Artaud Antonin - Antonin Artaud

In an interview from 1996, the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard averred, Everyone should have a singular, personal relation to Artaud. With him, we are always on a very inhuman level. He has become an impersonal being. What Baudrillard appeared to be saying is that the departure of the corporeal Artaud has led to a transubstantiated reversal; in the process, Artaud has achieved almost mythological status, a conclusion echoed by others, including those closest to Artaud. In April 2012 Artauds nephew, Serge Malaussna, his last living relative, alluded in conversation with me to the existence of two Artauds: the one who lived and the one of our ideas. In other words, Artaud has become something of a palimpsest upon which we inscribe what we want to find in him, and maybe even find in ourselves.

In some respects, Artaud facilitated this in a couple of ways. First, his choice of literary expression was compelling, and at the same time it was head-spinningly confusing. Much of what he wrote was in the service of transcending the boundaries of conventional communication: a cocktail of obtuse symbolism, intentional obfuscation, sexual prudery and weird scatological analogies, followed by references to curses and spells as a chaser and yet, this strange admixture was so well written. Second, in a paper he wrote to accompany an exhibition he organized on the work of the Mexican Surrealist Mara Izquierdo, Artaud noted that, as they travel, objects exchange their properties and metamorphose. Why would it not be the same for him that his peregrinations, whether within this dimension or after his death outside of it, have caused a corresponding alteration of his persona?

It is pretty clear that Baudrillard had no intention of wiping away the occluding mud Artaud seemingly placed intentionally on the window into his thoughts, and I must concur that to study Artaud means respecting the impenetrability of his seemingly Kevlar-shrouded head; but all the same, the more I read, the more I began to find a logic to his thoughts. For purposes of literary clarity, the pre-asylum Artaud is a snap in comparison to the guy who, during nearly a decade of confinement in French insane asylums, had existed alone, in his head. Whether or not he was insane when first institutionalized in 1937, his years in the precariousness of wartime French asylums did no favours to his mental health. The electroconvulsive therapy administered to him in Rodez during the last years of his confinement might have rewired him and prepared his re-entrance into society; but to Artaud this was yet another example of the individuals vulnerability to envotements (spells). While it is tempting to put these references to spells down to his penchant for spiritualism, given the impact of hegemonic forces on him, how else could Artaud make sense of it all?

From start to finish, there is constancy to Artauds writings and ideas; they scream (sometimes literally) alienation and rebellion: rebellion against the stultifying bourgeois values of his youth; the privileging of Western cultural norms, including reason and rationality; and rebellion against the authorities; the power of wealth; and the subversion of nature. Stripped of their bizarre, if not inaccessible, symbolism and verbiage, Artauds ideas are consonant with the ideals of the French revolutionary tradition, challenging domination in general, and bourgeois domination in particular; but whereas nineteenth-century French revolutionaries situated their challenge in the socialpolitical realm, Artauds revolution was over the cultural space of meanings, understandings, representations and signs.