Artaud

Cruelty as necessity, not sadism.

Theatre as the double of a plague.

Gesture where dialogue fails.

Artaud (1896–1948), adjacent

Message

The theatre that represents life is a dead theatre. Cruelty is not bloodshed as a spice. It is the rigor with which a spectacle must break the spectator’s organism, as the plague breaks a city, so that a metaphysics the word no longer carries can re-enter through the body. Language as written dialogue is the enemy. Gesture, breath, cry, and hieroglyph are the means. Late, the body itself is the battlefield: to have done with the judgment of God is to refuse the organism that God, medicine, and grammar have built.

Content

The Theatre and Its Double (1938) holds the two manifestos and “The Theatre and the Plague.” The letters from Rodez and To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947, recorded, then banned by French radio) are the late form. The early correspondence with Jacques Rivière is the first statement that he cannot make his thought arrive in the poem.

Presentation

Manifesto, letter, scream. He writes as a man whose thought is interrupted by the body, and he makes the interruption the style. There is no system to extract without loss. The radio piece is the presentation: a voice that will not be broadcast.

Method

There is a method of attack, not of argument. He doubles theatre with plague, alchemy, and metaphysics, then subtracts plot. Cruelty means necessity, lucidity, appetite for life, not sadism. That distinction is why he is adjacent to this branch and not a son of Sade.

Summary

The limit to be broken is representation itself, and the organ of the break is the body. He does not found transgression as a theory of the taboo. He founds a cruelty that later writers, Deleuze among them, will steal for other purposes.

What shaped him

People: Dullin, Lugné-Poe, the Surrealists, then the break with Breton; Rivière as the editor who refused the poems and kept the letters. Place: Marseille, Paris, the trip to the Tarahumara, then Rodez and Ivry. Formative experiences: lifelong pain and the electroshocks at Rodez; the failure of the Alfred Jarry Theatre; the peyote rites, which he read as a theatre Europe had lost. Cultural events: cinema and the talking picture, which he distrusted; the Occupation and the asylum as the state’s answer to a body it could not use.

Quotes

“I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But I use them at last in the management of my own affairs.”

Theatre must be “bloody and inhuman,” a double of the plague, not a copy of the drawing room.

Cruelty is “appetite for life, a cosmic rigor, an implacable necessity.”

“All writing is garbage.” The body has to finish what the sentence betrays.

“To have done with the judgment of God.”