti-theological eVect of Artaud’s
strategy of motility is appreciated, the view that his late texts are
the unreadable manifestation of a psychosis is no longer tenable in any
full-blooded form. Given the carefully orchestrated conceptual work
they perform, the psychotic condition that accompanies them can no
longer be held to impugn their credentials as worthy of serious critical
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141
consideration. Language is indeed frequently pushed to the point where
semantic breakdown is imminent. Yet if, as we have seen, this may on
occasions take Artaud’s texts into the realm of the illisible, we have also
seen that motility is part of a two-pronged strategy seeking, on the one
hand, to exploit the tensions within conceptual structures and, on the
other, to underscore the almost unsayable nature of what he would say.
Artaud writes against syntactic and semantic orthodoxy because thinking authentically within a conceptual system out of kilter with experience
requires it. Trying to rupture conceptual systems from within, Artaud’s
texts must be diYcult if they are to be successful.
Both the diYculty of Artaud’s writing and the subversive energy it
generates are particularly evident in the following passage, where he is
labouring to elucidate his ideas about ‘être’ in deWance of an inherited
terminology of essences and principles:
Car l’être en tant qu’être apparaı̂t si l’on veut après le principe de son essence
d’être ce que son principe est,
il est la vérité de cette essence mais il ne peut être conduit à être par l’essence:
essence: ce qui est sorti de son principe, il ne faut donc pas d’essence pour être
mais du principe viride.
Le principe de son être est d’être, mais l’être de son être ne doit pas apparaı̂tre
[ . . . ] dans un commandement à être par essence car l’être n’est pas immanent
dans l’essence mais son essence est de n’être que par viride combat entre le
principe insondable et son essence d’êtreté,
entre le rien et sa nature d’êtreté,
entre le promoteur sans être et le principe de son êtreté,
[ . . . ] et je ne me satisferai pas de l’être type que je suis et je ne me débarrasserai
pas seulement de ce qui est devant moi,
mais je plongerai en moi-même dans toute ma volonté aWn de la connaı̂tre
complètement et de savoir ce qui est son essence, sa substance, sa composition et
ce que je suis, moi, être, en face d’elle parce que mon être n’est pas venu
d’un principe, mais il a fait tous les principes, fût-ce même celui de l’êtreté.
(xvi. 35)
On Wrst and even on subsequent readings, this typical passage might
appear to be going confusedly round in circles, but by dint of hard
reading it is possible to follow the development of ideas. Detailed analysis
shows that, far from spinning around the term ‘être’ in uncoordinated
motion, this passage is straining to express new ideas in an exhausted
terminology. Being (the passage is referring to authentic, inner being) is
made manifest in accordance with its essence (‘l’être en tant qu’être
apparaı̂t [ . . . ] après le principe de son essence’). But there is nothing
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in the essence of this inner being to make it emerge—in other words,
existence is not immanent in its essence (‘il est la vérité de cette essence
mais il ne peut être conduit à être par l’essence’). Therefore the inner self
cannot be relied on to come into being unaided; what is needed is a
welling-up of the life sap (‘il ne faut donc pas d’essence pour être mais du
principe viride’).10 Even though the true nature of this latent, inner being
would be fully realized only were it to exist, it must not be forced into
existence (‘Le principe de son être est d’être, mais l’être de son être ne
doit pas apparaı̂tre [ . . . ] dans un commandement à être par essence’).
This is because the fact of existence is not immanent, as seen above, in its
essence (‘l’être n’est pas immanent dans l’essence mais son essence est de
n’être que par viride combat’). In the next phase Artaud is saying that, if
this inner being cannot be willed into existence, it must be drawn into a
life-endowing combat (‘par viride combat’). The combat is to be between
the non-being of God (‘le principe insondable [ . . . ] le rien [ . . . ] le
promoteur sans être’) and the inner being itself (‘son essence d’êtreté
[ . . . ] sa nature d’êtreté [ . . . ] le principe de son êtreté’). It is, in other
words, by combating God that the latent inner self will be able to Xourish
and pull itself up by its own bootstraps. (The fact that God is referred to
in terms resembling those used to refer to the inner self (‘principe’, ‘sans
être’) reveals God’s similarity to the inner self. This in turn suggests that,
if God is so similar to the inner self, it is, perhaps, because he exists
vicariously by stealing its place, and also that, were it not for God, man
would be godlike. This is the sort of mingling of terms by which Artaud
redraws his world view.) Artaud continues that, though he has said that
an appreciation of principles is insuYcient, he nevertheless needs to
know in full the underlying nature of his being (‘connaı̂tre complètement
[ . . . ] ce qui est son essence, sa substance, sa composition’) so as to know
how he stands in relation to it (‘ce que je suis, moi, être, en face d’elle’).
A certain amount of abstraction and theorizing is necessary to know
how he is progressing. But then again, if his being accords to a principle,
this is not because it is derived from a principle (‘mon être n’est pas venu
d’un principe’). On the contrary, principles are derived from being
(‘il a fait tous les principes, fût-ce même celui de l’êtreté’), and so the
role to be played by abstract comparisons between where he now
stands and his latent self must not be overstated. Equally, this reinforces
Artaud’s position as the ontological centre of creation, even the principle
of ‘êtreté’ being derived from ‘[s]on être’. Summarizing, élan vital and
10
The coinage ‘viride’ would seem to be forged from ‘viril’, with the associated emphasis
on upwards movement and verticality, and ‘viridité’, greenness.
writing doubles
143
élan vital alone will allow the latent self to be made real. Metaphysical
principles are irrelevant, and so Artaud must limit his theorizing to
elucidating what precepts will encourage this dynamic upsurging of
existence that would conWrm his position at the very centre of reality.
It could, of course, be objected that there is no need for Artaud to work
in so tortured a fashion through this speciWc conceptual framework of
essences and principles when early twentieth-century thought had developed new ways of thinking about ontology. But this objection would miss
the most important point (as would the plausible answer that Artaud was
not au fait with philosophical developments). For Artaud, the passage
through a time-worn philosophical vocabulary has little to do with accurately expressing philosophical ideas, and everything to do with exploring
the incompatibility between the philosophical framework that moulded
the Western tradition and his own, life-given sense of what being is. It is a
question not of philosophy but of revealing the alienating eVects of the
tradition that exerts pressures on the individual through the cultural doxa
and its stereotypes. Artaud’s late thought could hardly be described as
‘logical’, but the extreme stylistic complexity is a strategy formulated in
response to a rigorous thinking-through of the ramiWcations of his views
on language. Language is not only utterly inadequate to the task he would
have it fulWl of revealing his inner reality; it actually denatures his existence as a conscious, sentient, physical being. Words are, for Artaud,
incredibly powerful. Not just the generative Word but even human
language exerts hidden structural forces on reality (quite apart from the
overt modelling of reality it conducts). For Artaud it is by dislocating
syntax and the smooth unfolding of meaning that it may be possible to see
through words and force them to disgorge their hidden constituents.
Artaud writes to expose doubles and alienating forces within inherited
discourse. But any subsequent writing of a new textual identity poses new
threats of doubling owing to the alienation inherent in a linguistically
constituted self. Artaud suggests that abstract ideas give rise to doubling,
yet in writing about a new identity he cannot but employ them. He
chooses to anchor identity in the body because it is the obverse of
the abstract, but in passing from corporeality to writing bodily identity
there is precisely the kind of abstraction that Artaud wishes to avoid.
(To be logically consistent he would have to be silent, but then he would
not be able to theorize about self-identity and so would run the danger of
falling into something worse than lucid alienation, the brutish alienation
he imputes to the mass of humanity.) Writing doubles (in Artaudian
terms) if it leaves any trace of the writing self behind. The reason, for
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writing doubles
example, there are so many negative deWnitions of who and what Artaud
is in the Cahiers is because they prevent the emergence of any deWned,
doubleable, identity. Negation can even at times become the deWning
characteristic of the textual self: ‘mon extrême conscience non de moi
mais de Je, non [ . . . ] Je n’ai pas de moi et ce n’est pas moi, c’est non. j Et
quant au révolté éternel contre Je ça non, Je le creusera dans le ça par le
non’ (xvi. 169).
But yet one of the aims of the Artaudian text is to write the self. This
forces Artaud’s theorizing to deWne the writing self as the epitome of
dynamism if it is to avoid doubling and respect the programme formulated in ‘Révolte contre la poésie’ (‘Je ne veux pas me reproduire [ . . . ] Je
ne veux pas d’une idée du moi dans mon poème et je ne veux pas m’y
revoir’ (ix. 123)). The kind of textual self Artaud is looking to create is a
dynamic emptiness without any Wxed characteristics; to redeploy the
famous image that closes the introduction of Le Théâtre et son Double, the
self is to be a hieroglyphic, semaphoric self that is consumed by its own
burning creative drive. This is an identity that must never actually
appear in the text: ‘moi j’ai toujours existé dans le non-lieu, hors être,
hors condition’ (xvii. 186). For Artaud, it is because the terms available to
him are derived from theologically tainted linguistic frameworks that the
linguistically constituted self is alien. The deep, latent inner self beneath
the level of language should, therefore, remain free from alienation on
one of two conditions: either if it is not formulated in God-tainted terms,
should it prove possible to develop such simple language; or if the textual
identity is never given any (alienating) form. What Artaud’s texts show
him to be doing is employing the second strategy—the new textual
identity is forever announced but never achieved—whilst working on
the Wrst strategy. He does not, therefore, fall foul of his indictment of
language, but only at the cost of condemning his texts to perpetual
theorizing and prophesizing.
So the imperative ruling his writing is to tend towards the authentic
self in a process of ever-deferred self-creation. This is an impossible
project, for it is only by eVacing what he creates and starting forever
afresh that he can avoid producing new alienating doubles:
Moi qui ne vois jamais l’action et la création
que dans un dynamisme jamais caracterisé,
jamais situé,
jamais déWni,
où c’est l’invention perpétuelle qui est la loi
.
.
.
.
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145
je ne peux pas vouloir que des éléments apparaissent,
des principes, des essences,
.
.
.
.
ou surtout D E S Ê T R E S .11
Breton insisted that art be a constantly destructive and revivifying force
rejecting its own discoveries as persistently as it rejects normal modes of
thought, and Artaud takes this and extends its sphere of application from
aesthetics to the self.12 Given that Artaud’s writing is a self-writing,
perpetual invention becomes perpetual self-invention. Dynamism is not
reserved for destructive work; it is integral to the ongoing, constructive
project of creating a dynamic, non-doubling identity. Not only must
this project never slacken its pace; it must produce a perpetually sharpened creative hunger: ‘moi je ne suis jamais fatigué. [ . . . ] Où vais-[je]?
A l’absolu. Qu’est-ce que c’est? Une croix idéale qui tourne pour lancer
encore plus loin celui qui l’a atteinte. [ . . . ] Quand elle tourne que se
produit-il? Il se produit que la création passée se détache et tombe dans
le néant’ (xvi. 83). The inner logic of Artaud’s project therefore compels
his writing to erase and relaunch itself. The logical impossibility of
creating a Wnished, dynamic identity means that he must repudiate
all he has created and repeat the attempt to reach this goal time and
time again. By sticking so rigorously to his indictment of language, his
writing becomes an unstoppable theorizing machine that must never
describe the identity it is constructing, and indeed the great oddity of the
thousands of pages Artaud amasses to create his identity is that they
never touch upon the one thing that brings them into being. There is no
textual trace of a new identity, and it is this that lends them their
phantasmal air.
Artaud’s late writings, and particularly the Cahiers, may be seen as a
work-site. They are a work-site in which he aims to take hold of himself
against the hold of God and of the illusory entities used to people the
empty space of the self. Given that it is not just Christian and scholastic
philosophy but all metaphysics that is re-evaluated, it would seem that all
11
‘Notes pour une «Lettre aux Balinais» ’, Tel quel, 46 (1971), 17.
This derives from Dada thought. Dada took to a diVerent order the Expressionist
attempt to try to evolve a language capable of conforming to reality. Through asyntactic
and non-referential language Dada declared the inability of language qua human construct
to adequate to protean reality. Where Expressionism desired a once-for-all inner revolution, Dada is committed to a permanent linguistic revolution—a process of running to stay
on the same spot. (For fuller discussion of this idea see Robert Short, ‘Dada and Surrealism’, in Bradbury and McFarlane (eds.), Modernism, 292–310.) The Dada inXuence seems
strong here, Artaud advocating a perpetual writing against.
12
146
writing doubles
inherited metaphysical concepts, for Artaud, either imitate the pattern of
the conceptual model of God or else implicitly invoke God. In either
case, all abstract concepts are stigmatized for having shared a framework
with the concept ‘God’. Once he has rejected pro-God theologies Artaud
therefore writes against ideas of an innate, abstract self-substance, which,
for him, foster man’s status as the expelled derivative and hence negative
term of a divine/human dichotomy. His Wnal texts are an ongoing
process of identifying and naming the alien, abstract doubles hidden
ever more deeply in discourse. It is by working on language and making
it his own that Artaud will be rid both of God and of God-tainted
systems. So, if the major targets of the Cahiers are God and ontology,
both are to be destroyed through language. This means that leading an
assault on language and its alienating pretences is of overriding importance: ‘il faut frapper en tous sens pour le fait de frapper, sans viser un
point ou attendre une harmonie mais en brute, toute idée et tout être
[ . . . ] toute idée et tout concept’ (xvii. 102).
Once Artaud has decided that abstract ideas are doubles, then the
extremist tendency of his thought leads him to jump from one end of the
spectrum to the other and pin his hopes upon the physical: ‘la révolte du
corps contre le Principe’ (xv. 18). Hard textual facts about a corps neuf will,
theoretically, replace theories and abstractions, for, as he writes in an
early notebook: ‘Il faut faire les choses plus simplement et plus terre à
terre’ (xv. 218). In Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu, having reconquered a
certain degree of ontological and stylistic simplicity, Artaud will write of
the need:
[ . . . ] supprimer l’idée,
l’idée et son mythe,
et [ . . . ] faire regner à la place
la manifestation tonnante
de cette explosive nécessité:
dilater le corps de ma nuit interne,
du néant interne
de mon moi
qui est nuit,
néant,
irréXexion,
mais qui est explosive manifestation
qu’il y a
quelque chose
writing doubles
147
à quoi faire place:
mon corps.
(xiii. 94)
As we read through the Wnal phase of Artaud’s career we Wnd a move
away from abstract identity concepts towards the physical—or, rather, to
be precise abstract, conceptual reinventions of the physical—as the basis
for authentic selfhood. But, in order to carry out his radical simpliWcation
of existence, Artaud passes through extreme textual complexity. Not only
does he explore all that is not simple, all the terms that prevent him from
being simply himself; he also invents a most abstract and complex set of
concepts of physicality with which to articulate his pared-down ontology.
So, whilst the exorcism of language undertaken in his late writings is to
allow Artaud Wnally to say what he has to say, the strategies he employs
imperil communication and his writing drifts towards a solipsistic idiolect.
The repeated battering and gommage of semantic and connotative Welds of
key terms is supposedly an exhumation of hidden metaphysical components that must be cut oV at the root if they are not secretly to shape his
ideas. But actually Artaud is forcing new connotations onto terms.
Although his verse and prose are increasingly sparse, Artaud does not
simplify and pare down language; he does exactly the opposite, bogging
his key terms down with ever larger meanings. Artaud’s style is here
typical of a general tendency of Modernist thought modes that, though
associated with chaos and fragmentation, do not characteristically see
things fall apart so much as fall together, resulting not in disintegration
but in superintegration. Artaud is not stripping language of the accretions
it has acquired by contamination with the Western tradition but creating
an unwieldy, onto-theologically saturated language that, in the Cahiers at
least, can lumber tediously and become entangled in its own connotative
baggage-train. Admittedly, his deformations of inherited language in his
Wnal poetry, such as ‘Ja’ for ‘Je’ or ‘Jizi-cri’ for ‘Jésus Christ’ (both to be
found in ‘Ci-gı̂t’ (xii. 75–100)), are more successful in allowing him to
develop streamlined concepts: here, for instance, ‘Ja’ allows Artaud to
distance the new self from the critique of self-entities, and ‘Jizi-cri’
underlines the overlap between the incarnated God and language. But
in the Cahiers the attempt to write against inherited discursive forms forces
his writing towards the incomprehensible.
Yet it is by breaking with linguistic orthodoxy that Artaud works on
words themselves. Writing against the ready-madeness of orthodox
discourse, he forces terms to disclose (or so he sees it) their plethora of
148
writing doubles
tacit connotations, which are actually hidden determining forces that,
functioning collectively, push thought into unwanted channels. This, at
least, is what it can look like from within the Artaudian world. From
outside, the Artaudian text may be seen to be bonding new, invented
negative connotations to the major terms of Western thought—God, self,
being—whilst claiming to uncover them. It is true that the new connotations are derived by privileging messier areas within a conceptual Weld
(for example, the ambiguity at the heart of Christianity over the status of
the body), and so Artaud’s claims to be telling the true, underlying story
of reality are not pure unfounded delusion. If from outside the Artaudian
world we might choose to see this as a conjuring-up of phantasmal
connotations, from the inside it does have its own strangely compelling
logic, and, if we choose to eschew viewing Artaud’s ideas as hard
philosophical fact, we can still admire his prestigious skills of conceptual
and linguistic legerdemain.
But whatever view we choose to take, the diYculty of Artaud’s writing
needs to be recognized as an attempt to write against the linguistic and
conceptual models of the world within which he Wnds himself caught and
so free his inner experience from their contaminating inXuence. The
diYculty may equally be occasioned by the attempt to write a new,
alternative identity that is non-alienating, and hence, for Artaud, nonrepresentational. But in both its liberating and its creative mode, the
near illisibilité of much of Artaud’s Wnal writing is an index of its subversive energies and its intellectual earnestness. The Artaudian text plays
recklessly with language in the midst of its most extraordinary conceptual leaps, and it is truly unsettling in allowing the pleasures of language
to supersede the unfolding of lines of thought as the guiding force within
the text. It is this reinjection of literarity into the very heart of existential
crisis that makes Artaud’s writing so subversive. This is true of all
Artaud’s writing from Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière to Suppôts et Suppliciations, but it is especially so of the Cahiers.
Artaud has always regarded writing with suspicion because of its
representationality, and the famous ‘Pas d’œuvre’ of Le Pèse-Nerfs
(i*. 100) is now the guiding principle of his writing, for writing doubles.
The attempt to write through the doubles of the self and to prevent
writing doubling the writing self might well produce texts that dance with
the devils of unmeaning and psychosis. But Artaud holds that out of
these tortured texts new meaning can arise: ‘On peut inventer sa langue
et faire parler la langue pure avec un sens hors grammatical mais il faut
[ . . . ] qu’il vienne d’aVre’ (ix. 170). It is only, Artaud believes, by passing
writing doubles
149
through the alienation of language and writing a poetry of loss that he
will be able to forge a non-alienating form of writing. This new writing
might well be cacophonous and Xirt with the illisible, but for Artaud this is
an indication that language is being used authentically: ‘Car les mots
sont cacophonie et la grammaire les arrange mal, la grammaire qui a
peur du mal parce qu’elle cherche toujours le bien, le bien être, quand le
mal est la base de l’être, peste douleur de la cacophonie, Wèvre malheur
de la disharmonie, pustule escharre d’une polyphonie’ (xviii. 115). We
should not, of course, take Artaud’s judgement of his work unquestioned.
But, as this chapter has argued, if the cacophony of Artaud’s writing is at
times deafening, his discordances are fruitful.
6
A GOD-RIDDEN ARTAUD
e t q u ’a s - t u f a i t d e m o n c o r p s , d i e u ?1
It has never occurred to anyone to regard his stomach as a strange
or, say, a divine stomach.2
‘[L]a hideuse histoire du Démiurge,’ Artaud writes in one of his Wnal
texts, ‘on la connaı̂t.’3 The Artaudian story of the Demiurge is indeed the
best-known aspect of his late writings thanks to Derrida’s magisterial
article ‘La Parole souZée’, in which a battery of quotations illustrates
what has come to be recognized as the predominant idea of Artaud’s late
texts, that God stole his place and body at birth. Yet, if Artaud’s ideas are
well known, Derrida’s critical performance has attracted more attention
than Artaud’s own short-breathed textual performances, and critics who
pay attention to Artaud’s late writings conWne themselves to the territory
opened up by the Derridean reading.4 Goodall has argued strongly
against the tendency of post-structuralist readings to use Artaud’s texts
as grist for their own theoretical mills, and suggests that they keep his
texts at a long arm’s length and treat them as symptomatic, not literary
products. Yet she arguably goes too far in rehabilitating them (as indeed
do the readings of the post-structuralist thinkers). Artaud’s texts are
presented as a corps-à-corps with a heretical Gnostic theology, and so
one of their most important features is lost, for the writing against God
seems not just hermetic and abstruse (as her claim that they are primarily
a modern reinvention of the Gnostic tradition suggests), but frequently
crazed. He does not seem to be engaging unsettlingly with a theological
system so much as cobbling together a personal system using bric-a-brac
drawn from the Gnostic tradition.
Artaud, ‘L’être a des états innombrables’, 84, 5–6 (1948), 107.
Artaud, ‘Je n’admets pas’, 84, 5–6 (1948), 108.
4
Derrida was the Wrst to draw attention to Artaud’s writings from Rodez, sixteen years
before his notebooks were published in 1981. The sacrosanct status enjoyed by this article in
Artaud criticism is in part attributable to the fact that his article provided, for a generation
of critics, a rare foretaste of the Cahiers.
1
2
3
a god-ridden artaud
151
The story of the thieving God has become too familiar a part of the
late-Artaudian period for its forceful coherence, as well as its oddity, to
be readily appreciated. And, though Artaud’s account of a thieving,
hostile God has, since Derrida, been recognized as a rich seam of the
late Artaudian period, the great wealth of texts that fall outside the remit
of this ground-breaking article remain virtually unexplored. By surveying the details of the story of God, especially the unmined seams of the
notebooks and correspondence that allow us to follow the overall scheme
of Artaud’s ideas as they develop, this chapter suggests there are numerous variants of his anti-God account and how they might Wt together.5
It also seeks to go beyond previous readings by focusing on the work
performed by Artaud’s word-craft. But, though it is possible to discern an
underlying current of thought in Artaud’s anti-theology and antiphilosophy, the critical desire for unity and coherence should not
blind us to the fact that Artaud’s late writings are fragmentary, selfcontradicting, and frequently but a small step away from the arational.
Whilst Gnosticism has clearly left its stamp, Artaud’s writings are not
comfortably heretical but extravagantly abnormal in their unorthodoxy
or anti-orthodoxy, and a reading that glosses over this will miss something essential to the peculiar late-Artaudian world.
As a step towards isolating what this extravagance might consist in, it
is useful to compare Artaud’s texts with those produced by a famously
psychotic mind entertaining ideas similar to his. Freud’s celebrated case
history of Judge Schreber has meant that a belief in the predatory sexual
activity of God is especially closely associated with psychosis. And when
it is added that it is not just as victims of Divine sexual aggression that
Artaud and Schreber share common ground, but also in their interweaving of the ideas of God and fecality, then it might seem that Artaud’s
internment texts must indeed be classed alongside Schreber’s as the
products of a psychotic state.
But it would be overly hasty to condemn Artaud’s texts on the basis of
explicit propositional content, for the status implicitly accorded by the
two to their textual pronouncements shows the two bodies of writing to
be of a diVerent order, Schreber’s simply psychotic, Artaud’s a more
complex mixture of the extravagant with the playful and the linguistically inebriated. Artaud’s style and textual strategies are integral to the
5
Artaud also writes extensively and with great enmity about organized religion and its
rites, particularly in his later texts such as Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu (see, especially, the
dossier (xiii. 229–96)). This remains an unexplored area of his writing, but regrettably could
not be adequately addressed within the conWnes of this present study.
152
a god-ridden artaud
development of his ideas, as seen above, and this test-case comparison
with Schreber brings out the essential quality of Artaud’s writing. The
neat, modest, exact, tight-lipped prose of Schreber is fully at the service
of presenting facts with a minimum of fuss, even in a comparatively
heated moment such as the following:
But now what follows reveals the full perWdy of the policy that has been pursued
towards me. Almost every time the need for evacuation was miracled up in me,
some other person was sent [ . . . ] to the lavatory, in order to prevent my
evacuating. [ . . . ] And thereupon comes the question: ‘Why don’t you sh——?’
to which the brilliant repartee is made that I am ‘so stupid or something’. The
pen well-nigh shrinks from recording so monumental a piece of absurdity as that
God, blinded by His ignorance of human nature, can positively go to such
lengths as to suppose that there can exist a man too stupid to do what every
animal can do—too stupid to be able to sh——.6
The prose is level headed, patently sensible, displaying a judgelike
equanimity and nice sense of decorum lightly touched with sardonic
hyperbole. Schreber’s text serves as a crucial reminder that Artaud’s
texts are unusual not simply for expressing similar ideas but especially for
their sheer linguistic exuberance and for revelling in their accusations.
Thrown by the extravagance of what the Artaud text says about God,
readers have found it all too easy to overlook the inventive rhetoric of
anger and thrusting linguistic forcefulness that are the truly astonishing
things about the Artaudian text. It is equally easy to overlook the
carefully controlled, Xuid gracefulness of their anti-rational, sideways
switches from focal point to focal point that cock a snub at conventional,
unidirectional unfolding of meaning. Pleasure in linguistic performance
and the undermining of the ethos of high thought fuse seamlessly. The
Artaudian text, with its impish, mock magisterial sounding-oV and
gleefully precise scansion, is hot-blooded in its desire for linguistic
jouissance:
Connaissez-vous quelque chose de plus outrageusement fécal
que l’histoire de dieu
et de son être: s a t a n ,
la membrane du cœur
la truie ignominieuse
de l’illusoire universel
qui de ses tétines baveuses
6
Schreiber, quoted in Sigmund Freud, The Penguin Freud Library (London: Penguin, 1979),
ix. 158.
a god-ridden artaud
153
ne nous a jamais dissimulé
que le Néant?
(xiii. 107)
Artaud’s texts take great linguistic pleasure in themselves, savouring their
own Xavour on the tongue, drawing out their pleasure of accusing God
into the lengthy mouthfuls of ‘outrageusement’ and ‘ignomineuse’ with
all the greedy sensuality of a debauched logophile. It is as if all the
libidinous desire Artaud denies the body were transferred to juicy linguistic performance. Indeed his writing is not just desire-driven but
saturated with linguistic gluttony and self-pleasure. The Artaudian text
Xaunts its literarity and delights in working on the linguistic medium,
pausing at the end of each line to appraise its own linguistic agility.
This word-fun is not incidental—not only does it mark the text’s
opposition to high-minded intellectuality (in a way reminiscent of the
word-play of Derrida, who interestingly fails to pick up on the fun of
Artaud); it is also the very hallmark of Artaud’s later writings. Criticism
has managed to quell subversive Artaudian mischief from its portraits of
his texts, but mischief is crucial to late Artaud, both the most striking
characteristic for the reader of his Wnal poetry collections and an integral
part of the strategy of motility and self-creation: ‘Je suis un être humoristique éternel et c’est moi. [ . . . ] Cela ne veut pas dire que je doive
toujours apparaı̂tre sous l’être d’Artaud ni jamais. Ce n’est pas de tout
mon être vrai. C’est ma caricature’ (xv. 150). Just as Jacques Vaché used
umour as a shock treatment to cauterize corrupted forms, Artaud uses a
deadpan ‘humour absolu concret mais de l’humour’ (xiv*. 105) as part of
the process of taking hold of reality and making it his object. As with
Surrealist humorists, Artaud’s revolt against the world goes hand in hand
with a subversion of discourse and of the expressive modes that impose
that reality. Pleasure in linguistic performance therefore drives not just a
poetic but also a general existential stance.
But linguistic agility implies control, and this is as much in evidence in
Artaud’s late poetry as linguistic indulgence. In Artaud’s world of collapsing conceptual systems and hate-driven writing there is a potential
for disastrous non-diVerentiation. The Cahiers show how an underlying
impulse of Artaud’s writing is towards alarmingly distended sentences
eVacing boundaries between semantic units. But in the poetry, writing
is kept on a tight leash, and it is common to Wnd lines of a solitary
word. In the stanza quoted above, the material is cut into gobbets of
quasi-independent sense units and the text refuses to explicate precise
154
a god-ridden artaud
relationships between the lines. The lineation imposes structure on a
sentence that Artaud can thereby aVord to leave syntactically and
semantically fuzzy without endangering its lisibilité. This is typical of
Artaud’s late poetry in which long and short lines take on equal importance, and the expansion and contraction of stanzas establish sets of
equivalencies that cut across orthodox values. An extreme example of
this is in the poem ‘Interjections’ (xiv**. 11–25), where the word ‘m o i ?’ is
used as a complete stanza (xiv**. 20) and is hence of equal signifying
weight to a subsequent stanza of 15 lines and 284 words fulminating
against ‘envoûteurs’ (xiv**. 24). Lineation is but one structure-provider,
and Artaud’s text sets up complex weaves by alliterative echoes (‘truie’,
‘tétine’); by rhyme (‘cœur’, ‘ignomineuse’, ‘baveuses’); by syntactic
echoes generating semantic alignments (‘que l’histoire de dieu’, ‘que le
Néant’ and ‘de son être’, ‘de l’illusoire universel’); as well as secondary
networks of aesthetically pleasing recurrence such as lines starting with
the deWnite article or a relative pronoun. Artaud’s poetry combines
phonological and syntactic eVects to generate a well-deWned, structured
Xux of true aesthetic power and to redraw concepts forcefully. Between
Schreber and Artaud lies, in Barthesian terms, all the distance between
an écrivant and an écrivain.
Artaud’s anti-theology is not, then, what would normally be called a
body of thought but poetry about Artaud and about God that is hostile to
inherited onto-theology. What is more, it is composed of fragmentary
remarks scattered through nineteen volumes of writing (ix–xxvi). Most
frequently these remarks burst forth on a crescendo of rant against the
body, against the mind, or, towards the end of his career, against birth. It
is rare to Wnd any moderately prolonged articulation of his ideas on God;
they tend to be brief poisonous interjections, and, when the comments
do extend over more than a few lines, their bulk is normally composed of
a rhetoric of hatred that spins round on itself. The general impression is
of a persistent background noise against God that only occasionally
crackles into the sustained fulminations Derrida’s article have made
famous. The ‘hideuse histoire’, if strongly present, is not the centrepiece
of Artaud’s late writing (Derrida cannot be held responsible for the
reactions of his readers, but Artaud is nevertheless a victim here of
Derrida’s success). The struggle with God is the underlying fabric of
Artaud’s text, usually covered with his concerns about mind, body,
name, birth, identity, genealogies, and the plethora of topics Artaud
draws into his search for an autonomous textual self. The negative
theology has to be understood as one part of a far broader dissolution
a god-ridden artaud
155
of orthodox ways of thinking that is the primary concern of the Cahiers
and Wnal poetry.
An important neglected feature of Artaud’s thought on God is that it is
initially developed through a privileging of the hidden spaces of the
undermind.7 Though he oVers a melodramatic portrayal of mental
processes hijacked by hostile transcendental forces, it nevertheless serves
to integrate his complaints against God into a system. The tendency to
dramatize cerebration is familiar from his early writings, as is the claim
to unearth deep Xaws within the psyche. A general feature of Artaud’s
thought is a desire for depth and complication springing from his
ambition to discover mythic truths, with their status secured by their
profondeur in the depths of time or self. The intellectual vanity discernible
in the desire to discover profound truths by a pioneering exploration
of uncharted depths is apparent in the Wrst pages of the Cahiers,
where Artaud lays down a statement of intent in characteristically selfimportant and enticingly mysterious terms: ‘Il ne s’agit plus d’un voyage
au Pays des Tarahumaras ou en Irlande, mais d’un voyage plus chaotique et dramatique et qui [ . . . ] n’en traduit que mieux les spasmes
génésiques d’une pensée en pleine formation, en pleine essence, à ce
point crucial de l’explosion mentale où les mots du Verbe ne sont pas
encore issus, ni déjà nés’ (xv. 11). However rousing a note of promised
high drama Artaud might strike here, his ideas on the mind are far less
concerned with the potential purity of pre-verbal thought than with the
denaturing of thought by ‘le Verbe’. Whereas in the texts of the 1920s
and 1930s Artaud had pursued an ideal of pure thought for its truthcapturing properties, he now thinks in terms of liberating his mind from
the multitude of alienating forces that besiege it. Purity has become
equated to a paring-down.
In typical fashion, the decision to explore the undermind amounts to
its successful completion. The Cahiers oVer no phenomenological investigations into mind or self, only dramatized ‘revelations’. These inventive
theorizings suggest that the many outside forces exerted upon the self are
not impersonal but ‘êtres’, agents acting to fulWl their own desires.
Attaining selfhood is therefore not just a matter of maintaining the
integrity of the self in the face of the centripetal forces that arise from
7
The redeWnition of mind and self as porous is clearly logically prior to a diagnosis that
alienation results from God’s inWltration of Artaud’s inner space, but it is unclear in
Artaud’s writings which leads to the other. The anti-theology and the anti-philosophy
emerge and develop in tandem, and the two are still evolving in the Wnal texts of 1947
(Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu, Suppôts et Suppliciations, Artaud le Mômo).
156
a god-ridden artaud
the desiring, perceptual interaction with the world. These dispersing
forces are presented as scavenging agents scattering the self in a ‘bataille
entre le moi et le non-moi’ (NER 100). Artaud adds that these inner, alien
agents camouXage their presence by acting as if they were the natural,
non-alien substructures of the self: ‘cet eVarant problème du moi qui ne
veut jamais se rendre à lui-même, lui-même, parce qu’il ne cesse pas d’être
sans le savoir attiré par l’intrusion envahissante des choses, de toutes les
choses, qui ne sont pas lui et qui en lui essaient de se faire prendre pour
lui’ (NER 100). Conscious experience opens the door to devious agents
that, masquerading as the self, pollute and supplant it.
Abstract determining inXuences—the inevitable eVects of the desiring
and perceptual projections of self into world that are the basic stuV of
human experience—are thus presented by the Artaudian text as willing,
desiring, hostile, cunning agents bent on feeding on his consciousness
and identity. Artaud entertains an impossibly purist ideal of what would
constitute undetermined consciousness, for any interaction with the
world that aVects his sense of self is, eVectively, proscribed. Forces
exerted on the individual by the fact of being a consciousness in the
world are transformed by Artaud’s text into covert protagonists that
install themselves in his inner space and establish a stronghold in his
unconscious: ‘l’inconscient responsable des choses [ . . . ] voudrait bien que
nous le prenions toujours pour de l’inconscient alors qu’ [ . . . ] en dehors
de nous il sait très bien d’où il vient’ (xi. 48). The true reason Artaud has
no access to the unconscious is, he decides, because it is not really part of
him. Instead, it is either the consciousness of a speciWc other (God), or a
collective consciousness composed of the nexus of edicts, taboos, and
other determining forces issuing from society. In either case, this presence within him seeks to further the propagation of its own sphere of
inXuence at the expense of Artaud’s autonomy. ‘L’inconscient’ is the
term slipped into Artaud’s tongue to mask the presence of the other who,
by this trick, installs himself unnoticed within the mind and so enjoys
unchallengeable, as unsuspected, dominion: ‘cet inconscient qui serait,
paraı̂t-il, notre maı̂tre et qu’on nous refuse le droit d’accuser parce qu’on
nous dit que par nature il est de «l’inconscient»’ (xi. 48).8 Artaud transforms
the world of cerebration into a dramatic scenario in which a defenceless,
8
The whole is reminiscent of Artaud’s account of ‘envoûtement’, and in particular of a
variant he had developed near the beginning of his time at Rodez: ‘une forme d’envoûtement particulière qu’on appelle l’envoûtement en oubli pour l’enlever [ . . . ] de la conscience de [ . . . ] l’envoûté (x. 85). Unconscious activity is coming to be another name for
‘envoûtement’; in both cases the other takes hold of the self and also of the possibility of
being aware of this disappropriation.
a god-ridden artaud
157
virginal pure self is oVered up to a hellish army of malevolent societal and
transcendental forces that assail it from without and displace it from
within.
Artaud’s picture of everyday conscious activity is of the self deprived of
existence between the tyrannical linguistic ersatz ‘I’ and the equally
tyrannical and alien unconscious. But, despite all the alienating forces
arrayed within the mind, and despite the emphasis he famously places on
the body as the locus of identity, Artaud does not downgrade the mind’s
importance as a constituent of identity. Having made the integrity of
mental activity seem a chimera, he bluntly declares the need to eradicate
the unconscious: ‘Je n’accepte pas l’inconscient, je n’en veux absolument
pas en moi’ (xv. 23). A simple, non-alienating form of consciousness—the
form of consciousness that can be expressed only in the new form of
God-purged language his texts imagine—is to expand over the whole
inner space, and, when speaking as the reconstructed Artaud, he lays
claim to just such an unlimited consciousness: ‘je suis le maı̂tre absolu de
ma conscience et de mon inconscient et je fais ce qui me plaı̂t sans
attendre d’ordre ou de conseil de quelque force, de quelque esprit, ou de
quelque énergie ou sollicitation interne que ce soit’ (xvii. 44). Full,
unchallenged consciousness is claimed for the textual identity despite
the alienating and fragmenting forces let slip against Artaud by the
outside world and by God. Or, put diVerently, when Artaud is imagining
in his texts what it would mean to be wholly undetermined, it is clear this
would entail being without an unconscious, and so, when speaking in the
name of the textual subject (the Wgure Antonin Artaud), he states that in
this his textual universe the unconscious does not exist. Artaud’s consciousness is to Wll, permeate, and infuse his entire world, and this is
conceivable only if he creates that world—that is, in the world of the text.
But, instead of this imagined pure, omnipresent self-identity, the
conscious self for Artaud is an empty vessel Wlled by parasitic entities
the individual mistakes for himself:
ce qui croit toujours être l’être en réalité ne l’est plus et [ . . . ] le moi en se vivant
soi-même ne sait pas que c’est son propre vampire qui tient la place qu’il n’a plus.
Le double du théâtre c’est la vie, mais le double du moi et de l’être est une essence
imperceptible qui [ . . . ] induit l’être humain à ne vivre que sur le principe
inconscient des eYgies, des statues morales toutes moulées et toutes faites,
c’est-à-dire sans lutte avec les mystères de son esprit. Il est persuadé de penser
et vouloir et il ne s’aperçoit pas que c’est l’autre qui pense, sans même lui
demander son avis ou son choix [ . . . ] or tout cela c’est l’ennemi, c’est l’autre
car le moi c’est le non-manifesté, le vide. (xi. 45–6)
158
a god-ridden artaud
In a passage such as this, many of Artaud’s most characteristic stylistic
devices are to be found: the preference for reXexive and looped structures to describe the self (‘le moi en se vivant soi-même’), a similar
syntactically inelegant insistence on the word ‘être’, and the high frequency of binary structures (‘des eYgies, des statues morales’; ‘c’est
l’ennemi, c’est l’autre’; ‘le non-manifesté, le vide’). Artaud’s prose reenacts the process of doubling it decries. But this passage is unusual in
combining two accounts of alienation, writing both of the socio-linguistic
determination of the individual, and of the overarching ontological
alienation that is a given of human existence in a divine universe.9
Artaud makes no distinction here between the vampirism of his identity
by doubles, a metaphysical practice, and the internalization of discourse.
Both quash the possibility of autonomy and both have the same duping
eVect, viz. ‘ce qui croit [ . . . ] être l’être [ . . . ] ne l’est plus’. A collective or
divine other directs Artaud’s conscious existence, and, under this outside
control, the self is unaware that it brings about its own eclipse. Both the
individuated consciousness (the ‘moi’) and the bedrock conscious being
(‘l’être’)—the socio-linguistic being and the metaphysical entity—are
crowded out of existence by an ‘essence imperceptible’, which will later
be named as God but which here is also social doxa.
In the Rodez period, this socio-linguistic account normally plays a
secondary role to divinely imposed alienation, and it is only in such postinternment texts as Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société that it acquires equal
prominence. Nevertheless, if more characteristic of the late poetry,
Artaud fulminates in the Rodez writings against man’s cowardly refusal
to assume his full freedom and creativity and vents his anger at the
intellectual laziness of man when it comes to enquiring into his own
constitution (‘les mystères de son esprit’). Instead of grappling with
existence, man allows ready-made ideas to take over his nature. Man,
for Artaud, does not put his name to his own life but stumbles along in a
minimally conscious state, unthinkingly interpreting his own existence
through the conceptual apparatus of the inherited world view, and so the
self, unenquiringly submitting to social doxa, has become a shadow
yielding its place to the other. For the self to exist independently of this
omnipresent other requires a continually renewed tussle with the mind:
‘le moi devant chaque pensée doit se mériter et se gagner lui-même’
(xv. 19), but man has instead relinquished his space to an automaton,
mummiWed usurper-self: ‘[l’homme] aime mieux que l’automate des
9
The link between the two, other than the contamination of the individual by alterity, is
God as ‘le Verbe’.
a god-ridden artaud
159
limbes mène l’œuvre de son propre soi’ (xv. 20). Although ideas of limbo
are generally associated in the Artaudian text with the authentic self
banished to a form of sub-existence, here the ‘automate des limbes’ is the
socially inculcated self that reduces the subject’s experience of his own
subjecthood according to that which is readily sayable and thinkable.
Artaud therefore concludes these opening remarks of his Wrst notebook with the announcement of ‘la grande guerre qui sauvera notre
identité’ (xv. 20) to be waged against the mind, against orthodox discourse, against alienation within language, against God, and, most
importantly, against what passes as the self:
Nous croyons être nous et nous ne le sommes plus parce que nous ne nous
apercevons pas que ce qui faisait notre moi a été ravi dans les étoiles par celui
même qui se choisit en nous et que nous prenons comme le summum de nousmêmes, alors que c’est dans ce summum de nous-mêmes, dans cette énergétique
ineVable du moi qui nous méduse [ . . . ] qu’a lieu cette dénaturation [ . . . ] avec
une rapidité si subtile, un tour de passe si instantané que l’escamoteur a su se
dissimuler en nous-mêmes, être nous et penser pour nous. Et nous ne sommes
plus que ses propres porteurs. (xv. 20)
The substance of the self has been taken over by another. Our cherished
selves are actually not us at all; rather, they put themselves forward as
ours whilst violating our space (‘notre moi a été ravi [ . . . ] par celui
même qui se choisit en nous et que nous prenons comme le summum de
nous-mêmes’). This occurs in a domain outside our ken (‘dans les étoiles’)
and our lucidity is paralysed (‘médus[é]’) and cannot put what happens
into words. Artaud is convinced of his displacement from his own centre
by the forces of alterity, and this alienation explains why what we
commonly take for the self is unsayable, an ‘ineVable du moi’, for it is
not us at all. The high-level, mentalizing, reXexive, conscious self that we
normally designate when we speak of our own self—what Artaud later
mockingly calls ‘Monsieur Môa’, though even here the mockery is
partially directed against his own writing, which names the authentic
Artaud le Mômo (Mo-nsieur Mô-a)—is actually, it would seem, only the
most advanced outpost of the other entrenched in the unconscious.
Artaud continues the above passage with reference to subtlety, tricks,
and an ‘escamoteur’, and his account changes from a thick version of
socio-linguistic alterity to the rather diVerent proposition that alienation
occurs because of the intervention of a thieving other. The key closing
lines of this description strongly echo the texts of Correspondance avec
Jacques Rivière in their choice of terms, with the major diVerence that
now it is not words that are lost but the substance of the self that is
160
a god-ridden artaud
actively stolen. In a page—a page that stands at the head of the Cahiers—
man’s laziness in resisting the denaturing of thought by inherited discourse has been transformed into a usurper self, disguised as our own
highest manifestation, who precedes and displaces us until it is taken as
our highest reality. The account of divine theft of Artaud’s self (and, by
extension, his later account of body theft) is built on the foundations of
general socio-linguistic determination that has occupied him for some
time, but it is also generated by the redeployment of images originally
used twenty years earlier to describe Artaud’s particular sense of words
volatizing at the touch of his mind. It is ironic that the leading idea of one
complaining of the determining force exerted by the other within language should in fact be nourished and moulded by his own past words.
For from here it is but a small step to state that it is ‘Dieu qui me
vampirisait’ (xv. 251). All that needs to be done is to equate God with the
unconscious (‘notre inconscient: dieu’ (xi. 90)), and He thereby falls
under the critique of the undermind. Under Artaud’s pen, God revels
in the inescapable control He thereby exercises over Artaud’s mind:
‘l’esprit qui avait bu ma conscience voulait toujours régner à la place
du moi et me disait: Tu n’a pas d’âme, ni de détermination puisque je
suis, moi, Dieu, ton déterminant’ (xvi. 283). God reigns supreme in
Artaud’s mind, always in position, unfailingly ready to catch Artaud’s
Xow of experience and put it to His own use. This Divine presence not
only controls Artaud’s mental space; in drinking the Xow of Artaud’s
consciousness He lives Artaud’s life in his place, for: ‘Au-dessus de la
psychologie d’Antonin Artaud il y a la psychologie d’un autre j qui vit,
boit, mange, dort, pense et rêve dans mon corps’ (xiv**. 71). God has
taken over from where Artaud should be; He has become Artaud’s self.
On the evidence of the Cahiers, though this does not transpire in the
texts intended for publication, the basic reason behind the redeWnition of
God as Artaud’s inner colonizer is that He is bodiless and so in need of a
place to bring Himself into existence.10 For Artaud, all existence in the
world, including God’s, is conceivable only with a bodily support:
‘Qu’est-ce que c’est pour un être que d’être? C’est avoir corps et se
sentir corps dans l’espace’ (xv. 160). There is no such thing as a necessary
being (the Scholastic deWnition of God), only incarnate being:
10
By the time of the Wnal texts, Artaud’s account has taken on a life of its own and God
has acquired a body. In the most famous of the passages referring to the theft of his body by
God, Artaud describes how ‘ce corps j qui poursuivait [ . . . ] le mien j [ . . . ] naquit j par
l’éventration de mon corps’ (‘Je n’admets pas’, 108–9).
a god-ridden artaud
161
l’être n’a pas de corps,
c’est l’homme,
.
.
qui a un corps,
l’être n’est qu’un mot.
(xiii. 283)11
But the God of the Western tradition is by deWnition bodiless (as Artaud
reminds himself: ‘l’Être Absolu n’a pas de corps’ (xv. 160)) and so must
take possession of human bodies if He is to exist in the world. God, and
the host of non-physical entities that do His handiwork, of which the soul
is only the most obvious instance, are nothing other than metaphysical
vampires: to feed their existential appetites they take possession of an
identity space and thereby its bodily support. All that is not incarnate is
therefore a threat to integrity: ‘Croyant se vivre eux-mêmes [les mois] ils
ne s’apercoivent pas que c’est leur vampire, leur ennemi, cet autre qui
s’est toujours voulu eux-mêmes et qui n’ayant pas de corps a pris le leur
pour être, qui tient la place où ils s’imaginent encore vivre’ (xv. 19).
Mental space and physical space are, for Artaud, indissociable, and this
is why the account of God’s possession of the mind so rapidly spreads out
into the charge that God steals Artaud’s body. If ‘le Verbe’ exists in the
mind, it thereby exists in the body.
So, to schematize the shifts in Artaud’s thought, the account of God as
prime agent of doubling arises from a mythologization of socio-linguistic
determination that culpabilizes God because of His status as ‘le Verbe’.
The Wrst step of the anti-theology therefore concerns only God’s invisible
presence within the linguistic order. The second step is a hostile interpretation of the concept ‘God’, where Artaud privileges the disembodied
nature of God over the necessity of His existence and in this way hardens
the account of Divine shadowing into one of Divine body-theft. Here it is
both mind and body that are aVected. Artaud would seem to arrive at his
extraordinary reinvention of God as body thief by something akin to the
following, typically unreasonable logic: to wield power in this world God
must be in this world, and to be in this world, he is, Artaud decides,
dependent upon mankind’s making room for Him in their lives, and this
making room for Him is actually a question of lending one’s identity space
to God. All space, including mental space, is also physical space, and so
God exists in the human body. So the story of God, though a formidably
11
By this stage God has been demoted to a lower-case letter (‘dieu’). By extension, when
He is referred to as Being Artaud uses the lower case. Therefore this quotation refers both
to general and to the Divine being.
162
a god-ridden artaud
extravagant univers imaginaire, retains the Wrm imprint of traditional theological and philosophical ideas, and the account of Divine vampirism may
be arrived at by something resembling a process of extrapolation from
these orthodox ideas. It is, for Artaud, a matter of calling things by their
proper name, not a matter of mud slinging, to state that God is ‘le voleur
éternel’ (xv. 177), for He has only ever existed by dispossessing humanity.
By a further slippage typical of Artaud’s thought process of highly
selective (thus unchecked) exaggeration, the cupidity of God is such that
He does not just wish to possess Artaud’s space but actively desires to
replace Artaud: ‘Dieu est autre chose, il est ce qui veut être soi’ (xvi. 169).
The struggle to possess Artaud’s body space is a matter of life or limbo,
since neither Artaud nor God can exist fully without that space. God’s
existence is, therefore, not just contingent on others; He can exist only at
the expense of human existence: ‘Dieu n’a jamais rien fait pour moi que
de m’enlever la vie pour la donner à ses passions’ (xv. 211). Artaud is left
only a form of existential residue: ‘L’être en soi sorti lui de moi-même
non-être n’a jamais voulu autre chose que me donner à manger ses
excréments et me faire vouloir les manger’ (xv. 98). This idea is further
exaggerated, until Artaud’s God is not just a thieving other but a
libidinous vampire who ‘nous désire pour nous avaler et nous reprendre
notre moi’ (xv. 146). God’s libidinous desires may be directed towards a
brutish, crapulent sexual possession of Artaud’s body: ‘dieu a dit [ . . . ] je
trouverai bien [ . . . ] le moyen de resurgir à [s]a place [ . . . ] après avoir
bité, glotté, j luthé, limé’ (xiv**. 12); or alternatively towards lodging in
Artaud’s pudenda and thus both satisfying His desire for abjection and,
by the erotic rites He practises on Artaud, threatening Artaud’s virginal
purity: ‘j’ai inventé cela, moi, être, d’avoir instauré cet infâme, qui est de
prendre place dans ton propre cu, j [ . . . ] moi j prince dans ton vit’ (xxv.
211). The origins of the negative theology, God’s performative language
and inadvertently alienating presence within Artaud’s language, have
been left far behind. God is now the perpetrator of demonic, salacious
aggression on Artaud’s defenceless body.
But why should Artaud, once he relinquishes his Christian beliefs,
develop so complicated a negative theology rather than simply drop God
from his world view? It seems a perverse and cantankerous way of
thinking (and smacks of the persecution complex from which he was
diagnosed as suVering). It is largely attributable to the fact that, though
Artaud rejects the idea of a benevolent God, he still retains many of
the thought patterns of Gnosticism, in particular the idea that alienation
in the world may be traced to a catastrophic beginning. Only the
a god-ridden artaud
163
catastrophe is no longer the cosmogenic but his personal origin. Especially in the texts written for publication after his release from Rodez,
birth is presented as a Wght for possession of the infant’s body:
celui qui naı̂t ne se croit pas seul à naı̂tre,
car il voit combien d’autres
.
.
.
.
essayent
.
.
.
.
de se faire,
à cette occasion,
un corps.
(xiv**. 21–2)
By now it is not just God but God and the many ‘êtres’ that sweep along
behind him who seek to come to life in the infant’s body. God has
become a multiple being, and when Artaud asks himself: ‘qu’est-ce que
dieu?’, the answer is: ‘Le consortium du rassemblement universel j de
toutes les paresses j et de tous le lâchêtés.’12 This sprawling, multiple, allthieving bully of a God pillages and ravishes human bodies. His existence resides upon an ‘innéité volée’,13 and this essential ‘unbornliness’
means he has to steal Artaud’s birth. The true story of Artaud’s origin is:
[ . . . ] celle de ce corps
qui poursuivait (et ne suivait pas) le mien
et qui pour passer premier et naı̂tre
se projeta à travers mon corps
et
naquit
par l’éventration de mon corps
dont il garda un morceau sur lui
aWn
de se faire passer
pour moi-même
.
.
.
[ . . . ] se sachant irrecevable
et voulant vivre quand même à tout prix
[le Démiurge] ne trouva rien de mieux
pour être
que de naı̂tre au prix de
mon assassinat.14
12
13
14
Artaud, ‘L’être a des états innombrables’, 107.
Artaud, ‘Main d’ouvrier et Main de singe’, K, 1–2 (1948), 3.
Artaud, ‘Je n’admets pas’, 108–9.
164
a god-ridden artaud
By the time he writes this in 1948 it is clear the divine displacement of
Artaud is no accident but a deliberate pursuit, which is enacted in the
syllables hurriedly jostling one another to squeeze into the rhythm (‘qui
poursuivait (et ne suivait pas) le mien’). The stepping page layout of ‘aWn j
de se faire passer’ underlines the methodical intent driving towards the
purchase of ‘être’ at the price of ‘assassinat’, both of which are set into
relationships of equivalence by their indentation to birth (‘naquit’) and
masquerade (‘de se faire passer’). Given that God can exist only by
sexually possessing Artaud’s body or by inWltrating it, he is compared to
an avaricious and lazy parasite: ‘Dieu est un microbe intelligent et qui
hait l’être et ne veut jamais payer pour être lui alors qu’il faut toujours
payer pour être soi’ (xvi. 167). Being means being body and God has
refused to undergo the suVering of bodily existence, delegating bodily
suVering to humankind, as the reprise of ‘pour être . . . pour être’ insists,
whilst reaping the ontological beneWts for himself. The list of accusations
against the cowardly God who prefers to sneak into this world as an
immaterial parasite in Artaud’s body goes on and on, running from the
earliest Cahiers to the latest texts of Suppôts et Suppliciations. Artaud Wnds that
God is always present: ‘le parasite dieu est sur moi et me suit, j et me suit,
partout où suppura ma vie’ (xiv**. 12). He is an ineradicable (‘et me suit, j
et me suit’) doubling menace and the alpha and the omega of Artaud’s
problems: ‘mon ennemi Premier et Dernier c’est Dieu [ . . . ] le non-être
qui veut toujours se reposer dans son inexistence de lâcheté’ (xv. 267–8).
The Gnostic origins and (comparatively) careful theologizing have
been all but overwritten, and Artaud’s negative theology has taken on
a life of its own. His thought propels itself forward to ever more provocative and blasphemous ideas and displays a calculated recklessness
with regard to what socio-cultural orthodoxy deems may and may not be
said. God aVords Artaud the ideal topic to contravene cultural edicts and
be as indecorous as possible. This is evident when Artaud expands the
story to claim that, once God has taken hold of Artaud’s body, He takes
up residence in his rectum:
La main de singe [ . . . ]
.
.
.
.
[ . . . ] n’a jamais voulu travailler,
mais vivait
du prix de ma douleur entière
que dans mon grand côlon elle ramonait
.
.
.
.
que dans sa paume elle retient,
a god-ridden artaud
165
en ramenant du cimitière,
tout c’que t’avais
dans le derrière.
(xiv**. 65)
Veering towards a semi-sensical taunt of playground rhythms and
rhymes, the Artaudian text compounds the crimes against good taste,
and the texts are all the more provocative for the conjunction of blasphemy and puerility. But beneath this surface of what can now, like
Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God, seem outmoded shock
tactics and facile sacrilege, is an important issue at stake: the right to
invent the story of God according to Artaud. In the textual universe
plotted out in his late writings, the concept ‘dieu’ may be redeWned at
will, in such a way as to guarantee the eventual autonomy and independence of the textual identity (the Wgure) Antonin Artaud.15
Equally, in terms of Artaud’s reconceptualizing of onto-theological
categories, the importance of these insulting deWnitions of God as parasite, microbe, thieving monkey, and even, in Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de
dieu, as pubic louse (xiii. 86), lies not in their common viliWcation and
belittling of God, but in the fact that the parasitism of God implies that
He is ontologically secondary: ‘c’est l’être qui t’a fait Dieu et non toi,
avant lui tu ne l’étais pas’ (xv. 26). God’s bodiless nature has, by a process
of slippage and inference, come to mean that Artaud is First Principle.
This sort of intensely imagized conceptualizing is highly characteristic of
the later Artaud. A property of an abstract concept is foregrounded and
overly weighted in comparison to the other properties of that concept. In
this instance, the fact that God is not incarnate is taken to be His deWning
characteristic. Then an imagistic interpretation based on a conceptual
leap is established. God is not incarnate, so He needs and desires to have
body, a body, Artaud’s body. The overly weighted property of not having
body thus slips to God being a parasite. Then the implications of this
Wrmly established image are spelt out: if God is a parasite, then His
existence depends upon the body of others, and so the body is ontologically prior to the transcendent Godhead: ‘Mon corps [ . . . ] eut toujours
toute primauté sur l’esprit et l’intelligence de Dieu’ (xv. 198). By implication, this means that Being in the world is ontologically prior to divine
15
Although the blasphemy of Suppôts et Suppliciations can seem now puzzlingly overzealous rather than shocking, at the time it caused the book to be turned down by its agreed
publisher, as Thévenin writes: ‘Devant [ . . . ] la violence du contenu qui, nous le tenons de
sa propre bouche, a provoqué chez lui une crise de conscience religieuse, Louis Broder
renonce à le publier’ (xiv*. 231 n.).
166
a god-ridden artaud
being: ‘Dieu est une Faculté de l’être et non pas l’être une création de
Dieu’ (xv. 321). And, if God exists through man and not man through
God, then this implies that it is the human mind that subtends and
supports the reality that God claims to be of His making: ‘C’est
l’homme [ . . . ] qui pense, qui fait, qui invente et qui trouve, c’est l’esprit
de l’homme qui peut tout, celui de Dieu n’est que son suceur’ (xvi. 317).
By this process of gradual conceptual slippage God Wrst becomes Artaud,
and Artaud then takes on the status and powers of God:
‘C’est moi, j l’Homme j qui serai le juge j en Wn de compte j c’est à moi j que
tous les éléments j du corps et des choses j viendront s’en référer j c’est l’état de
mon j corps qui fera j le Jugement Dernier.’16
This is Artaud’s typical way of thinking where, if each shift from one
analogy to the next seems comprehensible, the aggregate slippage is
extravagant (this explains why the reader feels the coherence to be eery).
God has become Artaud’s double, not just in the sense that He exists
in this world by a ghostly overlaying of Artaud’s space, but in the sense
that He resembles Artaud, or rather is what Artaud should have been. It
is not man who exists in God’s image, He exists in Artaud’s image:
[ . . . Dieu] n’a d’autre issue, pour vivre,
que de vivre en reXet de moi,
me jouant cette entourloupette ensuite, de me dire:
«C’est toi qui doubles,
c’est toi le double et non pas moi.»
(xiv**. 70)
The unsubtle repetition of ‘vivre’ and dual usage of ‘double’ as noun and
verb, linked phonically to the nasty little trick, turn God’s behaviour into
a gauchely obvious move. But why should Artaud set up God as his
double as opposed to his usurper? Once, following Goodall’s lead, the
Gnostic conception of God is taken into consideration, then the logic
behind this suddenly comes into focus. In the Gnostic Gospels the
original God is deWned as primordial self-presence: ‘He alone is the
one who knows himself as he is [ . . . ] and has the ability to conceive of
himself, to see himself, to name himself, he alone is the one who is his
own mind, his own eye, his own mouth, and who is what he thinks, what
he sees, what he speaks.’17 These feats of mental, cognitive, and bodily
self-coincidence are precisely what Artaud plans for his textual identity.
‘C’est moi’, 84, 5–6 (1948), 131.
Quoted in Goodall, Artaud and the Gnostic Drama, 9. From ‘The Tripartite Tractate’,
trans. Harold W. Attridge and Dieter Muller, in The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. James M.
Robinson (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 58–103.
16
17
a god-ridden artaud
167
By claiming, or imagining, that God stole his place at birth, all that needs
to be done to attain perfect self-presence (for his textual identity) is to
reappropriate in his own name the identity space and associated attributes that are his by right. DeWning the God of his textual universe as He
who steals Artaud’s place is therefore an indirect way of securing the
authentic Artaud’s self-identity, for it makes perfect self-presence (the
textual) Artaud’s true, original nature. Artaud invents an account of his
original moment that in one bold stroke both explains his alienation and
guarantees his self-identity (that is, the self-identity of his textual identity).
On the one hand, then, Artaud’s God is removed from the textual
reality, a ‘non-être’. On the other, God is very much present in this
textual world, inWltrating Artaud’s body, taking possession of it in order
to bring Himself to life. The ambivalence of God’s status is not speciWc to
the Cahiers, in which Artaud is working out his ideas on God, but runs
through to the latest texts intended for publication. It is never deWnitively
settled whether God is the First Principle or a parasite dependent upon
Artaud to have any existence, although, given that Artaud’s writings are
supposed to fulWl the function of eradicating God from their textual
universe, his parasitism is increasingly emphasized over his primacy. At
times God is at the heart of a superior, other-worldly untarnished Being,
Artaud expelled into vitiated this-worldly reality (‘pourquoi m’a-t-il
expulsé, moi. L’Autre, l’éternel Aliéné de Tout qui ne touche à rien et
à quoi rien ne touche’ (xv. 239)). Far more frequently, Artaud is at the
heart of a prized this-worldly being, and so God tries to vampirize
Artaud in order to acquire ontological presence. At yet other times,
God successfully steals Artaud’s position at the heart of this-worldly
being, and Artaud is banished to a netherworld. Finally, at times God
is allowed foursquare presence within this-worldly reality, but this contaminates Him with the abjection and alienation inherent to this-worldly
existence; in this case God insanely abandons his place of perfect selfpresence and so becomes the object of Artaud’s scorn. God, then, is at
times bodiless, and at times vicariously incarnate; at times cowardly
sheltering in a transcendental haven, at times resplendent in the halo
of transcendentally guaranteed self-presence; at times a blundering and
inept thief prowling around outside Artaud’s space, at times the furtive
usurper gleefully evicting Artaud into ontological outer darkness.
Artaud’s accounts of God are many and contradictory, but He is at all
times and in all places responsible for Artaud’s sense of alienation. And
what needs to be retained is that the variations do not undermine the
indictment of God; they render it universal.
168
a god-ridden artaud
So, despite all the viliWcation of God and the many pronouncements
declaring the absolute necessity of being rid of Him, Artaud maintains
God in his textual universe. Artaud cannot get rid of God without
depriving his thought of its supporting structure, and so ironically
Artaud’s ideas on God depend parasitically on the theology they desecrate. This is one of the fundamental tensions controlling Artaud’s later
thought, which is a heroic eVort (or so it seems from inside Artaud’s
textual world—from the outside it seems hugely laboured) to free himself
from conceptual dependency on God. The conceptual tentacles of God
have bonded with so much of the Western world view that it is a supreme
undertaking just to identify and isolate His presence. God is so insidious
a threat for Artaud, He has inWltrated Himself so extensively and subtly
across the conceptual landscape that Artaud can only gesture towards
the sort of textual world it would be if God were ever eradicated at some
future time. Not only is God a parasite in bodies; He is a parasite in
conceptual frameworks:
Pourquoi dieu?
Parce que cette idée n’a cessé de s’évertuer à impregner
la conscience humaine [ . . . ] comme un écran
entre moi et moi.
(xiv**. 199)
God is so ever-present as to be almost invisible, and the only way that
Artaud can detect His presence is by the fact that he has not yet achieved
self-elision and self-closure—that there remains something between
‘moi’ and ‘moi’. This is why half of the 2,000 or so Rodez notebook
pages are given over to a new revelation of the alienating God. Whilst it
would be generally admitted that the concept of ‘God’ has placed its seal
on our world view, Artaud takes this with a new seriousness. If the
removal of God is always something to be done and never something
Artaud claims to have done, this is no inconsistency but instead the most
important point about God’s removal: it is an unthinkably radical
project. Just as the identity that Artaud is creating is perpetually deferred, so is the doing-away with God: ‘Je ne veux pas que Dieu descende
dans l’homme mais que l’homme élimine Dieu toujours’ (xv. 219, emphasis added). The one cannot occur without the other: ‘Je n’ai pas de
ligne vraie ou fausse, ma ligne est de tuer Dieu éternellement [ . . . ] Cela
est mon idée mère’ (xv. 49). The labour of self-creation is one with that of
being rid of God. And, by deWnition, Artaud can never get beyond the
stage of announcing that he is writing ‘pour en Wnir’, for otherwise he
a god-ridden artaud
169
would be compelled to provide a textual representation of his self (and
representation is precisely what deWnes the vitiated order of Divine
being). The elimination of God and manifestation of the self are inseparable in Artaud’s textual activity—or performance—and such a dual
conception of writing as an eradicating and a creating shifts the emphasis
away from the production of a textual object, helping Artaud to conceive
of his end-goal as something to be deferred and staved oV. This is why
even the postscriptum of the collection of texts of the same name is
couched in that peculiar Artaudian tense that one might call the prophetic future (xiii. 118).
In the light of the rather hysterical propheticism, how is Artaud’s
account of God’s thieving and vampiric activity to be taken? Certainly
his thought exceeds anything that belongs to the disciplines of philosophy or theology. In the following example a simplistic parody of syllogistic thinking is combined with an even more infantile delight in
transgressing linguistic taboos:
Là où ça sent la merde
ça sent l’être
.
.
.
Dieu est-il un être?
S’il en est un c’est de la merde.
S’il n’en est pas un
il n’est pas.
Or il n’est pas.
(xiii. 83–5)
Artaud takes a primitive pleasure in besmearing the conceptually complex realm of theology with the scatological. Yet, if the language and the
adaptation of philosophical and theological ideas may be crude, it would
be a mistake to deny that the Artaudian text engages conceptually with
theology. As we have seen, Artaud exacerbates, by a process of exaggerations and associative thinking, one of the most fundamental tensions
within Christianity: the primacy accorded to the Incarnation, on the one
hand, against the removal of God from the abjecting realities of corporeality, on the other. But equally, once the basic conceptual enquiries
have been conducted in the early Cahiers, it is important to recognize that
it is rhetoric and language that drive Artaud’s thought along. Even
though the invention of systems of ideas and imaginary philosophies of
being can seem an unliterary undertaking, it is just as great a mistake to
neglect the high literarity of Artaud’s texts and see them as merely
170
a god-ridden artaud
delusional metaphysics. The Cahiers fuse word-wielding and conceptwielding, and the Wnal collections play with the resultant notions, do so
for the earnest purpose of writing a new myth of the self, yet subvert their
own pretensions. Late Artaud is seriously playful.
Artaud’s late texts, and particularly his writing against God, subvert
classiWcation. They go against our expectation that serious works be staid
in their language and wear their serious status with dignity. The sheer
pleasure the texts take in violent language and in rolling in ‘la merde’ set
them apart from standard speculative thinking about big existential
questions. Artaud does away with the garde-fous deployed by theorizing,
for to his way of thinking they mean we cannot forget that the text is
never, however brave its speculations, anything greater than (armchair)
philosophizing. Artaud, on the contrary, makes his imaginative speculations feel real. On the whole, the best working hypothesis is to consider
that Artaud’s texts do not truly purport to describe reality (that is,
elaborate a delusional philosophy), but rather are concerned with working out an imaginary and dramatized textual world and presenting this
as if it were reality (that is, inventing a Wctional philosophy). The text
might present the ideas on God as real, but this is not evidence that
Artaud believes himself to be describing reality. On the contrary, it shows
that this is a textual world where his word is indisputably law. The Cahiers
oVer a textual universe, not a journal intime of Artaud’s delusions, and the
anti-God account is the central plank of the univers imaginaire elaborated
in the Cahiers as a habitat for an equally imaginary textual identity.
‘Artaud’ and ‘God’ do not purport to point to extratextual entities but
are instead somewhere between character names and concepts structuring the mythic, textual world of Artaud’s writing. Unless we make room
for the textual fun and games within our reading, we are liable to a
fundamental misprision of Artaud’s texts. If these are narrative and
conceptual systems, they are not doctrines but ludic Wctions compelled
towards extravagance and rhetorical overwriting.
This hypothesis seems to hold good for most of the time, and yet
Artaud’s ideas on God still eventually Wnish by resisting attempts to
inscribe them within the realm of imaginative but ultimately reasonable
discourse. The very realness of the anger against God places a question
mark over whether Artaud is indeed theorizing or whether he is not
simply ranting and raving against a real God who, in reality, does indeed
assault and steal the living Artaud’s body:
[ . . . ] tu as voulu me faire baiser,
dieu?
a god-ridden artaud
171
et le rond de tes basses fesses
bougre d’anus
de vieil anus
trou tonsuré.
Bougre de vieil anus tonsuré,
et le rond de tes basses fesses,
et le cercle de ton âme en perce
bougre de vieux tonneau percé
et le cercle de ta raleure,
ton âme de tonneau percé,
l ’a m e
que tu voulus me reWler
de fond de ton anus en perce
bougre de vieux trou tonsuré
et le rond de tes basses fesses.18
And so on. Hatred takes on an incantatory power and the text gets
caught up in its own cycle and epicycles of invective. The text is as if
hypnotized by the enemy God it has conjured up and becomes a psalm
of denunciation, a cycle of permutations on its own furious rhetoric as
Artaud succumbs to the force of his own Wctions. What starts out as a
rewriting of the concept ‘God’ becomes an unstoppable pouring-out of
hatred and contempt for a Divine Being, and the literary invention of an
imagined textual world gives way to a hurling of abuse at an imagined
adversary. Although for most of the time Artaud’s texts are an angry,
contemptuous refusal of conceptual orthodoxy and ideational unimaginativeness, the urge to spit out his anger and provocations is
never far from taking over. A carefully choreographed conceptual war
dance opposing ‘Artaud’ to ‘God’ threatens to subside into a phantasmal
slanging match between the ‘real’ Artaud and God.
There is, then, an ambivalence to Artaud’s story of God. On the one
hand, it is possible to see it as both well grounded in Artaud’s thought
about the self and making a fair point that the concept ‘God’ has exerted
a determining inXuence over the development of Western thought on
questions of identity, and so, overall, as a carefully plotted attack
launched from the realms of theology against traditional ways of thinking
of identity. On the other hand, there are moments when the text presents
the damning story of God as hard facts about reality. Artaud repeatedly
and subversively zigzags back and forth across the zone separating
radical thinking from phantasmal self-delusion. Artaud’s writing against
18
‘Main d’ouvrier et Main de singe’, 4–5.
172
a god-ridden artaud
God is a conceptual and a rhetorical system where rhetoric increasingly
takes over from conceptualizing. Nevertheless, the ideas display a surprising and unnerving coherence of thrust, despite their many extravagances and contradictions. Yet again, despite this coherence, the
extravagances eventually prove too strong and Artaud’s texts leave
behind anything to which one would reasonably subscribe even as a
ludic metaphor for feelings of ontological lack. Perhaps Artaud’s writing
against God is best seen as a form of metaphysical myth, conducted with
a frenzied rhetoric of abjection. It combines a high conceptualizing
mode with an unsophisticated desire for profanity, mingling the sacred
with eZuvia and faeces, and this Xitting between high and low modes
constitutes a challenge to the ethic of Western thinking. But, despite the
greedy delectation it takes in naming God’s depraved activities with a
mincing, false prudishness, and despite the voluptuously gleeful savouring of rolling the language of ‘caca’, ‘cu’, and ‘sperme’ on the tongue,
Artaud’s writing against God is not a purely linguistic performance. Its
ludic narrative theorizings build an imaginary world through which
Artaud is vicariously to know self-identity by hewing structures of his
own out of the Xux of language. More striking ultimately than the ideas,
though, is the balance struck by the writing between diVerentiation and
blurring, which dissolves and reconstitutes conceptual structures in a
poetic solution.
7
A SIMPLE ARTAUD
Je suis ce que je suis et je me sers de la voix de ce corps pour parler,
pour l’instant j’en ai une autre, vous l’entendrez bientôt
(xvi. 54)
Perhaps light feet are even an integral part of the concept ‘god’.1
Of all Artaud’s images, it is that of his ideal existential state, the corps sans
organes, that has proved the most intriguing to critics. Deleuze and
Guattari, for instance, in their challenge to received Freudian opinion
L’Anti-Œdipe (1972), accord it such prominence that it is honoured with
the iconoclastically lower-case acronym cso. The mould-breaking corps
sans organes, if less widely known than Proust’s time-bridging madeleine or
Sartre’s world-disintegrating tree root, has, like these, migrated from
French literary studies to general cultural discourse. Nevertheless, what
Artaud has to say about the corps sans organes has been only hastily
examined, even by Artaud criticism. It has outgrown its author and
the speciWc environment of his late poems, which are selectively interpreted in order to tally with the iconoclastic work the image is made to
do. Artaud’s admirers have been quick to acclaim the corps sans organes as
a truly revolutionary act of conceptual deWance in the face of the
squeamishness of Western culture when it comes to the undigniWed
facts and sheer messiness of bodily existence. Artaud is a pioneering
champion of the body, they say, reintroducing the shit, sperm, blood,
and urine of bodily existence back into discourse about identity. This
prevalent view of Artaud as anarchiste couronné of abjection and straighttalking, unabashed writer of the visceral and the Xeshly, Wnds conWrmation in the Xood of bodily Xuids that circulate as copiously in his Cahiers as
they did around the life story of Héliogabale in the extraordinary Wrst
line of that eponymous Wction: ‘S’il y a autour du cadavre d’Héliogabale
[ . . . ] une intense circulation de sang et d’excréments, il y a eu autour de
son berceau une intense circulation de sperme’ (vii. 13). Further evidence
for this view is aVorded by the numerous and varied anatomical redistributions that Artaud details in his textual labour pains set out in the
1
174
a simple artaud
Cahiers, and, as if this were not suYcient corroboration, a cursory glance
at Artaud’s drawings reveals a nightmarish gallery of disjointed, holed,
suVering bodies.
But things are rarely this clear-cut with Artaud’s writings, and the
misconception that sees the Artaudian text as an unambiguous celebration of inner bodily Xows is symptomatic of the fact that his later writings
are more talked about than read. The corps sans organes is certainly the
centrepiece of the late poems. It makes its enigmatic appearance in Pour
en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu,2 yet the seven-eighths of Artaud’s observations on bodily existence are to be found in the summative Suppôts et
Suppliciations, written between mid-1946 and late 1947. This extraordinary collection is composed of three parts: an opening 40 pages of brief
snippets drawn from the Cahiers; 100 pages of letters written mainly from
the asylum of Rodez; and 150 pages of poems.3 These are the peak of
Artaud’s interpretation of reality and it is here that his ideas on God,
alienation, ‘envoûtement’, motility, and the body are poetically fused.
Despite the tensions within each unstable notion, in Suppôts et Suppliciations Artaud elaborates a larger account hovering above them, centred
on the idea of an auto-generating, dynamic, simple body. The texts
frequently contradict each other about the new body, a consequence of
the ambivalence of the earlier ideas from which it issues, and, whilst it is
possible to discern a comparatively stable pattern of ideas on a corps sans
organes, the picture that emerges has many incoherences. Yet, irrespective
of its complications, the presence of the corps sans organes is—with the
exception of Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société—felt throughout all Artaud’s
major late works, directing his writing on other topics and lending an
elastic architecture to his system of ideas.
Yet, whilst it is clearly true that the body is ever-present in Artaud’s
Wnal creative phase, it is not so clear that he is celebrating and aYrming
it. Certainly the Artaudian text revels in an orgy of vilifying descriptions
of the abject human body: it is a ‘sale carne galeuse, bondée de rats et de
vieux pets’ (xiv**. 54), composed of ‘[l]a viandasse de carne grayasse’
(xiv**. 107), little more than a leaking assemblage ‘fait de viande et de
sperme fou’ (xii. 78). It is a ‘sale corps, pourri, taré, plein de sarcoptes, j
vert de pustules’ (xiv**. 54), equivalent to ‘la barbaque j bien crottée et
2
The expression ‘corps sans organes’ appears only once (xiii. 104), but Artaud writes at
some length in this collection about a new conception of the body. Corps sans organes has
become the accepted term for the new body Artaud conceives in his Wnal texts.
3
His Cahiers contain a far greater wealth of writing on the body than Suppôts et Suppliciations, but in the notebooks it is primarily an imagining of the speciWcs of the new anatomy,
whereas the late poems oVer reXections on the implications of bodily existence for selfhood.
a simple artaud
175
mirée j dans le cu d’une poule j morte et désirée’ (xii. 29), reduced to
sphincters and Xeshly tumescences: ‘Cette langue entre quatre gencives,
k cette viande entre deux genoux, j ce morceau de trou’ (xii. 14–15). This
is shock writing of the Wrst order, writing the nasty unwritten facts about
the sexual, digestory, death-bound workhouse body back into literary
discourse. But this Wlthy, diseased, oriWce-ridden, libidinous lump of
putrid, smelly Xesh convulsed by a cataract of abject Xuids is not at all
what Artaud has in mind when he puts forward the body as the locus of
identity. This, rather, is the way he characterizes the God-given deWling
body: ‘Dieu [ . . . ] a fait cet ignoble corps traı̂tre qui m’empoisonne
depuis toujours’ (xvi. 202), causing his sense of alienation. The body in
which Artaud Wnds himself (or rather fails to Wnd himself) treacherously
allows God to inWltrate and steal it, and so, whilst Artaud does indeed
write at length and with great provocative force on the lower bodily
functions and their attendant liquids, he does not glorify them. Lower
bodily functions and Xuids are instead associated with the dispossession
of his identity to which the corps sans organes is the supposed remedy.
Artaud is in fact deeply prudish about bodies: he might insist on the
messiness of bodily existence, on sexualization, on excretion, and on the
lowly Xuidic sub-life of the body, but he cannot bring himself to accept
that bodily life is like this. Instead he follows tradition in considering this
sub-life to be abjecting, and his texts, however much they enjoy touting
bodily Xows, actually banish it from the perfect bodily state. The corps
sans organes, whilst undoubtedly body, is a very unbodily kind of body. If
we turn to his texts, we Wnd it is a body stripped bare, disembowelled and
rendered dumb to the solicitations of the senses, a body without Xesh and
oriWces, and in the closing stages of his writing it even tends towards an
impervious surface with no depth or innards. The body as a pure,
virginal surface through which nothing passes is far removed from bodily
experience. It seems to have more in common with transcendental
noumena than with incarnate existence. The littering of initially puzzling
statements where Artaud speaks, for example, of the need: ‘aller vers
l’insurrection éternelle âme corps, et corps en corps par âme, âme sur
âme comme corps sur corps’ (xi. 101) make more (rhetorical) sense once
the marked kinship between soul-like entities and Artaud’s new bodily
form is appreciated. The account that sees Artaud as glorifying lower
bodily Xuids and the wondrous Xeshliness of human existence does not
stand up to scrutiny. He is horriWed by it and at times wishes instead for
the body to become soul: ‘L’âme est corps, et le corps est âme aussi, mais
non de côté limitable du corps, mais de celui illimité de l’âme’ (xi. 101).
176
a simple artaud
Although Artaud might not deify the body in the way commonly
supposed, he does deify it in a far more literal sense: ‘Il faut que Dieu
arrive à être parfait non comme Dieu mais comme un homme [ . . . ] j
Mais l’homme Dieu ne ressemblera en rien à celui de cette terre car il
sera inWniment plus dense et plus vrai’ (xv. 320). The new body is not just
a soul-like body, it is a Godlike body in its ontological density and
authenticity. Artaud’s body is to take over the role of archetypal existence. And, whilst this Godlike status is to be generated by a new
corporeality, the kind of identity to which Artaud aspires within this
new bodily form is most strongly characterized by its ethereality and
purity. Artaud’s idea of a new body Xows from his account of God’s theft
of his body, and the true crisis provoked by this body-theft is not the
abjection it imposes on Artaud’s body, but the fact that it denatures his
consciousness and leaves no room for him to bring his inner identity to
fruition. In other words, the bodily crisis triggered oV by God’s theft of
Artaud’s body is incidental. The true issue at stake in Artaud’s account,
both for him and for God, is identity. So, despite extensive talk about
bodies, they are in fact valued only for what it is possible to do in them,
not valued in themselves. The stolen body is only a support structure, not
the prize. What counts is consciousness. If the human anatomy is to be
reconceived, it is, then, for the sake of purifying and so potentially
becoming one with consciousness.
But the body-soul of this man-God, the corps sans organes, lies far in the
textual distance. Instead, in the early Cahiers, which work through the
initial act of rebellion against God, Artaud exists in a divinely created
body, and, although it is made in God’s image, this oVers no promise of
plenitude, given His shadowy bodily status: ‘le Démiurge [ . . . ] n’ayant
pas encore réalisé le corps absolu du soi-même [ . . . a] impos[é] le même
supplice d’absence à un corps mal réalisé’ (xv. 159). The human body is
incapable of supporting the kind of pure, self-present consciousness to
which Artaud aspires and instead pollutes him with abject biological
givens: ‘la conscience du caca que ce corps fait par Dieu ne cesse de
dégager en me mêlant, moi, conscience, à la douleur de cet homme et de
ce corps. Car moi, conscience, je suis dans ce corps, et je le hais’ (xvi. 177).
A divide has opened up between mind and body such that, speaking
from the enunciative position of the one, Artaud can take the other as an
object of hatred. Being body in the conditions imposed by God is a
matter of suVering (for Artaud bodily existence is tantamount to a
cruciWxion: ‘[l]a croix charnelle’ (xv. 243), ‘la croix corporelle’ (xvi. 11)),
and suVering, by making Artaud perceive his body as a separate object,
a simple artaud
177
acts as a barrier to perfect self-consciousness: ‘Le corps pour moi a
toujours été un mur entre la conscience et moi’ (xvi. 132).
But the distance that has opened up between his body and himself is
ultimately attributable to something seemingly innocent lying behind the
overt cause of doubling into pain-imposing body and suVering consciousness. To Artaud’s mind, doubling is actually generated not by
pain, which is only a catalyst, but by cerebration. Once the raw material
of existence is thought about, its force and value are lost: ‘les idées, les
notions et les conceptions n’existent pas, mais [ . . . ] la vie, la vie existe’
(xv. 241). The body is something that is lived and felt, it frames and
informs all consciousness, but, once the fundamental experience of being
body is verbalized and conceptualized, then the most important thing
about bodily existence, the fact that in lived experience Artaud has an
unmediated awareness that he is his body and that he is co-extensive
with his body, is lost. In an uncharacteristic, tamely philosophical and
stylistically Xat passage of Suppôts et Suppliciations, Artaud clearly sets out
that alienation from the body originates in the distancing from the object
of experience inherent to all abstract thought:
Quand ma main brûle, elle brûle.
Il y a le fait que ma main brûle, lequel déjà, si j’y pense, est, comme fait,
très menacé,
avoir le sentiment que ma main brûle, c’est entrer dans un autre rayon,
si j’ai l’idée que ma main brûle, je ne suis déjà plus dans ma main mais en état
de supervision.
(xiv**. 80)
If Artaud complains about the impossibility of living, and claims he is
prevented from living, he is referring to the almost impossible task of just
living, of having bodily experiences and sensations and not having them
in such a way as to perceive them as in any way distinct from him. It is
the same quasi-mystical strain as his Surrealist writings exhibited in the
desire ‘avoir en soi le courant des choses, être au niveau de leur courant,
être enWn au niveau de la vie’ (i**. 16–17). Yet, while Artaud decries the
fact that there is a distance between his consciousness and his body,
consciousness nevertheless remains the most precious good: ‘Je ne laisse
jamais aucune conscience se perdre’ (xv. 170). What Artaud desires is not
observational consciousness that treats his life as something distinct from
what he is, but to feel life itself, to be aware of himself as existing. For
Artaud, ‘[s]eules les sensations d’être sont vivantes’ (xv. 241). But to have
this kind of awareness of himself as a living, existing thing requires that
178
a simple artaud
he drop down beneath the high-level, mentalizing consciousness that can
conceive of a self or a being to which that existence belongs. It is a matter
of extirpating abstract consciousness so as to allow for a simple awareness
in which there is a perfect fusion of consciousness and body.
But, Artaud complains, the human mind and human body are too
cluttered by abstract ideas and entities for him to feel he can fully be
himself: ‘tout est en trop, tout est ce trop qui ne cesse de charger
l’existence, j l’existence elle-même est une idée de trop’ (xiv**. 80). It is
only when he is aware of himself as living body, and aware of nothing
further to this, that Artaud Wnds his consciousness untouched by the
outside world. It is therefore only in this state of rudimentary bodily
awareness that Artaud feels he is able to recuperate himself in a simple
experience of being alive and so arrive at an intense experience of self.
What is needed, then, is to do away with everything that is not irreducibly, inalienably himself:
Oublier tout ce qui n’est pas moi, moi tout seul au-dessus de toute existence
[ . . . ] et dans la douleur de cette interne tuerie voir ce qui ne pourra pas céder.
[ . . . ] Quand l’intégrale virginité de moi sans moi par moi sans moi me sera
revenue dans ce carnage, alors sans rien ni personne je me reposerai. (xv. 157–8)
To exist fully Artaud believes he must reduce himself to his essential
features without which he would not be himself any more. The aim is to
Wnd what he is in his purest, hence most complete state of ‘intégrale
virginité’, and to do this he must get rid of the idea of himself as having a
self (‘l’intégrale virginité de moi [i.e. Artaud] sans moi [i.e. an entity called
a ‘‘self’’]’). And, for rhetorical good measure, he must repeat the same
process on the pristine, concentrated, selXess core Artaud to which he
has reduced himself (‘[la] virginité de moi sans moi [ . . . ] par moi sans
moi’). Artaud repeats elsewhere that not just the examined but also the
examining self needs to be destroyed: ‘brûler jusqu’à ce que l’idée du
corps disparaisse [ . . . ] Je brûle [ . . . ] le moi du brûlant et du brûleur’
(xv. 47–8). Paring down his identity is an ongoing process that can never
end. Each dismantling self will always have to be worked upon in turn by
the even more simple self it has created. Artaud’s project will always be
overshadowed by its own erasure, for he is aiming at ever greater
simplicity and at the lowest level idea possible of what he is. It is a
calculus of identity where the self tends towards zero.
In this context of a self degree zero Artaud writes of an ideal state in
which there is no distance between bodily existence and awareness of
that existence:
a simple artaud
179
L’homme [ . . . ] ne s’est jamais vécu soi-même, il n’a jamais vécu son soi-même,
comme un feu qui vit tout un corps dans l’étendue intégrale du corps [ . . . ] dans
un espace absolu de corps. [ . . . L]’homme qui ne se vit pas tout soi-même
commet à chaque instant l’erreur de croire être ce soi-même, esprit, idée,
conception, notion, qui Xotte dans un point du corps, au lieu d’être lui-même
son corps et à tout instant tout son corps. (xi. 103–4)
It is because man does not identify wholly and perfectly with his body
that he has duped himself into believing he is self or mind. But there is no
such self-entity dissociable from the fact of incarnate existence. For
Artaud, if one is truly to be, one must at every moment consciously be
an all-englobing non-diVerentiated awareness of and so identiWcation
with all one’s body. Once again the image of Wre, with its connotations of
purging and purity, is used to describe the kind of identity Artaud desires.
Fire is also, in Artaudian terms, an ever-changing manifestation of its
principle and thus an elision of the creative and the destructive, and,
since it destroys itself in the instant of its manifestation, Wre cannot be
doubled. If earlier Artaud wrote that: ‘La vie est de brûler des questions’
(i*. 49), now that he is alert to the loss of vitality in ideation and so has
had ‘[a]ssez, assez et assez avec les questions’ (xii. 233), it is as if the
earlier statement were truncated, equating life with spontaneous conXagration. What Artaud aspires to is a total, perpetually self-renewing
awareness of the body. Just as the theological tradition presents God’s
mind as sustaining and supporting all reality in a perpetual creative act,
Artaud’s theorizings present awareness sustaining and supporting all his
body in a perpetual creative act.4 Artaud’s desires for consciousness take
on vast proportions.
But, instead of being an incandescent body, man experiences his body
only in fragments and so is unable to be all his self at one and the same
4
The kind of total bodily awareness Artaud aspires to might perhaps be intimated thus.
It is possible, with an act of concentration, to zoom consciousness in on, say, the Wngertips of
one hand and feel the pumping blood, the pull of gravity, the inner warmth, the nervous
spasms that traverse them. That is to say, not so much any sensory experience as the feeling
of ‘(being) Wnger’. What Artaud is talking about would seem to be this eavesdropping on the
minutiae of the body on a grander scale. This mental experiment would have to be taken to
the greatest possible pitch where one was no longer aware of oneself as aware of one’s
Wngertips but, and this would seem impossible, had instead fully projected consciousness
into them. This experiment would have to be extended, and this would seem just as
impossible, to all the body. And, Wnally, this total identiWcation with the totality of the
body would have to be so dynamic as to create and destroy itself in each moment of passing
experience. As far as one can surmise, the kind of bodily self-identity or simple pure selfpresent existence Artaud dreams of would seem to be of this order.
180
a simple artaud
time. For Artaud, this lack of perfect, total body-consciousness precludes
the possibility of eVecting absolute identity with and in the body:
il est tantôt genoux et tantôt pied, tantôt occiput et tantôt oreille, tantôt poumons
et tantôt foie, tantôt membrane et tantôt utérus, tantôt anus et tantôt nez, tantôt
sexe et tantôt cœur, tantôt salive et tantôt urine, tantôt aliment et tantôt sperme,
tantôt excrément et tantôt idée, je veux dire que ce qui est le moi ou le soi n’est
pas axé sur une perception unique, et que le moi n’est plus unique parce qu’il est
dispersé dans le corps au lieu que le corp soit rassemblé sur soi-même dans une
égalité sensorielle absolue, et ne compose pas une perception d’absolu. (xi. 103)
It is, Artaud suggests, only if man is able to become a homogenous (and
adrogynous) perceptive block that self-identity will be feasible, since any
distanciation or abstraction from the rudimentary feeling of being body
allows alterity to inWltrate the space opened up between experiencing self
and experienced bodily existence. Otherwise consciousness and, for
Artaud, by implication the self are not unique but dispersed, fragmented,
and multiple. So it is not the body per se but a fusion of body and mind
that is to be created: ‘On ne sépare pas le corps de la conscience ni la
conscience du corps’ (xvi. 315). Instead of an agglomerative ‘esprit dans
la chair’ (i**. 51), as he had termed it in his texts of the 1920s, Artaud is
now an absolute (a word that appears frequently in this context) unitary
‘esprit-chair’ or ‘conscience-corps’. And, in order for Artaud fully to be
this conscious body, he must jettison all idea of higher-level identity
constructs of ‘moi’ and ‘soi’ and aYrm his existence as an intelligent
body: ‘Décide-toi à être non le corps où tu te sens être [ . . . ] mais une
perception corporelle’ (xvi. 84). So, whilst Artaud persistently portrays
the body as a seething mass of animal appetites rooted in a putrescent,
other-infested Xesh, it is a very diVerent body shorn of the accretions of
self and high order, mentalizing consciousness that Artaud can fully
possess: ‘il ne me reste plus que le corps vide qui me porte et c’est ce
corps qui est moi et non la conscience qui nage devant, le cœur, les sens,
l’âme, la conscience, tout cela est à tout le monde, il n’y a que notre corps
qui soit à nous’ (xv. 282).5 The lesson of the Cahiers is that the only basis
for self-identity is an emptied, minimal body.
When we turn from the comparatively analytic theorizings of the early
Cahiers to the late poems, the ideas of the notebooks have been transmuted into Xamboyant images structuring a strange new world. In his
5
Admittedly there is some tension between this passage and the ideal of body consciousness, but what is rejected here is the ‘conscience qui nage devant’, the consciousness
separable from the body.
a simple artaud
181
poems Artaud deWnes his new world in deWance of conceptual orthodoxy, and the physical object of the body has become the alpha and
omega of Artaud’s new litany: ‘Du corps par le corps avec le corps depuis
le corps et jusqu’au corps’ (xiv**. 12). It is the body that is omnipresent:
Il n’y a pas de dedans, pas d’esprit, de dehors ou de conscience, rien que
le corps tel qu’on le voit, un corps qui ne cesse pas d’être, même quand
l’œil tombe qui le voit.
Et ce corps est un fait.
Moi. (xiv*. 17)
The text enacts the excision of the superXuous accretions, tending in
shortening sentences and lines towards the aYrmation of the single,
talismanic word ‘Moi’. The textual Artaud simply is his rewritten body.
This possibility of full identiWcation with the body means that it oVers the
hope of perfect, full intensity self-identity. Of the reconstructed body that
Artaud is writing towards he can say:
Entre le corps et le corps il n’y a rien,
rien que moi.
Ce n’est pas un état,
pas un objet,
pas un esprit,
pas un fait,
encore moins le vide d’un être,
absolument rien d’un esprit, ni de l’esprit,
pas un corps,
c’est l’intransplantable moi.
Mais pas un moi,
je n’en ai pas.
Je n’ai pas de moi, mais il n’y a que moi et personne,
pas de rencontre possible avec l’autre.
(xiv**. 76)
The core Artaud is co-extensive and one with the body, sandwiched into
the very fabric of the body (‘Entre le corps et le corps, il n’y a rien, j rien
que le moi’). This core ‘moi’ (not to be confused with the abstract idea of
a self entity) is ‘pas un esprit [ . . . ] pas un corps, c’est l’intransplantable
moi’: it is not mind, nor in fact is it the body, but just self-identically
closed on itself in a tautological loop (‘moi. j C’est [ . . . ] moi’). Experiencing this bodily self invokes no abstract ideas and is inseparable from
the fact of being Artaud, and cannot, therefore, be possessed by the
other. The inherited concept of the self cannot oVer this kind of
182
a simple artaud
guaranteed undoubleability to Artaud, as the self is attributable to a
subject, hence potentially distinct from that subject, hence stealable. The
self is not just superXuous; it is dangerous if thought of as something over
and above and separate from the body, which is why Artaud insists that
he is ‘pas un moi, j je n’en ai pas’. The textual subject is not distinct from
his body: ‘je ne suis pas le possesseur de mon corps mais mon corps luimême qui parle et agit et ne pense pas’ (xiv**. 222). He is simply acting,
signifying body, not an agent or a mind. In the kind of rudimentary
performative body stripped of mind and self, he is alone and so untouched by alterity (‘pas de rencontre possible avec l’autre’). Only
Artaud can be aware of his own bodily existence. This is the inalienable
bedrock to being Artaud. The overarching complaint of Suppôts et Suppliciations, that ‘Au-dessus de la psychologie d’Antonin Artaud il y a la
psychologie d’un autre j qui vit, boit, mange, dort, pense et rêve dans
mon corps’ (xiv**. 71), stops short of stating that the other feels Artaud’s
bodily sensations. The other might control Artaud’s body and Artaud’s
consciousness, but it cannot inWltrate Artaud’s awareness of his body.
This is his and his alone.
In three collections of texts written after his release from Rodez, Artaud
le Mômo, Ci-gı̂t, and the lengthy Suppôts et Suppliciations, his body may at
times be portrayed as pure self, but far more frequently it is an unclean
object wracked by the salacious gourmandism of his metaphysical vampires. What starts out as Divine possession:
Et la sainte bête intelligence de dieu a dit:
Et moi je suis une bonne bête en face de tout ce corps
d’Antonin Artaud,
.
.
.
.
qui n’en occupe qu’une petite partie, et qui s’en ira.
(xiv**. 12)
is ampliWed from a speciWc act of aggression to a general feature of
existence as hordes of unspeciWed beings gleefully speak through
Artaud’s pen to tell of his dispossession:
Que fais-tu là, Antonin Artaud?
Oui, que fais-tu là? Tu nous gênes.
Et à la Wn sors de ton corps, c’est à nous à tenir ta place.
(xiv**. 71)
The generalized hostile presence within Artaud’s body has in the past
functioned as a metaphor for the overbearing role played by society in
a simple artaud
183
shaping Artaud’s existence, but any such putative rationale is swamped
when this idea of the internalization of social doxa is translated into an
orgy of erotic activity in which the other takes control of Artaud’s bodily
processes. A rhetoric built around sex, digestion, and excrement and
driven by the primitive pleasure of besmirching the sacred with the
abject now takes over, as God is said to exist vicariously through Artaud’s
lower bodily processes, controlled by the cavorting of God with his
henchmen within Artaud’s body:
[dieu] ne vit, que d’être
boulotté au milieu d’Artaud, masturbé au milieu d’Artaud, rappelé en esprit
dans Artaud,
par la pensée abdominale et le coı̈t,
drainé le long de la colonne œsophagique d’Artaud,
ravivé par l’orgasme et l’expulsion excrémentielle anale des aliments d’Artaud,
rendu présent par l’acte de pulation à deux appelé la co-pulation,
non d’Artaud,
mais d’un et de l’autre,
du microbe un et de l’autre
au milieu du sexe d’Artaud.
(xiv**. 121)
‘Artaud’ is no longer an identity but an object convulsed by the insistent
and greedy sensuality of mauvais esprits, as the text repeats his name in a
chant of aggressive enmity. Any patient thinking that may have led this
far is outweighed by the rhetorical storm of eroticism and abjection as
the Artaud body (it is too alien to be called Artaud’s body, the text
designating it impersonally as ‘d’Artaud’) ejaculates, expels, and squirts
liquids around inside it. Much of the provocative force of Artaud’s later
texts comes from this reiWcation of the body, his making it an undigniWed
and largely alien object subject to the ravages of a hostile world.
The emphasis on bodily liquids is associated with God’s original act of
criminal aggression. A tidal wave of bodily Xuids is one of the deWning
characteristics of Artaud’s birth:
ma naissance a été une lutte horrible
.
.
.
.
j’ai nagé dans un Xeuve de pus
.
.
.
.
[qui] fut créé sur place et jeté vers moi
pour m’empêcher de passer.6
6
‘Je n’admets pas’, 111.
184
a simple artaud
The deluge of Xuids is presented as hostile to Artaud, and in general his
bodily Xuids are portrayed as treacherous for they are highly desirable.
The life-Xuids that course within him are drained oV by leech-like
parasites that attack his sleeping body:
Oui, toute la terre envoûte
Artaud
pour vivre
et elle ne vit que de la mort quotidienne
d’Artaud,
de son sommeil de chaque nuit;
pendant lequel elle se recharge à bloc
un peu plus chaque nuit
de tout ce qui fait la vie:
souZe, sang,
sperme,
salive,
sécretions internes,
bile,
.
.
.
.
humeurs.
(xiv**. 131)
The perpetrators of vampiric ‘envoûtement’ feast on all Artaud’s bodily
Xuids, but the blood, sperm, saliva, bile, and humours, whilst the sustenance that causes others to inhabit his body, are also very much part of
Artaud. So much so in fact that they are isolated from the rest of the text
on a line to themselves like the supreme term ‘Artaud’. It is because others
do not have the same capacity as Artaud to seal up their Xuids within their
body that they are said to have to replenish their vital forces by stealing
his: ‘qui a trop gaspillé de son sang, de son sperme, de sa salive, ou de la
morve de son nez, j c’est dans Artaud qu’il vient refaire son beurre’ (xiv**.
142). And Artaud’s bodily Xuids really are vital, in both senses of the term:
‘le monde ne continue qu’à cause de mes pertes de moelles et de sperme’
(xi. 105). It is by siphoning oV the life force of his bodily Xuids, and in
particular their structuring (‘moelle’) and generative (‘sperme’) potential,
that the world is sustained. Even the most disgustingly abject of Artaud’s
abject Xuids is of such value that the world is hungrily waiting to consume
it: ‘la bouche de l’actuelle race humaine n’est-elle pas, suivant le cadastre
anatomique du corps présent, ce trou d’être situé juste à la sortie des
hémorroı̈des du cu d’Artaud?’ (xiv**. 153). Artaud’s metaphor of the
possession of the body by the Other has mutated, and the urge to Xout
literary taboos on eZuvia have the whip hand over the exposition of
a simple artaud
185
the determining forces exerted on the individual by social and conceptual
orthodoxy. Artaud’s texts have left the path of rethinking identity and
deWantly bedeck themselves in Xuidic mess.
In one of the high points of Suppôts et Suppliciations, the Artaudian text
details the licking, sucking, probing, and draining of his body as it is
assailed from within by a multitude of alien tongues:
[ . . . ] les êtres n’ont jamais oublié comment approcher Artaud par magie,
comment lui puiser sa salive dans la bouche, et sa merde dans son coccyx,
et son sperme sous son pubis,
comment, de quelles lippes creuses
tourner la nuit autour de son lit,
de quelle ouverture des téguments,
de quelle dilation monstrueuse des pores, de quels sanieux écorchements
des tissus sous les téguments,
faire ventouse sur tout ce qui est lui pour le sucer jusqu’à l’épuisement,
et c’est ainsi qu’Antonin Artaud sent suppurer ses testicules
.
.
.
.
C’est ainsi qu’on avale Artaud, qu’on le pompe, qu’on le défèque, qu’on
le lèche.
(xiv**. 143)
Such writing is a pleasure in the mouth. This is Artaudian writing of the
highest calibre, wending between the Latinate, anatomical language and
foul-mouthed familiarities in a muscular equilibrium, and in its busymouthed, thrusting-lipped diction re-enacting the act of physical and
metaphysical inner fellation it denounces. All Xuids taste equally good to
the vampires who leave no tissue unturned in their search for this abject
ambrosia, and the text follows their ferreting with an almost sensuous
delight in detailing his inner rape, the deferral and then crescendo of
their attack being captured in the rhythmic shifts conducted by the
lineation from ‘comment, de quelles lippes’ to ‘faire ventouse’. Artaud’s
body is described from afar as a dispenser of lower bodily liquids to be
drained at will, an object to be swallowed, licked, and ignobly masturbated and made to excrete.
But why, for reasons other than provocation, should Artaud hold his
bodily Xuids to be of such value? According to one strain of Artaud’s
thinking, anything that has been held within the body is of value, since it
is by being held in the body that things may be fully possessed and all
traces of alterity removed.7 But this does little to explain why bodily
7
This was certainly Artaud’s opinion about purging language by salivary operations.
186
a simple artaud
Xuids, which are presented as abject in the most forceful terms, should
now be said to be of great and vital value. For Artaud it is a fact that
his body and its Xuids are of primordial value, as conWrmed in its
‘envoûtement’: ‘c’est parce que mon corps est bon qu’il est toujours
aussi minutieusement visité’ (xiv**. 141), and it is not possible to piece
together the ideas behind his Wnal writings unless this extraordinary
supposed fact is granted. The text suggests that it is because Artaud’s
body is the unique origin and locus of all value that he is subjected to
the libidinous infractions of the incubi and succubi that crowd around his
existence:
Et c’est donc comme prévenu d’être dieu
et d’avoir par conséquent un corps unique et le corps d’où tout est sorti
que j’ai été ainsi poursuivi,
que j’ai été ainsi envahi et mordu,
par des hordes de parasites (d’esprits),
de microbes,
d’ignobles intrus érotiques du cu,
de vampires lippus ou barbus,
et par eux limé, raboté,
râpé, tondu,
pompé, sucé,
pioché, percé, troué.
(xiv**. 136)
Artaud, not God, is the unique origin of existence, as proved by the fact
that God had to take hold of Artaud’s body to come into existence, and
this is why his body is besieged:
Et non comme dieu,
mais comme, étant, moi,
ce corps unique,
d’où tout,
même dieu, fut sorti,
que j’ai été violé à vie,
insulté, oVensé, sali,
pollué, crotté, salopé,
jour et nuit,
depuis que je vis.
(xiv**, 137)
Whether it be, then, because he is mistaken for God (‘comme prévenu
d’être dieu’) or because he is known for who he is (‘non comme dieu, mais
a simple artaud
187
comme [ . . . ] moi’ since ‘dieu de son vrai nom s’appelle Artaud’ (xiv**.
138)), he is sullied by a universal act of possession directed against him. In
either case all value originates in his body: since Artaud is the author, the
Creator of his textual world, his is therefore ‘le corps d’où tout est sorti’.
Yet the text does not legitimate this restriction in our interpretation to
speciWcally imagined, textual worlds. The text presents it as given that
Artaud’s body is the origin not of a mythic, textual world but of the
physical universe, and at times is adamant that it is not a question of
imagined but real bodily facts: ‘je ne me guérirai pas d’une fuite du corps
[ . . . ] par la pensée d’un autre état de corps mais par la souVrance dans la
douleur du corps’ (xv. 205). This conXation of the world of text with the
world tout court, and the resultant expansion of his narrative from a
metaphor for determining forces within the individual to a literal account of vampiric pollution and consumption, are among the most
troubling features of Artaud’s late writings. Artaud’s text indulges in a
mythologization of epic proportions, then takes its myths as facts.
The simple fact that his vampirized body is the archetypal life force is
reXected in the simplistic rhymes and dittyish rhythms from which
Artaud weaves his verse texture. Whether it be an even-toned roll-call
of disgusting practices detailed in the Wrst of the above passages, which
takes its time to indulge in its controlled syntactic repetitions and phonic
echoes (‘que j’ai été ainsi poursuivi, j que j’ai été ainsi envahi et mordu’),
or the gabbling of the second, his verse sweeps the reader along by its
oracular conviction in its own truthfulness. The disarming simplicity of
the verse structure lends the texts a peculiarly compelling logic and
forcefulness. There is also a strong element of malice and provocation
here, as there is throughout Suppôts et Suppliciations, and the text clearly
takes a complicitous pleasure in listing the humiliations to which Artaud’s
body is subject. But, notwithstanding the gaiety and gleeful black humour, notwithstanding the fact that Suppôts et Suppliciations is driven by the
desire to invest life with metaphysical implications, notwithstanding the
fact that it is, through its mythologization and epic overtones, the textual
enactment of the Theatre of Cruelty,8 the central claim that his body is
overrun by vampires is not rationally explicable. Claiming that the body
is the central fact of existence and that his body is the centre of his world is
one thing; claiming that his body is controlled, abused, and consumed by
humanity and God quite another. And by Suppôts et Suppliciations the
8
In which Artaud is still interested, but as text, not play. This is apparent in the choice of
the title ‘Le Théâtre de la Cruauté’ (xiii. 107–17) for a text denouncing God and the Godgiven body in Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu.
188
a simple artaud
central fact of Artaud’s univers imaginaire is that he is vampirized and
possessed in one great movement of imposed alienation:
violé, tondu, pompé à fond
par toute l’insolente racaille
de tous les empafrés d’étrons
qui n’eurent pas d’autre boustifaille
pour vivre
que de bouVer
Artaud.
(xii. 17–18)
The body has become a lump of vulgar tasty Xesh, ravaged by innumerable parasites that prick and suck and eat it from within. The extraordinary assertive aplomb with which his texts repeatedly hammer out this
fact is equalled by the similarly unshakeable conviction that ‘Artaud’ is
the supreme value, a term of such strength that it can appear in isolation,
a complete expression in its own right that needs no qualiWcation and that
can bring all statements to unanswerable closure. ‘Artaud’ has become
the word that rises up from beyond the cosmos: ‘[les inités] écoutant [ . . . ]
le gouVre l’inWni [ . . . ] disent avoir entendu en eux monter les syllabes de
ce vocable: j a r -t a u ’ (xiv**. 138). The abjection of Artaud’s body and the
investment of Artaud’s name with all value progress together, as both
name and body become central objects in his textual world.
The vampirized eZuvial body that is nevertheless the site of supreme
value is one of the structuring tensions in Artaud’s late texts. All that is
associated with bodily humours, with Xuids, with the Xesh, is regarded as
the essence of deWlement and pollution, yet it is precisely because these
eZuvia are a powerful life force that the other seeks to consume them,
and this ambivalence lends dramatic tension to Suppôts et Suppliciations in
what could otherwise become an overly ritualized narrative. Artaud’s
attempt to write an ending to this vampirization leads to the project of
imagining a hardened, desiccated body that would oVer nothing of value
to the multifarious ‘envoûteurs’. Once all that is Xeshly and liquescent is
written out of the body, then the true, inalienable body will emerge: ‘sous
la disparition Xuidique du corps il resterait un corps osseux’ (xv. 289).
Sperm, faeces, saliva, mucus are to be eradicated from his body because
of their value, and so this hardened body will no longer limply oVer itself
up to the desiring attentions of God and humanity.
It is as part of this project of drying out the body that Artaud preaches
the eradication of bodily organs. Organs treacherously tempt the other
a simple artaud
189
into his space, since they secrete the bodily Xuids on which his vampires
delight to feed: ‘Les organes n’ont été faits que pour donner à manger
aux êtres’ (xiii. 287). Equally it is the organs that assimilate the outside
other with the personal within, be it a (physical) digestive assimilation or
a (mental) perceptual assimilation. Organs allow the non-self to force
itself upon the self, and so Artaud blames them for his alienation:
L’homme est malade parce qu’il est mal construit.
Il faut se décider à le mettre à nu pour lui gratter cet animalcule
qui le démange mortellement,
dieu,
et avec dieu
ses organes.
(xiii. 104)
The project of recuperating a self-suYcient body necessitates the redrawing of an anatomy viewed as a set of functions inducive to self-loss.
The deliberate ambiguity of ‘ses organes’ underscores the fact that it is
God who is responsible for the imposed torturous bodily form: ‘une
croix’, as Artaud writes elsewhere in Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu,
‘où dieu croyait l’avoir depuis longtemps clouée’ (xiii. 86). The deferred
appearance of the term ‘dieu’ after the polysyllabic ‘animalcule qui le
démange mortellement’, and its repetition, place it in a position of
prominence equalled by the placing of ‘organes’ at the chute of the
dissecting 1–4–3 rhythm. ‘Dieu’ and ‘organes’ are brought into syntactic
and rhythmic partnership. The corps sans organes, by which man will be
‘délivré de tous ses automatismes et rendu à sa véritable liberté’ (xiii.
104), is a way, then, of being Wnally free from God’s inXuence, the means
‘en Wnir avec dieu’—it could have been called the corps sans dieu. Like the
God who imposes them on the human anatomy, organs are parasitic.
They occupy a place within the body that should not belong to them:
Le corps est corps,
il est seul
et n’a pas besoin d’organes,
le corps n’est jamais un organisme,
.
.
.
.
tout organe est un parasite,
il recouvre une fonction parasitaire
destinée à faire vivre un être
qui ne devrait pas être là.
(xiii. 287)
190
a simple artaud
It is not just the organs but the whole idea of an organism that is to blame
for the impossibility of closing up the body, for organisms are by deWnition composed of separate parts and so do not present an impenetrable
front to the outside world. Artaud’s body, though, is self-identical (‘Le
corps est le corps’) and a single unit (‘il est seul’).
What Artaud’s texts are doing with the image-concept of the corps sans
organes is not so much suggesting that the body be changed as that the
way it is conceived be rethought from a very diVerent perspective.
Instead of being thought of as an assemblage of parts, it needs to be
taken as an irreducible whole, as this is, within Artaud’s world of
vampires and doubles, the prerequisite for full identity. In Pour en Wnir
avec le jugement de dieu Artaud is writing, inter alia, against academic
disciplines and their conceptual dissection of reality. It is here that he
rails against the deep meaninglessness of abstract terms that are no more
than ‘des mots j inventés pour déWnir des choses j qui existaient j ou
n’existaient pas’ (xiii. 94); it is here that he parodies syllogistic thinking
(‘Dieu est-il un être’ etc. (xiii. 86));9 it is also here that he parodies
psychology (xiii. 92) and scholarly prudence: ‘On dit, j on peut dire, j il
y en a qui disent [ . . . ]’ (xiii. 93). And the corps sans organes is in large part a
provocatively anti-scientist image. The sheer folly of it is a way of
ridiculing rationalist discourse for what Artaud perceives as its blindness
to greater truths, in the same vein as the self-accusations of madness in
Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu (‘Vous délirez, Monsieur Artaud j Vous
êtes fou. [ . . . ] De quelque côté qu’on vous prenne vous êtes fou, mais
fou à lier’ (xiii. 103–4)) are supposed to function as indications of the
superior breadth of his vision, which is capable of integrating and
transcending ‘narrow-minded’ (rational) criticism. For Artaud the most
important fact about the body is that it is not just another object in the
world, and so, whilst susceptible to scientiWc enquiry, this misses out the
metaphysical fact that it is what the individual is. The corps sans organes is a
deliberate nonsense and primarily a rebellion against a culture that sees
life devoid of its mythic and metaphysical grounding. In ‘Van Gogh, le
suicidé de la société’ (xiii. 13–64) Artaud compares two diVerent modes of
investing reality with value: the ‘Western’ mode of elevation, and a truer
mode of descending so far into physical objects that their metaphysical
dimension is intuited:
[ . . . ] Gaugin pensait que l’artiste doit chercher le symbole [ . . . ] aggrandir
les choses de la vie jusqu’au mythe,
9
See Chapter 6.
a simple artaud
191
alors que Van Gogh pensait qu’il faut savoir déduire le mythe des choses les
plus terre-à-terre de la vie.
En quoi je pense, moi, qu’il avait foutrement raison.
(xiii. 29)
The corps sans organes, like the vampirized eZuvial body it replaces, is just
such an instance of earthy myth, brute metaphysics, and violently antiintellectual language.
The organless body might well be an attack on the metaphysically thin
vision of rationalism, but the image exceeds this function and takes on a
life of its own, as Artaud constructs a supporting nexus of ideas derived
from this central image. The sort of body that would grant him autonomy in his textual world from the host of bodiless assailants is one that is
hard, dry, and without any oriWces, organs, or other means of contact
with the outside. The corps sans organes is characterized by its perfect
closure on itself: ‘tête, rate, foie, poumons [ . . . ] rentrera en eVet en moi
de ma tête à mes pieds’ (xv. 332). The body is to be folded back on and
assimilated by itself. This implies that nothing is to be lost from this body,
including the bodily Xuids that are the preferred sustenance of the
‘envoûteurs’: ‘Ne perdez pas une parcelle de vos excréments, de votre
urine, de votre sperme, de vos crachats’ (xx. 63). The body is to let
nothing escape, as otherwise it will oVer part of what has constituted it
and hence its physical integrity to the alienating contact of the outside
world.10
The new body is, therefore, a body without any openings and even
one that cannot be conceived in terms of boundaries, for boundaries
need defending against sullying ingress and doubling egress: ‘rien qui soit
dehors ou dedans j et surtout pas la bouche d’être’ (xii. 100). The mouth
is particularly alienating, since it is both the oriWce by which physical
objects are admitted into the body and the bodily exit for language,
which ought to be kept secure within the body, so ‘ouvrir la bouche c’est
s’oVrir aux miasmes’.11 Just as the written text doubles Artaud, so speech
exposes him to a similar threat of loss of control over that which was his
(his ideas, himself as manifested in his speech) and thus a loss of
10
As Julia Kristeva reminds us in Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980)
excrement, as fundamentally impropre, is not a part of the subject. Artaud’s insistence on
retaining excrement within the body, although therefore initially surprising given his
preoccupation with expunging all traces of alterity from the body, may be seen as a
means of incorporating all that is non-self within the body, thus making the impropre his
own and so no longer a threat to pure integrity.
11
‘J’étais vivant’, 84, 5–6 (1948), 102.
192
a simple artaud
autonomy. The mouth is therefore for Artaud the fullest example of an
alienating oriWce, for it introduces both physical and mental alienation:
Alors, pas de bouche!
Pas de bouche
pas de langue
pas de dents
pas de larynx
pas d’œsophage
pas d’estomac,
pas de ventre
pas d’anus
Je reconstruirais l’homme que je suis.12
The digestive tract is to be expunged along with the mouth as the
primary means by which objects enter and leave the body. The alimentary canal is, according to Artaud’s way of thinking, a hole running right
through the centre of the body, an inhabitable empty tube that runs
through but is not his body, which could even be the fault-line along
which his body separates.13 It is not just to be sealed up, for, whilst that
would prevent alienation either by potentially doubling extrusion of self
into world or by the alienating intrusion of world (and God) into self, that
would not remove the threat of an inner cleaving. Unlike head, spleen,
and lungs, which are to be assimilated, the digestive tract is therefore to
be expelled: ‘quant à l’abdomen, il sera rejeté’ (xv. 332). The body is to
disembowel itself by excreting out its innards, or rather its inner voids.
Such ideas follow a recognizable if extravagant logic. But in what it
has to say about the means of creating this new bodily form, the
Artaudian textual world takes a step further away from normal ways of
thinking and follows a logic of paradoxes. It is on this topic that some of
his most extraordinary and outrageous writings are to be found. Inconsistently, the closed body is to be created precisely by opening the bodily
oriWces to excrete the alimentary canal, which is incompatible with
closure. Even more problematically, the abjecting God is to be eradicated by abjectingly expelling Him through the oriWces through which
he committed his original infraction: ‘Je vais réaliser le principe même
du péché qui est de blasphémer Dieu et de le rejeter de soi, de le chier
[ . . . ] de le pisser, de le branler, et de l’expulser par le vit’ (xvii. 70).
Although the logic of monistic philosophies of identity means that
12
13
Ibid.
These problems may be inferred from the late texts, although they are not spelt out.
a simple artaud
193
rejection of an idea might be described as a bodily act, the text takes a
savage delight in underlining the physical and demeaning nature of the
(r)ejection of God. Artaud seems to be writing not of a means of
establishing the writing subject as an unambiguously monistic identity,
but of a supposedly physical act of excreting and ejaculating God.
Metaphor is shading into delusion.
And this bodily ejection of God, quite apart from the extravagance of
the metaphor, sits uncomfortably with Artaud’s earlier condemnation of
God, for one of the weightiest charges levelled against Him is that He
creates fecally by means of expulsion. It is because the world, removed
from the Godhead, is ‘l’être expulsé de Dieu’ (xv. 61) that Artaud is able
to ask the rhetorical question: ‘Connaissez-vous quelque chose de plus
outrageusement fécal j que l’histoire de dieu’ (xiii. 107). Expulsion is the
primordial crime: the original separation that occurred in cosmogenesis
meant that, if the Divine realm was (by deWnition) one of archetypal,
pure, self-identical Being, the created world must by contradistinction be
one of alienation, a ‘mamtram faussé, j tartre encroûtée d’un ancien
crime’ (xii. 41). It can seem paradoxical that Artaud writes of the need to
be free of the original creative crime by adopting the Creator’s methods,
and to end abjection by abject means, but it is one of the structural
features common to all areas of Artaud’s thought that to be rid of
something involves a homeopathic immersion in that something. In
this particular instance the fecal expulsion of God is warranted by the
claim that God, the ‘main de singe’, has lodged Himself in Artaud’s
rectum (xiv**. 65) and so Artaud must ‘sorti[r] les ténèbres de Dieu de
mes ténèbres anales’ (xvii. 19) before he closes up the body. This is why
Artaud has no choice about the most apt way to create himself but must
do so by excretion, even if that involves an aping of God’s original
creative crime: ‘c’est la question du départ de dieu ou de son maintien
qui se pose dans la colique de notre humanité’ (xiii. 250).
But, whilst Artaud’s ideas on fecality strain logic, it is possible to
account for them, at least in part, by reference to his ideas on the fecal
status of text and language. What Artaud identiWes as the fecality of
language is the result of language issuing from the mouth, the opening
of the inner sewer: ‘la bouche [ . . . ] j trou d’un égout foré de dents’
(xii. 100). And this fecality of language means that the written text is a
fecal object too; as early as Le Pèse-Nerfs Artaud was referring to his texts
as abject objects that had fallen away from his body: ‘raclures de l’âme’
and ‘déchets de moi-même’ (i*. 94). This is why Artaud compares loss of
fecal matter to a loss of the soul: ‘L’anus est toujours terreur, et je
194
a simple artaud
n’admets pas qu’on perde un excrément sans se déchirer d’y perdre aussi
son âme’ (ix. 169): the text is the product of what he is, and so is both fecal
and insuZated with the soul. In so far as it is possible to rationalize
Artaud’s claim that his lower bodily Xuids are vampirized, it is this idea of
the fecal text that provides the model. Abject bodily Xuids are valued
because the abject has become a term of approbation: if the abject text is
valued, then so too by extension are abject Xuids. The valued abject
Xuids are vampirized, since the necessarily abject text is primarily an
object to be consumed, and so too, therefore, is the physically abject. But
in which case, it could be objected, why should Artaud wish to purify the
body? This is because the body is rendered impure not by the presence of
messy Xuids but by the presence of the other in search of those Xuids. For
Artaud, impurity is strictly a matter of contamination by foreign bodies.
The vampirized abject body is a semi-literalist cashing-in of the image of
the detrital text.
So, returning to Artaud’s curious statements about creating the corps
sans organes by excretion, when he writes
Pas de philosophie, pas de question, pas d’être
pas de néant, pas de refus, pas de peut-être,
et pour le reste
crotter, crotter.
(xii. 40)
this may be understood as a provocative way of referring to the need
to write. Plunging into abjection is a polyvalent metaphor for plunging
into writing. Excretion refers to the eradication of God and to the act of
writing, and it is a pleasing conjunction, for an author whose prime
textual aim is to be free of God, that the two activities should come
together under the same term. The expanding semantic Welds of ‘crotter’, ‘merde’, and cognates allow Artaud to speak of his textual ambitions, to criticize and sully God, to suggest his superiority, and to work
outside conceptual and linguistic orthodoxy all in the same breath: ‘Je
ferai quelque chose de la merde tandis que Dieu n’a jamais fait que de la
merde de tout’ (x v . 229). There is also a signiWcant part of scandalizing;
the Wrst line of the resoundingly unsophisticatedly titled ‘Centre pitere et
potron chier’ reads: ‘Ce qui importe ce n’est pas de savoir comment être,
mais comment bien faire caca’ (xiv*. 48). But this rather self-admiring
relish for the inconvenable is mixed in with a more serious belittling of
intellectuality. Bodies are more important than ideas for creating an
identity, Artaud’s texts are saying, and our identities are composed of
a simple artaud
195
the waste matter of the past: ‘Vivre c’est éternellement se survivre en
remâchant son moi d’excrément’ (ix. 175). However uncomfortable our
culture may be with the idea, creativity is not the noble activity traditionally portrayed. Artistic artefacts are created by bodies ex-pressing.
So, if the new body is to be created by fecal methods, the fecality
resides in the act of writing, and the corps sans organes itself is as far
removed from fecality as imaginable; when writing in the name of his
new identity, Artaud insists to the point of paroxysm on his cleanliness:
‘Je suis pur. j Je suis pur. j Je suis pur. j Je suis pur. j Je suis pur. j [ . . . ] Je
ne ferai plus jamais caca’ (xiii. 273). And yet, even though there is a strong
metaphoric link in Artaud’s text between fecality and textuality, which
leads to much of what initially seems delusion and infantilism, this still
fails to explain the whole story. When Artaud writes approvingly of
fecality, this must, to a signiWcant extent, be taken literally. The great
frequency with which Artaud bedecks his texts with the language of
excrement is out of proportion if fecality is only a provocative metaphor
for textuality. And, whilst it is possible to discern the inner logic in
portraying eZuvia as valued objects of consumption, the insistence on
naming diverse bodily Xuids has nothing to do with this logic. It is simply
a delight in naming the unspeakable.
It is, therefore, unsurprising to Wnd Artaud elevating the actual physical stuV of excrement in his late texts to the supreme ontological state
transcending distinctions between the most intensely bodily and the most
ethereal: ‘caca est la matière de l’âme [ . . . ] Le souZe des ossements a un
centre et ce centre est [ . . . ] Kah-Kah [ . . . ] le souZe corporel de la
merde’ (ix. 174). Although derived from taking literally the Wgurative
equation of loss of excrement to loss of soul, this exceeds any metaphoric
reference to textuality and speaks instead of metaphysical theories. The
word ‘caca’, strewn through Artaud’s Cahiers and late poems, takes on a
talismanic force similar to that of his name: ‘le suprême terme Ca-Ca. j
Je veux à tout instant être ce suprême terme’ (xx. 453).
For substantial sub-themes of his later texts to Wt together in an overall
picture, Artaud’s pronouncements on excrement and the excretory
functions need to be taken literally. For example, in Suppôts et Suppliciations
Artaud repeatedly claims that his rectum is possessed and controlled by
the Other: ‘L’anatomie véritable [ . . . ] n’arrive pas à progresser parce
que tout le monde a mis son veto dans le sphincter anal de ses fesses’
(xiv*. 138). It is because of this that Artaud cannot evacuate those bodily
parts infested by the Other. Alternatively, the text suggests, it is because
the Other occupies Artaud’s inner space, the inner workshop of the
196
a simple artaud
rectum, that he is unable either to reincorporate that which has previously been outside his control or to hold back the products of his body:
‘Je veux porter mes refoulements dans mon cu, moi, Antonin Artaud,
mais toi, être, c’est dans le mien que tu veux les porter. C’est-à-dire me
les faire porter, engrosser et incuber’ (xiv*. 50). The Other brings himself
to birth by a fertilizing sodomy of Artaud, and at the same time blocks
the space needed to create his new unsullied body. In this claim that he
cannot develop his closed textual identity because of the controlling
presence of the Other blocking the birthing chamber of the rectum,
Artaud has unambiguously overstepped the boundaries of rationality.
His texts, when read literally on the excretory processes, as they must be
in the light of some of the Wnal poems, are no longer a rethinking of the
world in terms that are startling yet nevertheless amenable to interrogation about a recognizable reality. It is now a hermetic textual system that
can no longer be thought of as a commentary on an extra-textual world.
From this stage on in the evolution of his ideas Artaud’s late poems are
removed from a common, shared reality and become ever more so.
Whereas it has thus far been possible to discern a plastic system of
ideas driving the metaphors from which the textual world is generated,
and even insights into the limited freedom of the culturally determined
individual, his univers imaginaire now becomes wholly imaginary, untethered to a generalized human condition. If up to this point it has been
possible to see his ideas as idiosyncratic metaphors for reality, now, as he
develops these idiosyncratic perspectives further, their reality index is lost
and the Artaudian text moves into a personal, phantasmal realm. The
reader may continue to applaud its ever bolder linguistic performances,
admire the internal architecture holding the image-concepts together,
and appreciate that it is a mind-defying act of rebellion against the whole
tenor of Western thought about the individual; but dialogue with the
ideas peters out. It may be analysed as a cryptic literary artefact spawned
of Modernism pushed to an extreme, but no longer as a dramatization of
insights into dark corners of the human condition.
Two points that might at Wrst seem to anchor the isolated textual
world in an extra-textual world are insisted on ever more frequently and
urgently: that the author of these texts is Antonin Artaud and that
Antonin Artaud is his body: ‘Moi je suis Antonin Artaud, j je ne crois
à rien qu’à mon corps souVrant’ (xiv**. 175). In the fullest expression of
Artaud’s late world, Suppôts et Suppliciations, a negative deWnition of ‘un
corps’ in which Artaud lists all the abstract concepts he is not, closes on
the hammering aYrmation:
a simple artaud
du corps
.
.
du corps
197
.
et des coups,
des coups
des coups, des coups, des coups,
et ça.
(xiv**. 16)14
The body is taking on a giant structuring role, nearly every page of
Suppôts et Suppliciations reWning Artaud’s self-deWnition as body. In this
textual world he is continually forging himself into a forceful body of
blows and nothing else other than the signatory unsayable ‘et ça’, which
both ludically undermines self-deWnition and thereby earnestly insists on
the impossibility of saying the self. But, if it is incontrovertible that
Artaud is Artaud and has a body, this does little to bestow any reality
on the texts. The very insistence on these two points is symptomatic of
the extent to which the textual world is removed from reality, and shows
that the Artaudian text is not actually stating facts but deWning a future
reality:
Moi, Antonin Artaud,
homme de la terre,
c’est à moi
14
It is worth quoting the humorous yet serious list of all those ideas that will not enter
into consideration in this new identity. It shows the great work undertaken by Artaud in his
Wnal texts, and acts as an index to everything his new body is not: ‘un corps, j pas d’esprit, j
pas d’âme, j pas de cœur, j pas de famille, j pas de familles d’êtres, j pas de légions, j pas de
confréries, j pas de participation, j pas de communion des saints, j pas d’anges, j pas d’êtres,
j pas de dialectique, j pas de logique, j pas de syllogistique, j pas d’ontologie, j pas de règle, j
pas de règlement, j pas de loi, j pas d’univers, j pas de conception, j pas de notion, j pas de
concepts, j pas d’aVects, j pas de langue, j pas de luette, j pas de glotte, j pas de glandes, j pas
de corps thyroı̈de, j pas d’organes, j pas de nerfs, j pas de veines, j pas d’os, j pas de limon, j
pas de cerveau, j pas de moelle, k pas de sexualité, j pas de christ, j pas de croix, j pas de
tombeau, j pas de résurrection, j pas de mort, k pas d’inconscient, j pas de subconscient, j
pas de sommeil, j pas de rêves, j pas de races, j pas de genre j mâle ou femelle, j pas de
facultés, j pas de principes, j pas d’attributs, j pas d’actes, j pas de faits. k Pas d’avenir, j pas
d’inWni, j pas de problème, j pas de question, j pas de solution, j pas de cosmos, j pas de genèse,
k pas de croyance, j pas de foi, j pas d’idée, j pas d’unité. k Pas d’anarchie, j pas de
bourgeoisie, j pas de partis, j pas de classes, j pas de révolution, j pas de communisme, j
[ . . . ] pas d’analyse, j pas de synthèse, j pas de dedans, j pas de réserves, j pas d’exsudat, j
pas de sueur, j pas d’inspir, j pas de zone, j pas d’irradiation, j pas de physiologie, j [ . . . ] pas
d’organisme, j pas de psychologie’ (xiv**. 13–15). Artaud is against everything: family,
religion, spirit, rationalism, ideation, language, biology, mind, intellectuality, society, anything that enters or leaves the body, and he is even against that which he himself has deWned
himself as (bone).
198
a simple artaud
à décider
maintena
.
.
.
de la taillade
.
.
.
que mon corps
dans l’avenir
il sera.
.
.
(xiv**. 17)
In this textual world the repeated self-naming as ‘Artaud, homme’ or
‘Artaud, un corps’ is a way of drawing the concept-character ‘Artaud’
and the new concept ‘corps’ or ‘homme’ ever closer. This is particularly
evident in: ‘Artaud, un corps [ . . . ] puisque son moi est tout son corps j et
qu’il est lui-même ce corps’ (xiv**. 191), in which both ‘Artaud’ and
‘corps’ are disassociated from the writing subject and appear in the third
person (as they predominantly do in Artaud’s late poems). They have
become objects in the textual world to be constituted and delimited. This
is redeWnition, not common ground on which reader can meet poet.
And Artaud’s textual world continues to slip even further from the
reader’s grasp, for, although the texts make frequent reference to a
prophesied textual future, this future is presented as unattainable. The
pervading impression of Artaud’s late texts, both of the Cahiers and their
immense cry of refusal of a ‘nature matrice comme moule de son corps
déjà fait’15 emitted from the pit of Artaud’s being, and of the proliferating
fragments of Suppôts et Suppliciations and Artaud le Mômo, is one of unendability. Artaud’s texts in fact write this unendability into their system of
ideas, since there is no possible closure to the project of writing a
dynamic identity that must always be a leap ahead of the doubles that
pursue it. Even in the heights of self-aYrmation, Artaud presents the
body as something to be worked and reworked:
Je suis cet insurgé de corps
.
.
.
.
[ . . . qui puise sa durée] dans le bêchage toujours plus arrière
et plus retiré du corps.
(xiv**. 84)
The plenitudinous identity ‘Artaud’ arises from an ongoing work of
rebellion against the way the body is conceived in which the body’s
15
Artaud, ‘Je hais et abjecte en lâche’, 84, 8–9 (1949), 280.
a simple artaud
199
inner space is repeatedly worked over. The process of self-birth is
unendable: ‘une conscience [ . . . ] bien ramenée sur sa propre matière,
et qui n’en Wnira plus de pilonner son fond’ (xii. 153); and this continual
self-deWnition and redistribution of the body is the function of the Cahiers.
In the late writings the depths and inner gulfs of the body have become
bottomless and so the body can never be fully reconquered. Changing
his metaphor from space to energy, Artaud writes of the need to keep the
Wres of suVering stoked even once he has burnt oV the cancerous growths
of God and doubles so that the created body is destroyed and surpassed
in the moment of its creation. Artaud’s promised space is one where the
incandescent body must be kept at boiling point: ‘Ce qui me distinguera
des autres est que j’aurai un corps plus souVrant [ . . . ] et plus brûlant’
(xv. 141). This metaphor of the new body as a self-consuming Wre is itself
reworked so that the body is energized to the point of explosiveness:
[ . . . ] le corps actuel n’est qu’un plaquage
de petite envergure
appliqué sur l’écorce de l’arbre terrible
qui n’a pas cessé de monter
et bientôt aura atteint son fatal développement.
Alors ce sera l’explosion terrible
qui fera peter au loin
l’armée des poux
car la raison d’être de l’existence
n’a pas encore été prononcée ou énoncée.16
The enunciative act by which Artaud will bring the (textual) body into
existence will rip through (his textual) reality, and the old world order will
be sent scattering by the cataclysmic formation of Artaud’s new conceptualization of the body. Metaphors are no sooner established in the
Artaudian text than they become the basis for a new, further, Xight
towards epic mythologization. Images are worked and reworked in the
way advocated for the body as the climate of Artaud’s textual world
tends towards ever greater forcefulness and physicality.
In this textual world moving with increasing speed and self-conWdence
towards myth and irreality, all Artaud’s thought is orchestrated by the
dominant image of the corps sans organes. The most important thing about
16
Artaud, ‘Il fallait d’abord avoir envie de vivre’, K, 1–2 (1948), 130. The rationale
behind this image of ‘l’arbre terrible’, found in the Wnal texts of late 1947 and 1948, is that
the tree, like Artaud, is constituted primarily by a massive trunk and is thought of as having
no organs or inner voids. It is an example of the ‘simple’, self-suYcient existence Artaud
prizes.
200
a simple artaud
the new body is its perfect closure on itself: ‘Je suis fermé, bloqué, j je suis
blindé à la langue de l’être’ (xiv**. 223). As a hard, closed block, it will be
immune to the sexual and vampiric incursions of God and Other. Selfclosing and self-hardening will make Artaud’s body both sexually and
physically impenetrable and impregnable: ‘tout mon corps impossible à
percer’ (xiv**. 142). This hardening is an embodiment of the essence of
corporeality that will result in ‘un ultra-corps’ (xvii. 19) purged of everything non-bodily, ‘un corps [ . . . ] entièrement a n t i - s p i r i t u e l ’ (xiv**.
198). And yet, as this process of imagining the hard, closed body gathers
momentum, the corps sans organes, the supposedly most bodily of bodies,
becomes less and less recognizably body. It is not just stripped of mind,
soul, and organs; it is stripped right down to its skeletal essence: ‘je suis
[ . . . ] un cliquetis d’os particuliers sans viande’ (xvi. 215), and this
skeleton is further reduced to a minimal body of bones: ‘Un os dur
dans le front, j un os dans la colonne, j un os au diaphragme, j un os
au pectus j avec l’idée d’os au milieu’ (xvi. 189). Then the corps sans organes
loses even these last vestiges of bodyness and becomes a wooden structure with fewer and fewer chinks: ‘je suis un morceau de bois [ . . . ]
reprenant les morceaux de corps tombés pour les reclouer l’un sur l’autre
toujours plus étroitement et de plus près’ (xiv**. 84), an ever denser
agglomeration of wood, brick, and metal: ‘une maçonnerie réelle de
poteaux, de boı̂tes, de briques et de clous’ (xiv**. 198). Having hardened
to the point of becoming mineral, the body then becomes so hard and
dense that it collapses in on itself and loses all volume: ‘le corps j c’est
s’entasser, s’épaissir [ . . . ] le corps est absolument opaque ¼ sans profondeur’ (xiv**. 197). Conceptual limitations are ignored as the body both
becomes spatially inWnite: ‘c’est l’intrusion absolu de mon corps, partout’
(xiv**. 76) and dwindles to a point, nothing but a superheavy concentration of energy: ‘Je suis un bloc de feu plus dur et plus dense que tout
corps et qui ramènera les choses au crible de sa densité’ (xvii. 39). The
corps sans organes is a body only in name. It has become a massive,
incandescent new space of will and energy that engulfs the entirety of
the world. It is endless, bottomless, inWnite, a black hole of a body in
terms of its super-density and spatial contradictions, and in the way it
swallows up all Artaud’s writing.
The most adventurous of Artaud’s Wnal poems were written in autumn
1946 and collected under the title Artaud, le Mômo (Ci-gı̂t, though not part
of this collection, is part of the same creative upsurge). These slender
texts represent a peak of linguistic experimentation, and in them Artaud
creates highly individuated, densely interwoven, mesmeric sound
a simple artaud
201
textures by combining standard words with a personal language halfway
between neologism and glossolalia (‘C’est la toile d’araignée pentrale, j la
poile onoure j d’ou-ou la voile, j la plaque anale d’anavou’ (xii. 13–14)).
But this linguistic inventiveness, striking though it is, is less striking than
the ambition of Artaud’s ideas. His previous imaginative theorizings on
bodily existence and on determinism swell to an unexpected fullness of
amplitude that exceeds even that of Suppôts et Suppliciations. Whilst the
corps sans organes is, from the Wrst, a means of escaping God’s hold, in
Artaud le Mômo the new body suddenly bursts onto the textual stage in all
its irrepressible autonomy. The text loudly proclaims in its slightly otherworldly tongue the autogenesic irruption of new from old body:
Non la membrane de la voûte,
non le membre omis de ce foutre,
d’une déprédation issu,
mais une carne,
hors membrane,
hors de là où c’est dur ou mou.
Ja passé par le dur et mou,
étendue cette carne en paume,
tirée, tendue comme une paume
de main
exsangue de se tenir raide.
(xii. 14)
Dovetailing intricate phonic echoes with straight repetition (‘Non [ . . . ]
voûte, j non [ . . . ] foutre’), this writing takes on a rare assertiveness and
self-belief. Crafted sound patternings—‘omis de ce foutre j d’une déprédation issu’ transfers all its phonic emphasis, by the sharpening of the i-ou
into i-u, onto the keyword ‘issu’—lend a logic to the text that generates a
climate of new, aYrmed order. This sense of aYrmation is furthered by
the rhythmic switches that roar out the text’s allegiances in ‘mais une
carne, j hors membrane’, and that hammer out its hostilities in the monosyllabic pile of ‘hors de là où c’est dur ou mou’. Artaud’s birth is
associated with bodily humours because of the tidal wave of bodily
Xuids that beset him at the moment of his birth, and also because
liquescence is the deWning characteristic of the foetal environment
(‘la chair s’est préparée pendant 9 mois au milieu du sperme et des
excréments’ (x. 43)), so the hard body denies biological birth. In a body
held so taut that the humours have been pressed out of it, Artaud has
202
a simple artaud
moved beyond the God-given order of soft, rounded, clinging Xeshliness
into his world of hard, uncontained, angular meatiness that is re-enacted
in the jagged verse texture and new-found muscularity of language and
Wnality of tone. The tumescence, an illusory hardness, of the penis, and
the vampiric, englobing softness of the vagina and womb (see again the
‘nature matrice comme moule de son corps’ (emphasis added)) belong to
an inferior order of existence that Artaud has sloughed oV along with
orthodox vocabulary. Instead, in Artaud le Mômo, Artaud lives up to his
new self-given name and rails mockingly against all genealogies:17
ni de mère, ni
de père inné,
n’étant pas
la viande minette
qu’on copule
à patron-minet.
(xii. 23)
The saturation of these lines with ‘in’ and ‘ni’, mimicking the false
daintiness of the progenitors, thrusts the ‘copule’, which dispels their
aura of innocence, into phonic prominence. But this is not just an overturning of his biological origin and genealogy, it is a rebellion against all
origins and against the idea of inneity in favour of self-creation. Parents
and God blur into one hostile force, since all origins impose a determining
past history, for ‘qui est donc Patron-Minet? j C’est dieu’ (xii. 139). Artaud
here refuses both masculinity and femininity: he is neither passive, consumed, female ‘minette’ subjected to the incursive ravages of what he has
elsewhere called ‘la langue de l’être’, nor issued from a sexual act that
enshrines patriarchy (‘patron-minet’). Instead Artaud transcends distinctions being male and female, creator and progeny:
Moi, Antonin Artaud, je suis mon Wls, mon père, ma mère,
et moi.
(xii. 77)
Self-generation allows Artaud to rise above time and logic, and the new
‘Antonin Artaud’ to be closed in a loop of self-identity between ‘Moi’ and
‘moi’.
Artaud presents this dual movement of paring down the body and its
expansion to Wll all space and time as: ‘une terrible évolution simple’
17
Momos, Greek God of raillery and mockery.
a simple artaud
203
(xiv**. 160). It is a movement away from all dualisms that is unsayable
and always just over the horizon:
Voilà cinquante ans que je pense autre chose de ce que je fais
et que ce que je vis.
Assez
Assez avec l’homme et la femme,
le mâle et la femelle.
Les choses sont une.
Assez avec la dualité.
Et assez avec l’existence et la vie.
Les choses n’ont pas commencé
par le mâle ou la femelle,
l’homme ou la femme,
elles n’ont pas commencé encore
(xiv**. 152)
It is supposedly a countdown towards ever greater simplicity in which he
frees himself of the Godhead and of doubles and so Wnds oneness, and
beyond oneness a simple identity degree zero: ‘plus de trinité, de
doubles, j l’unité, la simplicité’ (xvi. 123). But this quest for simplicity
leads to extraordinary extravagance. The simplicity of existing free from
all determination leads to the paradox of being undeWned to the point of
being nothing: ‘ce que je suis est sans diVérenciation’ (xiv**. 76), whilst
explicitly not being nothing:
[ . . . ] moi, simple
Antonin Artaud,
.
.
.
ja na pas
a papa-mama,
nature,
esprit
ou dieu,
.
.
.
ou corps
ou être,
vie
ou néant.
(xii. 99–100)
204
a simple artaud
The corps sans organes is the product of paradox, a conceptual and
linguistic game in which extreme simplicity of lineation is combined
with a simplicity of diction (‘ja na pas j a papa-mama’), a myth of a
newly innocent and whole state that overwrites the old, abstract, anticorporeal identity myths. It is, by deWnition, irrepresentable and undeWnable: ‘Je suis un être indéWnissable dans un état, étatiWer, c’est me
détruire.’18 In the quest to escape the prison house of the sayable and
accede to the ‘ordre de non-détermination totale, j irrévocable et absolue’ (xiv*. 89), Artaud writes himself out of the realm of the conceivable:
he is neither body nor being nor life nor nothingness. ‘Moi, simple j
Antonin Artaud’ can only be negatively deWned as like nothing on earth,
exceeding space, time, and language: ‘sans alpha ni oméga’ (xiv*. 17).
Artaud’s writing on the body, whilst proclaiming ever more loudly
how pure and simple a bodily state the corps sans organes is, eventually
attains such convoluted abstract realms that it shades towards the
incomprehensible.
Artaud delights in and underlines this unintelligibility of the corps sans
organes: ‘ce simple: [ . . . ] L’analphabète indécrottable du simple qui est
homme et ne comprend pas’ (xiv*. 17). Artaud’s great textual journey has
reached its end in the outer reaches of language and the conceivable,
amidst the detritus of the mother tongue that, as he writes of the body, he
nails ever tighter together, fulWlling the promise of the rallying cry for the
conceptual revolution he had decided on at the beginning of his career in
‘L’activité du Bureau de recherches surréalistes’: ‘que les coprolaliques
m’entendent, les aphasiques [ . . . ] tous les discrédités des mots et du verbe, les parias
de la Pensée’ (i**. 47).
In this world of great contradictions much is lost. Artaud’s early
rhetoric has been ampliWed to the point where it has become a law
unto itself, to be heard in all its manic, frenetic energy but in which the
contradictions cannot and, for Artaud, should not be resolved, as his
ideas take to their heels over the horizon of the intelligible:
[ . . . ] je suis inintelligible
et je n’entre jamais sans inintelligible
attaché comme un nouveau corps
à l’aisselle de mes pieds morts,
et ils carapatent les pieds qui pensent,
ce n’est pas de la pensée mais de la panse.
(xiv**. 109)
18
Quoted by Steinmetz in ‘Hapax’ (p. 280). No detailed reference to Artaud’s texts is
provided.
a simple artaud
205
Both the ‘nouveau corps’ and the text become the embodiment of
motility in these late poems where his ideas really take Xight. There is a
grandeur of vision to the late poems as Artaud’s contradictory and
extravagant ideas fuse with enormous uplifting energy. Yet, equally,
this textual system is so large in its aspirations and so sprawling in the
conceptual terrain it seeks to make its own that all semblance of normality is left behind. Artaud’s Wnal writing on the body tumbles ahead of
itself fuelled by its own rhetorical energy in a fuite en avant. And yet
ultimately it is precisely this second Xight—the Xight from reality—that
is constitutive of the textual identity, for this has to leave all normal
identity behind. Flying up and away from reality, Artaud’s writing is built
on the essential loss of all writing: ‘Voilà 30 ans et plus que j’accuse un
manque, un manque de fond à ma parole aux abois’,19 and it is at the
heart of this loss that it snatches its paradoxical victory, gesturing towards
the unwriteable identity and aYrming the superiority of life to language:
[ . . . ] on ne dit rien, mais [ . . . ] on se bat
.
.
.
.
nommer la bataille c’est tuer le néant, peut-être.
Mais surtout arrêter la vie . . .
On n’arrêtera jamais la vie.
(xii. 236)
19
Letter to Arthur Adamov, 26 October 1947, Nouvelle Revue française, 413 (1987), 115.
CONCLUSION
je suis moi, moi;
c’est moi, moi, moi, qui suis là devant,
et non un autre,
devant le fond en rébellion de l’autre
qui n’est pas l’autre de mon moi
(xiv**. 70)
Language depends on the most naı̈ve prejudices.1
Reading Artaud demands considerable acclimatization and a certain
reticence of judgement. His texts must not be approached purely as
testimony to the dissolution of subjecthood if we are to perceive their
many and surprisingly unremarked literary qualities, and neither must
we conclude too precipitately where their heart is, for Artaud writes
pluralist, not univocal, narrative and conceptual systems. When one Wrst
opens his earliest adult publication, Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière, it
seems that Artaud is describing a psycho-biological dysfunction, and it is
only after one has read further into the Œuvres complètes that it becomes
clear that Artaud’s characteristic way of writing is to adopt a high
dramatic tone for even the most everyday subjects. Artaud is known
for the originality of his analyses of inner states in which down-to-earth
descriptions of the painful body are intercalated with fanciful abstractions, and critical emphasis has traditionally been placed on the straighttalking, unliterary nature of these confessional self-analyses. Artaud
undoubtedly does write the pain, grinding panic, and tedium back into
mental processes with striking openness, but this is not in fact the
dominant tendency at work.
From the opening pages Artaud’s writing is striking for the way he
dramatizes mental and bodily self-analyses with a peculiar intensity, even
dramatizing his questioning of the conceptual and linguistic frameworks
within which this introspection is conducted. In the writings of the
middle period the drama has become high epic couched in the esoteric
terminology of opposing cosmic forces (male and female, Wre and water,
1
conclusion
207
and so on) mobilized to describe Artaud’s sense of inner lack. And the late
writings take this epic drama to still higher levels, with ‘Artaud’ and ‘dieu’
the names of the two cosmogenesic principles slugging it out in a primeval
struggle over the ontology and authorship of reality. A great uplift of
dramatic energy turns dry questions about the resistance of inherited
language and conceptualizations to the expression of a more intense,
authentic (sur)reality into mythic narratives in which thieves and vampires stand in for linguistic frustration and existential disappointment.
This dramatization of conceptual questioning obscures the thinking,
yet Artaud’s texts are nevertheless, in a sense, a conceptual system. They
build a plastic theory of selfhood (couched in particularized form as a new
Antonin Artaud) out of Artaud’s intuitions into questions of (un)freedom,
(non-)identity, and self-expression. But this theorizing is conducted by
the writing of imaginary universes, so the systematizing is in the Wrst
instance governed not by conceptual but by narrative demands. And in
Artaud’s imaginary universe the logic snarls up, for he is actually creating
not one imaginary universe but two. And this is the crux to understanding his late texts. Artaud transposes his self-intuitions into a mythologized world view and, to right the catastrophic wrongs of which he is the
victim in this mythic world of alienation, he invents an obverse mythic
world of plenitude in which he is the victor. This is not just the case in the
Wnal writings but includes his writing on thought in the early texts. But
the mythic world of alienation and the prophesied world of unity created
as a counter-myth are neither separated nor separable. They are the weft
and warp from which the textual fabric is created, and Artaud shuttles
rapidly between them. Their opposing claims mean that Artaud’s univers
imaginaire is an unsettling combination of extensive coherence and, when
the narratives clash, irresolvable self-contradiction.
The resultant instability of Artaud’s imaginary textual worlds is heightened by their verbiage and the fact that conceptual terms are reshaped
and connotatively refashioned by semi-ludic word-play, with the accidents of language therefore structuring his imaginary conceptual systems.
This is true of all Artaud’s writing, but nowhere is it truer than of his postChristian texts, where Artaud plays and puns his way through what could
otherwise be dogmatic assertions that his only reality is that of animal
physicality. In this way he invests the basics of everyday life with metaphysical dimensions whilst at the same time stripping his mythic epic of
the earnest intellectuality associated with existential redeWnition. The
ludicity is of equal weight to the metaphysical Wctionalizing. In ‘La
question se pose de . . . ’ (1947) a ‘gaz puant’ building up inside his body
208
conclusion
is the ‘seule chose j qui soit quelque chose’ (xiii. 95), beating oV space,
time, being, and the self into the realms of irreality:
l’espace,
le temps,
la dimension,
le devenir,
l’avenir,
l’être,
le non-être,
le moi,
le pas moi,
ne sont rien pour moi.
(xiii. 95)
The ‘grand pet’ (xiii. 93) by which Artaud ‘[a] tout fait éclater’ (xiii. 95)
becomes the triumphal proof of the bold, excedentary, all-transcending
nature of Artaud’s explosive identity:
Je suis Antonin Artaud
et que je le dise
comme je sais le dire
immédiatement
vous verrez mon corps actuel
voler en éclats
et se ramasser
sous dix milles aspects
notoires.
(xiii. 118)
One of the most typical of Artaud’s dramatizing processes is at work here
as he plays on two meanings of the term ‘explosive’. A bodily expulsion
of gas is transformed into what he calls the thundering manifestation of
his uncontainable world-breaking and world-making force. Rarely has
so much been generated out of hot air. Artaud’s theorizing is couched in
a language that shies away from humdrum accuracy and that privileges
the structure-providing role played by verbal pyrotechnics and prestidigitation. In his early writings grandiosity and imagistic exaggeration
are already part of the textual bent, and when Artaud Wnds his Wnal, fullthroated voice, his attempt to go beyond the already-said and the readily
sayable to express what he believes are the fundamentals of human
existence builds to a crescendo of hammering linguistic power that in a
collection such as Artaud le Mômo can veer towards noise. Artaud’s writing
conclusion
209
blurs the distinction between literary epic and conceptual reworking. His
text moves in an interzone between the poetic and the (anti-)philosophic
and the further one reads, the more explicit becomes the poeticization and mythologization of ontology and metaphysics. The text plays
hard and fast with language in the midst of its world-shaking existential
crises, and it is the poetic legerdemain redrawing concepts that makes
Artaud’s writing so subversive.
But the dramatization and heavy literary topspin Artaud gives to his
existential questioning result in a picture of reality so exaggerated that it
slides towards the incomprehensible. Not only does Artaud theorize in
the Wrst person; his speculative leaps take him to extreme and dramatic
positions. Rather than saying that the concept ‘God’ has fashioned the
way the Western tradition has thought about metaphysics, Artaud claims
God forces him to consume His faeces, which then mutates into the
obverse mythic image of God squatting in Artaud’s rectum. Artaud’s
later textual performances Xit confusingly between inventive attempts to
say deeply sensed truths and splurges of infantile linguistic naughtiness.
Beyond the vanity that leads him to conduct conceptual enquiry in
terms of mythic narratives about his life, there is much that is ‘high’
thought. Yet, even the high thought about existential paucity can seem
Ximsy, for, and this is one of the great ironies of Artaud’s writing—
despite the sophisticated, sharp-eyed distrust of the inXuence of inherited
linguistic modellings of reality—his two overarching ideas seem built
upon clichés. At the heart of his ‘high’ thought is an amazingly simple
conXation of the metaphoric with the literal: a ‘gut feeling’ about metaphysics leads to a metaphysics that revolves around the guts, and a ‘body
of writing’ becomes a body created by writing. It is this conjunction of
abstract intellectualizing, on the one hand, with primitive taboo-Xouting
and simplistic literalism, on the other, that is so unnerving.
Artaud’s conceptual work is neither the fanciful oddity it can seem nor
the hard-core rewriting of metaphysics it pretends. His writings challenge
conceptual orthodoxies and unenquiring acceptance of foundational
ideas in novel ways, and it is Artaud’s ideational strategies (Surrealist in
their anti-rationalism and ludicity) rather than the resultant systems that
are most revealingly disturbing. The irritation Artaud’s writing provokes
arises from his dual iconoclasm: his refusal to accept the cherished notions
of the Western tradition, and especially his refusal to go about his
questioning of these notions in the sanitized, decorous mode of intellectual endeavour. But, if it is hard to maintain one’s equanimity in the face
of Artaud’s wilfully wild and at times dishearteningly simplistic writing,
210
conclusion
his texts can also be highly enjoyable. Dumoulié has recently issued a
useful corrective in drawing attention to the important role humour plays
in his late writing (what Artaud calls his ‘humour absolu concret mais de
l’humour’ (xiv*. 105)), which, in the great demands of forbearance the
Artaudian text places on the reader, is all too easily overlooked. But, if one
is willing to submit to the mesmeric verbosity of Artaud’s late writings,
they can be both exhilarating and eerily compelling.
The result of this peculiar combination of the sophisticated and the
primitive and of the earnest and the ludic is to diminish still further
the precarious stability of Artaud’s imaginary conceptual system. But,
if the primitivism and the excessive nature of Artaud’s textual performances work against the coherence of his late writings, this coherence is
not completely undermined. Patterns do emerge in each of the phases of
Artaud’s thought, which, whilst not models of precision conceptual
planning, are suYciently well established for it to make sense to talk of
his ideas as a world view (or a parody of a world view?), even if not
consistent enough (quite independently of the extravagance of its content) to call it a doctrine or a position. As we have seen in the closing two
chapters, for instance, in Artaud’s Wnal thought about the corps sans organes
conceived so as ‘en Wnir avec dieu’, the various impulses of previous ideas
achieve full amplitude as they are drawn together into a Xuid, at times
turbulent system, in which the incoherences and contradictions actually
energize his writing and lend it a remarkable and supposedly literal gutwrenching urgency.
Indeed, this reading has been primarily concerned with establishing
an analytic portrait of these mutating patterns through the major phases
of development of Artaud’s thought, and to present them speciWcally in
terms of both their core structures and their irreducible complexities. We
have seen how Artaud’s early writings on thought, language, and body
implicitly invoke an ideal, self-present form of consciousness; how his
earlier Rodez writings chart his passage through and adaptation of
Gnostic thought, which provides the root of his two major ideas of the
body as a barrier to epiphanic self-plenitude and of the cosmogenesic
word as a domineering overlord stamping out the poet’s autonomy; and
we have seen how in his Wnal writing he spins a mythic interpretation of
subjecthood from the earlier Rodez material. We have also seen that, for
all its rebarbative verbiage, the Rodez writing—including the Cahiers—
cannot be dismissed as unworthy of critical attention nor as of only
secondary importance. The Rodez writing does Xirt with unreason,
and Artaud’s ideas on the constraints on the linguistic subject’s freedom
conclusion
211
are heavily overwritten with a rhetoric of hatred and anger that can turn
round and round on itself. The late poems that grow out of the Rodez
writing do indeed tend towards hermetic textual systems untethered to a
recognizable, shared human reality, and the Wnal writing on ‘dieu’ is no
longer a dramatization of insights but a phantasmal conceptual world
feeding oV its own metaphors and sinking into puerility and frenzy. But,
nevertheless, the very linguistic exuberance, inebriation, and inventiveness show the late Artaud to be a true écrivain, for, once the antiphilosophic work is taken into account, the psychotic colourings no
longer impugn their literary credentials, since it is the very extravagance
of the textual strategies that does the work on discourse.
Not only do the Rodez writings merit reading; they are, as has further
been argued, essential to understanding the later poems of the lesserknown collections Artaud le Mômo, Ci-gı̂t, and Suppôts et Suppliciations,
which, in the light of the Rodez material, may be re-evaluated. Thus
the other major concern of this study has been to demonstrate that it is
only when the textual speciWcs of Artaud’s passage through his idiosyncratic Gnostic theology are brought back into the critical picture that the
conXicting forces at work in his most puzzling later images may be
appreciated, allowing the most diYcult late poems to be meaningfully
integrated into an overall analytic portrait. But the late poems themselves are not merely some post-Gnostic codicil; they are of a wholly
diVerent order, and need to be approached as free-standing works
making sense in their own right. What we have seen, then, is that early
writing links to Rodez writing links to late poems in a process of what
may legitimately be called intellectual development. Most critics argue
that any coherence of Artaud’s work lies in the preoccupation with selfwriting, and it is this alone that lends what unity there is to his fragmented works; I would venture to suggest that his Œuvres complètes display not
just a weak homogeneity, but a genuine, if uneven, process of development in which his thought mutates according to its own inner logic into
mature systems.
The most striking thing on coming to the Wnal texts is their exacerbatedness and diVerence of feel. The late conXagration of his writing
switches mood and register to such an extent that we seem to be entering
a new world. Yet, the more they are studied, the more it becomes clear
that there is a logic to their evolution. It is evident that the thinness of his
sense of identity that is central to Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière,
L’Ombilic des Limbes, and Le Pèse-Nerfs is still Artaud’s major preoccupation
in Artaud le Mômo and Suppôts et Suppliciations, but what is less immediately
212
conclusion
clear is that the writing of this existential paucity in the early texts in
terms of language, body, and consciousness informs all his later thought.
Artaud’s early writings not only deWne the terrain; they eVectively establish the framework in which he continues to work over the course of his
entire career. And, what is more, in the early writings the dominant idea
that moulds his ideas on consciousness and the body is the conviction
that linguistic infelicities result in a catastrophic incompatibility between
his texts and the truths he wishes them to articulate. The failure of
language to say life results in deformations and lacunae of such signiWcance in verbalized thought that the metaphysics implicit in his
texts is a travesty of the metaphysics they were theoretically meant to
convey. And it is precisely this idea of writing creating the wrong kind of
metaphysical constructs that continues to dominate the development
of Artaud’s thought. Not only, then, does the framework of language,
consciousness, and the body persist; the relative importance of these
three major elements stays unchanged. Even the conXuence of these
early ideas with his religious ideas at Rodez does not profoundly alter
the direction they are taking but only invigorates their development. The
inXuence of the early texts is so strong in fact that when, as explored
in the previous chapter, his late poems suggest that the verbalization of
bodily experience introduces distance between body and self, he is
reworking the idea analysed in the Wrst chapter—to wit, the impossibility
of writing the Xuctuating bodily-rooted sub-life that is, for him, the
substratum of all consciousness and all identity. Artaud’s early ideas
appear in increasingly dramatized form, and this dramatization means
that they become more extreme. Yet, despite the seeming discontinuity,
many of the principal features of the textual world of the Wnal poetry
issue from the matrix of his early writing.
The initial impetus that sets the vast theorizing machine of Artaud’s
writing rolling is the crucial realization that his failure to put his sense of
who he is into words actually carries an important metaphysical lesson.
Linguistic failure tells him that sayable selfhood has little or nothing in
common with the inner self, the plenitudinous ego-entity he senses
within. And, by extension, this suggests that all that may be said in the
inherited discursive mode must be viewed with extreme suspicion, for
the problem is not one of Wnding the right words but that the right words
are not to be found. The inherited language necessarily brings with it a
metaphysics and an ontology, and Artaud’s starting point is the realization that these inherited conceptual foundations do not correspond at all
to the metaphysical truths he feels are implicit within his intuited inner
conclusion
213
self. At Rodez the same idea reappears in newly dramatized form with
the repeated insistence that the inherited conceptual orthodoxy is not
just incompatible with but actively hostile to the metaphysics he carries
within him. That discourse is imbued with metaphysics is not an unusual
idea (though the determining strength Artaud attributes to invisible
discursive forces is less usual), nor is the idea that we have a somehow
more authentic self that vainly struggles to emerge in discourse. What is
far more unusual here is the idea that, although we are trapped in the
metaphysical presuppositions of language, we nevertheless hold an alternative within us, since an inner self is a veritable object-lesson in an
unsurpassably authentic metaphysics. Metaphysics is not an abstract
discipline but something of which the individual has direct, instinctual
knowledge, what he calls in his early writings the metaphysics of the Xesh
or the truths of the blood. Expressing this intuited, gut-felt inner metaphysics is the task all Artaud’s writing seeks to perform.
But this task is necessarily impossible, since Artaud’s belief that there is
such an instinctual metaphysics is based on his profound, informative
dissatisfaction with any utterance that touches on matters metaphysical.
For Artaud, language is both utterly unable to say experience, and an
incredibly powerful force moulding human reality. The inadequacy of
language is made all the more serious by the world-making power he
attributes to it, for it opens a rift between discursive reality and a metaphysical surreality immanent in lived experience, and he writes over
twenty-Wve years and twenty-six volumes of the loss that occurs in telling
and its implications for the human condition. Language, as a representation of the world, is founded on the absence of that which it presents
again and so, as he will write near the end of his career, is ‘un double qui
dégage par projection un son pour un signe, un sens pour un son, un
sentiment pour un signe d’être, une idée pour un mouvement’ (xiv**. 30).
For Artaud, language, as representation, is devoid of reality—‘Il n’est rien
que j’abomine et que j’exècre tant que cette idée [ . . . ] de représentation,
j donc de virtualité, de non-réalité’ (xiii. 258)—and so is a void, nothingness. There is therefore a literal sense in which Artaud can claim in his
seminal letter of 1947 to Peter Watson that ‘je n’ai jamais écrit que pour
dire que je n’avais rien fait, ne pouvais rien faire, et que faisant quelque
chose en réalité je ne faisais rien. Toute mon œuvre n’a été batie et ne
pourra l’être que sur ce néant’ (xii. 236). This idea that all truth and
vitality stream out through language is the crux of his letters to Jacques
Rivière, is at the heart of his idea of a theatrical language of direct, sensory
impact, lies behind the glossolalia and linguistic deformations of the late
214
conclusion
writings, and is the basis of the superiority accorded to acting bodies over
talking mouths in his Wnal ideas about the most authentic form of
existence. The loss that occurs in representation is the spark Artaud
uses to set Wre to the very foundations even of the inherited world view:
j’accuse [ . . . ] un manque de fond à ma parole
. . . .
c’est la raison d’être elle-même du langage et de la grammaire
que je désaxe
et je la désaxe de telle façon et sur un tel plan qu’il en apparaı̂t
la nécessité d’une nouvelle
agonie humaine
. . . .
et d’une idée nouvelle
de la nécessité,
de la présence,
du vide,
de l’essence,
de la durée.2
Whilst a preoccupation with language and its structuring of the world is
characteristic of the Modernist text, Artaud typically take this to extremes.
If human language builds the world, the wrong language builds the wrong
world, Artaud (contentiously) says over and again. Language fails to say
human experience, and, if language fails, then for Artaud the most basic
concepts—causality, being, identity, time—are to be built all over again.
Given Artaud’s precept that authentic existence is indissociable from
expressing selfhood, his belief in the erroneousness of the linguistic and
conceptual lexicon means that life must be a continual creative eVort to
think in new ways. Or, as Artaud expresses it in typically adversarial
terms: ‘Je hais et abjecte en lâche tout être qui ne veut que se sentir vivre
et ne veut pas avoir travaillé à vivre.’3 Throughout his career Artaud
warns of the dangers of conceiving of existence according to terms laid
down by inherited discursive resources. This is apparent in the complaint in Le Pèse-Nerfs that he is penned in by language, and it underlies
his idea of ‘envoûtement’ articulated in Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société,
where the bewitchment denounced is that of dominant discourse limiting
the thinkable. But this extraordinary power of language also means that
it oVers potential redemption from his sense of existential lack. Writing is
2
3
Letter to Arthur Adamov, 26 October 1947, pp. 115–17.
‘Je hais et abjecte en lâche’, 278.
conclusion
215
not just to reveal the self, but actually to make real for the Wrst time the
repressed, inner self that cannot be manifested in inherited conceptual
and linguistic frameworks. Writing the self is not a matter of giving
expression to who he is—to a pretextual self—it means creating a textual
construct called Antonin Artaud. A rejuvenated language and a vitalized
identity are indissociable, and refashioning language is tantamount
to reimagining the self. All Artaud’s linguistic experiments, from the
writing of consciousness and its pain and blackouts of the early texts,
to the savage, skeletal linguistic dance of the late writings, are part of
the lifelong attempt to make the pulse of his writings beat as one with the
extralinguistic inner self he intuits within.
The inadequacy of the inherited language is only part of the problem.
The more fundamental problem that Artaud identiWes in his early
writings on consciousness and language is reXexivity. From Wrst to last
Artaud is concerned with a prise de conscience of who he really is, but the
irresolvable problem with a prise de conscience is that it resides on a
doubling of the subject into a subject and object of consciousness. As
Artaud writes in 1924: ‘penser à soi-même [ . . . ] Qu’est-ce que Moimême? [ . . . ] creuse[r] un problème impensable [ . . . ] Se voir, et ignorer
que c’est lui-même qui se voit’ (i**. 9). Self-consciousness is supposed, for
Artaud, to bring perfect self-presence and so plenitudinous self-identity,
but reXexivity and identity are distinct properties, so apperception in
reXexive self-consciousness is in fact of no avail in the creation of whole,
simple selfhood.4 Whereas identity entails indissociability, reXexive structures are founded on a dissociation. This distance between same and
same creates a disjuncture where there should be identity. As Artaud will
write at Rodez: ‘pourquoi se prendre quand on est [ . . . ] Vouloir se
prendre c’est s’être éloigné [ . . . ] et se ramener’ (xv. 124). ReXexive selfconsciousness leads away from, not towards, identity. The attempt to
think the self cannot bear the promised fruits of self-presence for selfreXexive thought creates an internal schism within consciousness.
ReXexivity thus brings the very possibility of self-writing into question.
At Rodez, Artaud returns to this idea of a doubling occurring in
reXexive consciousness and explores it with renewed vigour. Artaud
repeatedly deWnes himself in his Cahiers as non-reXexive, as he who
cannot observe himself: ‘Je suis Celui qui ne me voit pas moi’ (xv. 158).
His rejection of the idea of a reXexively constituted self leads to the
4
My idea here is an extension of Grossman’s discussion of Artaud’s use of the personal
pronoun in the Cahiers de Rodez, during which she evokes Ricœurs’s ideas on the diVerence
between reXexivity and identity (Artaud/Joyce, 157).
216
conclusion
collapse of all traditional ideas on identity, for, if Artaud is an unsayable
‘Celui’, then the idea of a subject-entity becomes redundant. It is this
doubling inherent to reXexivity that is at the heart of his rejection of the
‘moi’, for non-reXexive consciousness has no need for a self-entity to
which consciousness belongs, it just is: ‘ne jamais revenir sur soi-même
pour s’interroger ou se penser [ . . . ] la conscience [ . . . ] est soi-même
sans moi’ (xvii. 47). And the collapse provoked by the crisis of reXexivity
spreads, for, once the idea of a self as subject of consciousness is done
away with, then this implies that he has no consciousness, if consciousness is taken to be something separate from the body: ‘Je n’ai pas de
mental réXéchissant. j [ . . . ] Je n’ai pas de moi. j Je suis un être corps’
(xviii. 286). The total identiWcation with the body that Artaud claims in
his late writings is the extreme to which the Xight from reXexivity takes
him. The problem of reXexive consciousness and the idea of the monistic
intelligent body as the centre of a diVerent metaphysical order both
come from the writings of the 1920s, and the explosive expansion of his
ideas of doubling in the late texts is an unpacking and extrapolation of
early ideas.
A similar energizing and expansion occurs at Rodez to Artaud’s ideas
on language. The early complaints about word-theft, as has been argued,
covertly articulate Artaud’s ideal of a form of language symbiotic with
even the most nebulous and ephemeral of conscious experiences. But, at
Rodez, Artaud returns to the speciWc form in which he had expressed
this idea in his early writings and draws out the previously implicit
conclusion that he does not enjoy unchallenged possession of his mental
space. He now takes the presence of the inherited, reality-structuring
linguistic hermeneutic grids even more seriously and sees this as implying
that all language-users are present within him and inXuencing his
thought. In particular, he interprets the Divine attributes of ‘inWnité’
and ‘innéité’ literally and concludes that God, to exist, must exist within
the individual. The two forms of alienation and disempowerment—
socio-linguistic determination and Divine presence—are linked by
God’s status as ur-speaker. And so Artaud concludes that in accord
with the early belief that the sayable, thinkable self is an illusion, behind
the mask of the self of thought and language lurk humanity but especially
God. The early account of the inadequacy of language and the resultant
inaccuracy of our ideas about the self have been more and more boldly
written, until linguistic and ideational determining forces are so great
(and the self so Ximsy) that metaphysics has to be rethought and traditional ideas of mind and self discarded.
conclusion
217
The fact is that Artaud has a most extraordinary view of language, and
he is oV the scale of the Modernist linguistic crisis. At the outset of his
career his judgement that language was utterly inadequate to saying
experience and imposed a deeply erroneous metaphysical framework,
whilst on the scale of established philosophies of language, was already
extreme. But, by the time of the late texts, Artaud’s earlier judgement
seems tame and cosily upbeat. His proclaimed attitude towards language
is now somewhere between hatred and horriWed despair:
Les idées me font horreur, je n’y crois plus
.
.
.
.
.
[ . . . ] vraiment je ne crois pas aux mots ni aux idées remuées par les mots,
et dans les mots,
être ne veut pas plus dire pour moi ou m o i n s que ne pas être, et rien ne
veut plus rien dire pour moi,
et le silence d’ailleurs non plus et encore moins.
.
.
.
.
[ . . . ] j’ai aussi, et nul ne me croira sans doute, la haine intestine de la poésie.
(xiv**. 28)
But, for Artaud, silence, as he suggests, is not an option. His gut hatred of
writing is not just an intense hatred; it is the hatred dictated to him by
what I have called his gut metaphysics, and the urgent need to manifest
this instinctual metaphysics means it must be put into words if Artaud is to
be free of invalid empty discourse. The subject is splayed on the rack of
discourse, rent asunder by alterity, and so inherited discourse is something that must be fought against with all the force he can muster in what
his texts portray as a heroic corps-à-corps: ‘les idées que j’ai je les invente, en
les souVrant moi-même, pas à pas et pied à pied, je n’écris que ce que j’ai
souVert mesure par mesure de corps’ (xi. 104). Language and poetry have
to be fought again and again, and victory can never be had:
Je vous le répète
je n’ai jamais pu vivre, penser [ . . . ] écrire
.
.
.
.
.
[ . . . ] on ne dit rien, mais on souVre, on désespère et on se bat, oui,
je crois en réalité qu’on se bat
.
.
.
.
.
Mais sortira-t-on sur [ . . . ] le terre-plein d’après la bataille. [ . . . ]
Jamais.
Le combat a repris plus bas, alors quoi? L’escharrasage à pérpétuité?
Le raclement indéWni de la plaie. La labourage à l’inWni [ . . . ]
(xii. 236)
218
conclusion
His writing, as he puts it, must time and again reinfect his never wholly
purged language with devastating, gangrenous scabs that must be
scraped and scoured to expose the putrid underbelly of discourse. Writing, for Artaud, means violence and repeated violence at ever deeper
levels of self and language—violence against discourse, and even physical violence. At the end of his life Artaud famously dictated his works
whilst pounding a wooden block sliced from a tree trunk with a hammer
(and the blocks were soon destroyed and had to be replaced). This kind
of violence appears in the texts themselves in which Artaud claims he
wields language as a physical weapon:
Les mots que nous employons on me les a passés et je les emploie,
mais pas pour me faire comprendre [ . . . ]
alors pourquoi?
C’est que justement je ne les emploie pas,
en réalité je ne fais pas autre chose que de me taire
et de cogner.
(xiv**. 26)
All Artaud’s writing may be thought of as a ferocious ‘No!’ hurled at
ready-made discourse, and by the post-Rodez writings this refusal is so
conWdent in its own integrity and rightness that the Artaudian text
becomes rabid with destructive rage and claims to use language in
non-linguistic ways. Just as Artaud claims that his new body signiWes
without thinking, so ‘le ton fort, et bien relevé, sur lequel rebâtir un
monde et une autre réalité’ (xii. 151) communicates without representing.
Language-usage is no longer an ideational act for Artaud, but as physically real and as destructive in its eVect as his blows pulverizing blocks of
tree trunk as he declaims his poems.
Post-Rodez this kind of identiWcation of textual with physical acts, the
descendant of the aesthetic aim of making text and life one that Artaud
set himself in the 1920s, comes to dominate his writing. Stylistic devices
and the rough-handling of language will result, Artaud claims, in a body
that incarnates the force and violence of the text:
Qu’est-ce que la motilité?
C’est le pouvoir de se faire soi-même corps
en fonction d’une volonté
de rapacité,
de bestialité,
de brutalité
5
‘Notes pour une «Lettre aux Balinais»’, 10–11.
conclusion
de force.
219
5
One of the great oddities of Artaud’s Wnal writings is that the abstract is
repeatedly ruled out from his textual universe, yet he writes of a space to
be generated by writing that Xouts all consideration of what is real and in
which he claims to embrace and contain all contradictions. The abstract
and thaumaturgic nature of his writing increases in direct proportion to
the repudiation of all that is abstract and non-worldly:
Je connais un état hors de l’esprit, de la conscience, de l’être,
et qu’il n’y a plus ni paroles ni lettres,
mais où l’on entre par les cris et par les coups.
Et ce ne sont pas des sons ou des sens qui sortent,
plus des paroles
mais des c o r p s .
Cogne et foutre,
dans l’infernal brasier où plus jamais la question de la parole ne se
pose ni de l’idée.
Cogner à mort et foutre la gueule, foutre sur la gueule, est la
dernière langue, la dernière musique que je connais,
et je vous jure qu’il en sort des corps
et que ce sont des c o r p s animés.
(xiv**. 30–1)
Artaud speaks of his textual universe à venir as a kind of limbo in which
language and existence have been left far behind, but paradoxically this
liminal, quasi-transcendent realm is one in which all that exists is physical bodies. And, as violent text theoretically Xows into insurgent corporeality, so the narration of bodily violence and abjection is to create yet
more aharmonious and unchoreographed performances in which textual style and bodily realities fuse. ‘Le style c’est l’homme’, Artaud writes,
‘et c’est son corps’ (xxi. 130).
As the distinction between violent texts and simple bodies is washed
away by the creative upswell of the post-Rodez years, the many paradoxes of Artaud’s writing are heightened: he claims not to speak and
think, when he is frenziedly writing ever more extraordinarily abstract
texts; language becomes the very emblem of alienation, yet he writes
what he claims is an autonomous identity; the supposed simplicity of the
textual identity is secured only at the price of being utterly inconceivable;
life and art are supposedly one, but Artaud substitutes textual reality
for existential reality. In the imaginary textual universe of his writings,
220
conclusion
self-creation and self-destruction become inseparable and self-writing
goes hand in hand with linguistic play: ‘C’est moi, moi, l’auteur de
mon corps, qui le désincarne et le décharne pour le remanger obstinément’ (xiv**. 87). A process of linguistic recycling can cut out the inner
syllable of a word, and in Artaud’s closed textual world this operation on
the text is a virtual, magic operation cutting down the body. Artaud’s
body is now one with language, for language has swallowed up any
extralinguistic reality. As Artaud’s texts dance oV over the horizon of the
comprehensible, the following lines on the dance of Artaud’s new body
come to mind:
—Cé des histoires,
à première vue,
c’est une utopie,
mais commence d’abord par danser, bougre de singe,
espèce de sale macaque Européen que tu es.
(xiii. 280–1)
Artaud does indeed tell the story of his utopia, a utopia where text is
truth, and we might well choose to decide that in his Wnal texts he is just
aping around with the European intellectual heritage. If earlier Artaud
played hard and fast with language at moments of crisis-driven thinking,
by the end his poetry strives to be hammering force dissociated from
thinking, but Artaud is nothing if not a conjuror with words, and out of
this violent assault on the French language he crafts texts of an astounding, sophisticatedly primitive, forceful beauty, and shows himself to be a
virtuoso, mesmerizing verbalist.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
primary texts
Artaud, Antonin, Œuvres complètes, ed. Paule Thévenin, 26 vols. in progress
(Paris: Gallimard, 1956– ; rev. edn. 1976– ).
—— ‘La conférence au Vieux-Colombier: Histoire vécue d’Artaud-Mômo
(extraits)’, L’InWni, 34 (1991), 3–49.
—— Nouveaux Écrits de Rodez (L’Imaginaire; Paris: Gallimard, 1977).
—— Lettres à Génica Athanasiou (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
—— ‘Notes pour une «Lettre aux Balinais»’, Tel quel, 46 (1971), 10–34.
—— ‘Les êtres sont’, 84, 5–6 (1948), 103.
—— ‘L’être a des états innombrables’, 84, 5–6 (1948), 107.
—— ‘Je n’admets pas’, 84, 5–6 (1948), 108–14.
—— ‘C’est moi’, 84, 5–6 (1948), 131.
—— ‘Main d’ouvrier et Main de singe’, K, 1–2 (1948), 3–5.
—— ‘J’étais vivant’, 84, 5–6 (1948), 102.
—— ‘Je hais et abjecte en lâche’, 84, 8–9 (1949), 280–4.
—— ‘Il fallait d’abord avoir envie de vivre’, K, 1–2 (1948), 128–31.
—— Letter to Arthur Adamov, 26 October 1947, Nouvelle Revue française, 413
(1987), 115–18.
—— Pour en Wnir avec le jugement de dieu, enregistrement radiophonique d’Antonin
Artaud, Maria Casarès, Roger Blin, et Paule Thévenin, produced by Réné
Guignard, February 1948. Cassette released with Alain and Odette Virmaux,
Antonin Artaud: Qui êtes-vous? (Lyons: La Manufacture, 1986).
biographies
Barber, Stephen, Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (London: Faber and Faber,
1993). A biography of great verve.
Hahn, Otto, Portrait d’Antonin Artaud (Paris: Le Soleil Noir, 1968). Stirring stuV:
polemical apologia and passionate upsurges of counter-cultural enthusiasm.
Maeder, Thomas, Antonin Artaud (Paris: Plon, 1978). Excellent research on the
internment years more than outweighs any inexactitudes relating to the earlier
years.
Prével, Jacques, En compagnie d’Antonin Artaud (Paris: Flammarion, 1974). An
interesting document by a contemporary witness of Artaud’s Wnal years in
Paris.
Roumieux, André, Artaud et l’asile, 2 vols. (Paris: Séguier, 1996).
222
list of works consulted
secondary
This selection includes only recent works or those that contributed directly to the ideas put
forward here, the most influential being marked with an asterisk.
Audiberti, Jacques, ‘Le Salut par la peau’, Revue K Numéro double Antonin Artaud,
1–2 (Paris: June 1948), 62–4.
Bersani, Leo, ‘Artaud, Defecation and Birth’, in A Future for Astyanax: Character
and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), 259–72.
*Blanchot, Maurice, ‘Recherches: Artaud’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 8 (1956),
873–81.
*—— ‘La Cruelle Raison poétique’, Cahiers de la Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, 22–3
(1958), 66–73. Repr. in L’Entretien inWni (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 432–8. Both
articles are indispensable for examining Artaud’s early writing.
Bonardel, Françoise, Antonin Artaud ou la Wdélité à l’inWni (Paris: Balland, 1987).
An idiosyncratic esoteric reading.
Bouthors-Paillart, Catherine, Antonin Artaud: L’Enonciation ou l’épreuve de la
cruauté (Paris: Droz, 1997).
Charbonnier, George, Essai sur Antonin Artaud (Paris: Seghers, 1959). The Wrst
full-length study; the at times insightful analyses are imperilled by a mimicking
of the Artaudian style, something characteristic of early Artaud criticism.
Cortade, Ludovic, Antonin Artaud: La Virtualitée incarnée: Contribution à une analyse
comparée avec le mysticisme chrétien (Paris: Harmattan, 2000).
Costich, Julia F., Antonin Artaud, Twayne’s World Authors Series, 492 (Boston:
Twayne, 1978).
Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Le Schizophrène et le mot’, Critique, 255–6 (1968), 731–46.
Repr. in Loqique du sens (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1969), 101–14.
—— and Guattari, Félix, L’Anti-Œdipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie I (Paris:
Éditions de minuit, 1972).
*Derrida, Jacques, ‘La Parole souZée’, Tel quel, 20 (1965), 41–67. Repr. in
L’Écriture et la diVérence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 253–92. The article that deWned the
Weld for future Artaud studies, even though many were slow to follow up
Derrida’s lead into the later writings.
*—— ‘Le Théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture de la représentation’, Critique, 230
(1966), 595–618. Repr. in L’Écriture et la diVérence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 341–68.
—— ‘Forcener le subjectile’, in Antonin Artaud: Dessins et portraits (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 55–105.
*Dumoulié, Camille, Antonin Artaud (Les Contemporains; Paris: Seuil, 1996). The
most level-headed of the introductory works, Wlling a crucial gap in Artaud
criticism.
—— Nietzsche et Artaud: Pour une éthique de la cruauté (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1992).
*Durozoi, Gérard, Artaud, l’aliénation et la folie (thèmes et textes; Paris: Larousse,
1972). Interesting for the attempt made by a traditional philosopher to read
Artaud.
223
Floc’h, Katell, Antonin Artaud et la conquête du corps (Paris: Découvrir, 1995).
Garelli, Jacques, Artaud et la question du lieu (Paris: Corti, 1982).
Gasché, Rodolphe, ‘Self-Engendering as a Verbal Body’, Modern Language Notes,
93 (1978), 677–94.
Gauthier, Xavière, et al., Artaud: Communications et interventions du colloque de
Cérisy, juin-juillet 1972 (Paris: 10/18, 1973). Important for the interest generated
as a result of the collaboration of prominent members of the Tel quel group.
*Goodall, Jane, Artaud and the Gnostic Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). A
new departure in Artaud studies for its vision of Artaud as engaging in
intellectual work.
Gouhier, Henri, Antonin Artaud et l’essence du théâtre (Paris: Vrin, 1974).
*Grossman, Evelyn, Artaud/Joyce: Le Corps et le texte (Paris: Nathan, 1996). Particularly interesting on the poetics of Artaud’s Rodez writing.
*Harel, Simon, Vies et morts d’Antonin Artaud: Le Séjour à Rodez (Longueuil, Québec:
Éditions Le Préambule, 1990). A psychocritical reading of the Rodez material
of sturdy reasonableness, penned in by adherence to a Lacanian framework,
never fully transcending medical theses to develop literary theses.
Hort, Jean, Antonin Artaud le suicidé de la société (Geneva: Éditions Connaı̂tre,
1960).
Jacob, Carol, ‘The Assimilating Harmony: A Reading of Antonin Artaud’s
Héliogabale’, Sub-Stance, 17 (1977), 115–38.
Jenny, Laurent, La Terreur et les signes: Poétiques de rupture (Paris: Gallimard, 1982),
209–67.
Kauffman, Vincent, Post Scripts: The Writer’s Workshop, trans. Deborah Treisman
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 96–106, 141–6.
Kelley, David, ‘Antonin Artaud: ‘‘Madness’’ and Self-Expression’, in Peter
Collier and Judy Davies (eds.), Modernism and the European Unconscious (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 230–45.
Knapp, Bettina L., ‘Mexico: The Myth of Renovatio’, Sub-Stance, 50 (1986),
61–8.
Kristeva, Julia, ‘Le Sujet en procès’, in Artaud: Communications et interventions du
colloque de Cérisy, juin–juillet 1972 (Paris: 10/18, 1973), 43–108. Repr. in Julia
Kristeva, Polylogue (Tel Quel; Paris: Seuil, 1977), 55–106.
Masson, André, ‘Artaud, lui-même’, Cahiers de la Compagnie Renaud-Barrault,
Antonin Artaud et le théâtre de notre temps, 22–3 (Paris: May 1958), 9–10.
Mauriac, Claude, L’Alittérature contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958), 42–68.
*Mèredieu, Florence de, Antonin Artaud: Les Couilles de l’ange (Paris: Blusson, 1992).
Valuable for its clear exposition of the alchemical imagery of Artaud’s writing.
Pierssens, Michel, Savoirs à l’œuvre: Essais d’epistémocritique (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990), 109–19.
*Rey, Jean-Michel, La Naissance de la poésie: Antonin Artaud (Paris: Éditions Métailié, 1991). A contentious thesis that does much to provoke reXection on the
importance of the early Rodez material.
224
Scarpetta, Guy, ‘Artaud écrit ou La Canne de Saint Patrick’, Tel quel, 81 (1979),
66–85.
Sellin, Eric, The Dramatic Concepts of Antonin Artaud (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1968).
*Sollers, Philippe, ‘La Pensée émet des signes’, in L’Écriture et l’expérience des limites
(Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 88–104. Interesting for the upbeat reading of Artaud’s
early texts on thought.
*Sontag, Susan, ‘Approaching Artaud’, introduction to Antonin Artaud, Selected
Writings, trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pp. xvii–lix. A masterly critical introduction.
Shattuck, Roger, ‘Artaud Possessed’, in The Innocent Eye (Toronto: Collins,
1984), 169–86.
Steinmetz, Jean-Luc, ‘Hapax’, in Signets: Essais critiques sur la poésie du xviii e au
xx e siècle (Paris: José Corti, 1995), 275–88.
Stout, John C., Antonin Artaud’s Alternate Genealogies: Self-Portraits and Family
Romances (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996). An interesting book analysing Artaud’s use of biography as a medium for self-creation.
Thévenin, Paule, Antonin Artaud, ce désespéré qui vous parle (Fiction & Cie; Paris:
Seuil, 1993).
—— ‘L’Automatisme en question’, in Fabienne Hulak (ed.), Folie et psychanalyse
dans l’expérience surréaliste (Nice: Z’Éditions, 1992), 35–73.
Vidieu-LarrØre, Francine, Lecture de l’imaginaire des œuvres dernières de Antonin
Artaud (Caen: Lettres modernes Minard, 2001).
Virmaux, Alain, and Virmaux, Odette, Artaud, un bilan critique (Paris: Belfond,
1979).
—— Antonin Artaud: Qui êtes-vous? (Lyons: La Manufacture, 1986).
White, Kenneth, Le Monde d’Antonin Artaud (Le Regard Littéraire; Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1989).
special reviews
Cahiers de la Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, 22–3 (1958).
La Tour du Feu, 63–4 (1959).
Obliques, 10–11 (1976).
Europe, 667–8 (1984).
other works to which reference is made
Aragon, Louis, Le Roman inachevé (Paris: Gallimard, 1956).
—— Le Con d’Irène (Paris: René Bonnel, 1928).
—— Les Poètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
225
Beckett, Samuel, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder,
1965).
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—— Second manifeste du surréalisme (Paris: Editions Kra, 1930).
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1991), 259–73.
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Penguin, 1991), 71–94.
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—— Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982).
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Nuits, 1996).
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226
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of Jean-Yves Tadié (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade; Paris: Gallimard, 1987–9).
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Garnier; Paris: Bordas, 1991).
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25–40.
—— L’Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard, 1956).
Sheppard, Richard, ‘The Crisis of Language’, in Malcolm Bradbury and James
Penguin, 1991), 323–36.
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Penguin, 1991), 292–310.
‘The Tripartite Tractate’, trans. Harold W. Attridge and Dieter Muller, in The
Nag Hammadi Library, ed. James M. Robinson (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988).
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INDEX
‘A la Grande Nuit’ 31
abjection 77, 94, 126, 176, 219
corps sans organes and 175, 188–91,
194–5
fecality 126, 193–5
God and 112, 162, 172, 183, 192–3
identity and 173, 174–5, 194–5, 208
language and 193
soul and 193–4, 195
Tarahumara rituals 79–80
vampires and 183–6, 188–9, 191,
194
writing and 194–5
abstractness/abstract concepts 100,
101, 139, 146–7, 165
doubling and 143–4, 146
Adamov, Arthur 3
‘Adresse au Dalaı̈-Lama’ 26 n. 10
‘Adresse au Pape’ 25, 26 n. 10
alchemy 2, 4, 57, 69, 75, 85
alienation 53, 81, 82, 128, 177
God and 158, 162, 167
language and 40, 74–6, 158, 159,
219
mouth and 191–2
poetry and 96
self and 71, 143
vampires and 188–9
see also self-alienation
alterity 8–9, 10, 89, 117
âme (soul) 106, 161, 171, 175
and abjection 193–4, 195
angels 89, 94
‘Antigone chez les Français’ 118
Apollinaire, Guillaume xi, 27
Aragon 24, 26, 30–1, 36, 104
Le Con d’Irene 35
on language 38–9
L’Art et la Mort 26
Artaud, Euphrasie 90–1
Artaud le Mômo 3, 182, 198, 200–2, 208
asexuality 88
astrology 85
l’Atelier 1
Athanasiou, Génica 86–7
Au pays des Tarahumaras 74, 82
Audiberti, Jacques 22 n. 3
automatism 30–1, 34, 35, 36, 39, 50 n. 4
Ball, Hugo 111
Beckett, Samuel 38
Being 74, 82, 95, 165–7
God as 87–8
being 116–17, 141–3, 160–1, 165–7: see
also existence
Bersani, Leo 6
Bilboquet 20 n. 2
birth 83, 85, 87, 136
birth imagery 51, 163, 164, 183, 196,
201
Blake, William 103
Blanchot, Maurice 5, 6, 49
blasphemy 165
Blin, Roger 3
body 43, 137–8, 174, 175, 182, 185,
187–8, 195
anatomy 88, 94–5, 123, 124
awareness of 14, 43–4, 46, 47
and consciousness 176–8, 179–80
definition of 196–8
and existence 45–6, 160–1, 186, 187
God and 137–8
identification with 117, 179–80, 181
and identity 143–5, 157
and suffering 40–1
theft of, by God 40–1, 71, 150–1,
160–5, 170–1, 175, 176, 183
see also corps sans organes
228
index
Breton, André 24, 26, 30–1, 145
and Artaud’s expulsion from
Surrealism 25
on language 60
Second manifeste 26–7
self, doubling of 36
Bureau de recherches surréalistes 25,
26
Cabala 85
Cahiers 132–3, 155
abjection in 173–4
Cahiers de retour à Paris 121, 122
Cahiers de Rodez 116 n. 17, 121, 124
existence in 160–1
God in 176
identity and 122, 143–5, 180, 198–9,
215
illisibilité of 122–5
style in 121–6, 128–31, 133–4, 147–8,
153–4, 169–70
cannibalism 84–5
Carroll, Lewis 108–9
Caws, Mary Ann 38
Les Cenci 3
‘Centre-Mère et Patron-Minet’ 87
Christianity 74, 123–4
rejection of 71, 97–8, 121
Ci-gı̂t précédé de la culture indienne 3,
88, 91 n. 20, 182, 200
consciousness 28–9, 37–8, 64, 95, 119,
156–7, 215–16
body and 176–8, 179–80
and loss 33
and self-consciousness 58–9
unconscious and 30–1, 61
corps sans organes 41, 70, 88, 89, 95,
173
abjection and 175, 188–91, 194–5
God and 72–3, 176, 189, 210
simplicity of 199–201, 204
vampires and 94, 188–9
writing and 16, 35, 174
Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière 4, 9,
20–1, 33 n. 12, 206
and consciousness 58
and thought 32, 34, 55–6, 73, 159
creativity 8, 21
cruelty 4, 76–7, 78
Dada 24, 110–11, 145 n. 12
death 77, 126
Deleuze, Gilles 6, 16 n. 18, 108, 173
demons 71, 84–6, 91, 94, 95
deportation 3
Derrida, Jacques 5, 6, 50, 56, 70, 76 n.
8, 154
L’Ecriture et la différence 7
‘La Parole Soufflée’ 4, 7–11, 150
‘Le Théâtre de la cruauté et la
clôture de la représentation’ 7
determinism 74
doubles/doubling 68, 78, 117, 148–9,
157–8, 166, 177
abstract ideas/abstraction
and 143–4, 146
angels and 89
reflexivity and 215–16
and self 35–6, 85, 128, 134–5
and speech 9
drawings 3, 121, 174
Dreyer, Carl 1
dualism 74, 75
of Gnosticism 84–5
of metaphysics 8
of writing 169
Dubuc, Marie 87
Dullin, Charles 1
Dumoulié, Camille 11 n. 15, 17, 50 n.
3, 75, 80, 90, 210
Eluard, Paul 27, 28
envoûtement (bewitchment) 91–5, 98,
132, 156 n. 8, 184, 186, 214
and anatomy 85, 94–5
vampires and 93–4, 184
index
erasure (gommage) 53–4, 133–4, 147
‘L’exécration du père-mère’ 87
existence 119, 177–9, 182, 213–14
body and 45–6, 160–1, 186, 187
of God 166
see also being
experience 27–8
fecality 126, 193–5
film 69
fire imagery 81, 86, 178, 179, 199
Foucault, Michel 6
Fragments d’un Journal d’Enfer 43–4, 68,
119
France, Anatole xi
Freud, Sigmund 11, 48, 151
Gance, Abel 1
Gasché, Rodolphe 14 n. 17
Gide, André 51
glossolalia 39 n. 27, 109–11, 200–1
and Word of God 109, 111
Gnosticism 74–7, 83, 84–6, 98, 150,
162, 166
dualism of 84–5
Manichaean cosmogeny 84–5
and self-presence 85
and Surrealism 103
God 42, 216
and abjection 112, 162, 172, 183,
192–3
and alienation 158, 162, 167
as Being 87–8
and body 137–8
and body, theft of 40–1, 71, 150–1,
160–5, 170–1, 175, 176, 183
and corps sans organes 72–3, 176, 189,
210
as Demiurge 150, 176
elimination of 168–9
existence of 166
infinitude of 99
and language 97, 99–101, 111–12
and meaning 97–9
229
as Non-Being 74
parasitism of 164, 165, 167, 168
(r)ejection of 192–3
as thief (le Voleur) 9 n. 12, 10, 150–1
and thought 99
as vampire 160, 161–2
le Verbe (Word of God) 98, 100,
102, 109, 111–12, 114, 155, 158 n.
9, 161
gommage (erasure) 53–4, 133–4, 147
Goodall, Jane 11, 50 n. 3, 74 n. 4, 133,
150, 166
Grossman, Evelyn 91 n. 20, 110, 111
Guattari, Félix 6, 173
Hamsum, Knut 44 n. 30
Harel, Simon 83
Heidegger, Martin 23–4
Héliogabale 2, 51 n. 6, 74, 75, 77–8, 173
Hofmannstahl, Hugo von 23, 28
Huelsenbeck, Richard 111
humour 55, 127, 153, 197 n. 14, 210
Hyde, G. M. 110 n. 12
identity 58, 122, 134–5, 176, 180,
198–9, 202–4, 215
and abjection 173, 174–5, 194–5, 208
body and 143–5, 157
dissolution of 80, 81–2, 135–6
mind and 157
religious 90–1
textual 78, 157, 166–7, 170, 196, 205,
219
theology and 171
see also self-identity
illness (maladie) 7, 53, 54 n. 11, 55, 57,
67, 70, 119
imagery:
of birth 51, 163, 164, 183, 196, 201
of fire 81, 86, 178, 179, 199
of labour 173–4
metaphors 12, 22, 61, 75, 76, 195,
196, 199
of plague 4, 76, 81
230
index
images 60–2, 199
impouvoir 8–9, 53, 68, 70
L’Infini (the Infinite) 99–100
inneity (innéité) 9 n. 12, 37, 163, 202
insight 66, 67
internment 3
Ireland 3
Kafka, Franz 23
Kahn, Gustave 51
Khlebnikov, Velimir 110, 131
knowledge 82
concepts and 44–5
flesh as site of 46
and loss 64
see also self-knowledge
Kristeva, Julia 6, 12 n. 16, 191 n. 10
Kruchonykh, Alexei 110, 131
labour imagery 173–4
language 5–6, 7, 23–4, 38, 62, 128–9
and abjection 193
and alienation 40, 74–6, 158, 159,
219
ambiguity of 136–7
ambivalence of 115, 135–6
anti-representational 69
Aragon on 38–9
Artaud and 38, 39–40, 47–8
Breton on 60
Dada and 145 n. 12
as destructive force 59–60
failure of 22, 24, 212, 213, 214
fight with 217–18
God and 97, 99–101, 111–12
illisibilité of 122–5, 148–9
inadequacy of 215, 216–17
linguistic crisis 9, 23
linguistic performance, pleasure
in 12, 54, 125, 131, 152–3
linguistic play on philosophical
concepts 139–42
neologisms 131, 200–1
philosophy of 97, 100
playful 11–12
power of 52, 143, 214
private 130
rant 12, 126–7
rationalistic 27
and reality 59–60, 143
repetition 133–4
and representation 213–14
saturation of 147–8
and self-identity 129
stasis of 129–30
Surrealism and 38, 40, 60
syntax, disruption of 130–1, 143
and thought 59, 66
word games 138–9, 207
see also imagery
Leiris, Artaud and Michel 138
Lettres de Rodez 93, 125–6
Littré, Emile 57
loss 34, 37, 205
and consciousness 33
and knowledge 64
of thought 33, 34, 49–50, 53–4,
55–7, 64
Lucas de Leyde 4
Lugné-Poë, Aurélien Marie 1
madness 104–5, 107, 190
Maeder, Thomas 72
magic (magie) 38, 51–2, 78, 79, 92, 109
maladie (illness) 7, 53–7, 67, 70, 119
Mallarmé, Stéphane 125
Manichaeism 84–5, 86
marginality 21–2
Marinetti, F. T. 111
meaning 97–9, 102
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 46 n. 31
le merveilleux 25, 27, 104–5
metaphors 12, 22, 61, 195, 196, 199
metaphysics and 75, 76
metaphysics 7, 10, 78–9, 209, 217
dualist 8
index
and inner self 212–13
and metaphors 75, 76
theatre and 76–7
theology and 75
mind 155–7, 158
Modernism 4, 147
Le Moine 51 n. 6
mouths:
and alienation 191–2
see also orality
mysticism 28, 47, 74, 133
names 75, 83, 84, 90–1, 132, 133
neologisms 131, 200–1
Nietzsche, Friedrich 120
Daybreak 49
The Will to Power 1, 20, 97, 121, 150,
173, 206
Non-Being 74
La Nouvelle Revue Française 20, 32
Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être 2–3, 52,
76 n. 7, 84, 132
reality in 74, 81–3
L’Ombilic des Limbes 2, 23, 26, 32, 33–4,
49, 68
orality 93, 153, 172, 184–5
the Other 184, 195–6, 200
‘Pages de Carnet. Notes
Intimes’ 38 n. 22
pain 40–2, 46, 48, 49, 68, 177: see also
suffering
parasites and parasitism 119, 128, 164,
184, 188
of God 164, 165, 167, 168
organs as 189
‘Paul les Oiseaux ou la Place de
l’Amour’ 17–18, 26 n. 9
Péret, Benjamin 51
personhood 136–7
Le Pèse-Nerfs 2, 26, 32, 33–4, 148, 193
impouvoir 9, 68
231
language 59, 214
loss in 53
plague imagery 4, 76, 81
poetry (sonority, intonation,
intensity) 5–6, 100–1, 103–5, 114,
180–7
and alienation 96
Artaud and 106–8
lineation 153–4
and religion 102–3
and self-identity 117–18
style in 153–4
and theology 97–8
and truth 108
‘Position de la Chair’ 45–6
post-structuralism 6–7, 150
Poulet, Georges 113
Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu 18, 111,
146–7, 165
corps sans organes 174, 189–90
‘La question se pose de . . . ’ 139–40,
207–8
Prével, Jacques 87
primitivism 78–9
Proust, Marcel 34, 36 n. 19, 173
rant 12, 126–7
reality 27, 28–30, 74–5, 80–3, 207
language and 59–60, 143
recordings 111, 127
reflexivity 215–16
religion:
and poetry 102–3
solar 2, 85
see also Christianity; God; theology
repetition 133–4
representation 76, 117
language and 213–14
‘Révolte contre la poésie’ 112–13, 115,
117–18, 144
La Révolution surréaliste 2, 25, 26, 27
Rey, Jean-Michel 133
Rilke, Rainer Maria 129
232
index
Rimbaud, Arthur 43, 52, 103, 112–13
Rivière, Jacques 2
Roumieux, André 93 n. 21
Sarraute, Nathalie 56 n. 12, 58, 59, 61
Sartre, Jean-Paul 173
schizophrenia 108–9
Schramme, Cécile 87
Schreber, Judge 151–2
Schreyer, Lothar 31
Schwitters, Kurt 111
self 1, 71, 128, 143, 155–6, 158–60,
181–2
creation of 115, 117, 118
destruction of 43–4, 116–17
doubles and 35–6, 85, 128, 134–5
inner self 42–3, 44, 48, 50, 127–8,
141–2, 212–13
writing of 34–5, 114, 144–5, 214–15
self-alienation 68, 71, 77, 79, 85, 122,
143
self-consciousness 6–7, 215
consciousness and 58–9
self-identity 70, 98, 116, 181, 215
angels and 89
and language 129
and poetry 117–18
textual 78, 167
writing and 51
self-knowledge 45, 62–3, 85, 134–5
writing and 36–7
self-presence 49–50, 80, 83–4
and alienation 82
Gnosticism and 85
thought and 58–9, 63, 68
separation 87–8
sexuality 77–8, 84–5, 86–8, 93, 94–5
silence 21
solar religions 2, 85
solipsism 31–2, 42, 147
Sollers, Phillipe 6
Sontag, Susan 6, 69 n. 17, 74 n. 4
soul (âme) 106, 161, 171, 175
and abjection 193–4, 195
Soupault, Philippe 104
speech 9, 39, 191–2: see also glossolalia;
recordings
Steinmetz, Jean Luc 116 n. 17, 122,
134
suffering 40–1, 68, 136, 164, 199: see
also pain
suicide 83
Suppôts et Supplications 3, 4, 19, 72, 88,
121 n. 2, 140
body in 174, 177, 182, 185, 187–8,
195, 196–7, 198
illisibilité of 124–5
vampires in 94, 185, 187–8
Surrealism 20 n. 2, 24–31
Artaud and 2, 24–6, 30–1, 46–7, 104
Artaud’s break with 105–6
Artaud’s expulsion from 25
duality of self 35–6
and Gnosticism 103
and interpenetration of art and
life 33, 34, 103–4
and language 38, 40, 60
and madness 104
Premier manifeste 35, 37
Second manifeste 26–7
and speech 39
Surrealist Research Centre 25, 26
Symbolism 111 n. 14
Tarahumara Indians 93 n. 21
rituals of 3, 79–80
Les Tarahumaras 3, 81, 127
Tarot cards 2–3, 81, 85
‘Textes surréalistes’ 23, 49, 50
‘Le Théâtre alchimique’ 69
Théâtre Alfred Jarry 1
Théâtre de l’Œuvre 1
‘Le Théâtre de la Cruauté’ 126
‘Le Théâtre et la peste’ 76
Le Théâtre et son Double 4, 5, 21–2, 51 n.
6, 68, 76–7, 144
index
‘Deuxième lettre sur le langage’ 59
and language 59, 69, 115
and reality 74
‘Sur le théâtre balinais’ 1
Theatre of Cruelty 5–6, 52, 68–70,
76–9, 81, 187
theology 71–3
and identity 171
and metaphysics 75
poetry and 97–8
Thévenin, Paule 3, 38 n. 22, 53 n. 9,
73 n. 2, 165 n. 15
‘L’Automatisme en question’ 50 n.
4
thinking 52–3
and writing 35
thinking subject:
and object of thought 31–2
and thought 57, 58
thought 31–7, 42–3, 47–8, 73, 159
body-anchored 44
definition of 65
failure of 41
God and 99
ideal 57–8, 66–7
and insight 66, 67
language and 59, 66
loss of 33, 34, 49–50, 53–4, 55–7, 64
as pre-linguistic form 30, 65
self-presence and 58–9, 63, 68
and suffering 41
and thinking subject 57, 58
total 63, 67
translations 108–9
Tric-Trac du ciel 20 n. 2
truth:
Artaud and 42–3
and poetry 108
Uccello, Paulo 17, 32
umour 12, 153
233
unconscious 156, 157, 160
consciousness and 30–1, 61
undermind 61, 155, 160
univers imaginaire (imaginary
universe) 15, 68, 113, 170, 187–8,
196, 207
Vaché, Jacques-Pierre 12, 153
Valéry, Paul 21, 111 n. 14
vampires 158, 187–9
and abjection 183–6, 188–9, 191,
194
and alienation 188–9
and corps sans organes 94, 188–9
and envoûtement 93–4, 184
God as 160, 161–2
Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société 21, 92,
158, 174, 190–1, 214
Un ventre fin . . . 26 n. 9
le Verbe (Word of God) 114, 155, 158 n.
9, 161
and glossolalia 109, 111
poets and 98, 100, 102, 111–12
violence 217–19, 220
Vitrac, Roger 1
Word of God (le Verbe) 114, 155, 158 n.
9, 161
and glossolalia 109, 111
poets and 98, 100, 102, 111–12
writing 35–8, 52–3, 129–30, 148–9,
217–19
and abjection 194–5
and corps sans organes 16, 35, 174
duality of 169
failure of 35
of self 34–5, 114, 144–5, 214–15
and self-identity 51
and self-knowledge 36–7
and thinking 35

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