Zach Hartley

Impractical Madness: Praxis and the Final Body of Antonin Artaud

Zach Hartley
 

Antonin Artaud was mad. Let us accept this as a given, and in that acceptance, attempt to put aside any assumptions, positive or negative, regarding the nature and affectation of madness. He indeed proclaimed himself a madman, calling himself “Artaud le momo (Artaud the madman)” in a poem written at the Rodez asylum, so this should not be difficult.1 By accepting this, we are able to reject any idea of the causes of Artaud’s madness. It is not within the realm of this work to debate whether it was Artaud’s bout with meningitis at an early age, decades of heavy drug use, electroshock therapy, or any other myriad potential reasons for his madness.

That said, Artaud is also considered to be among the foremost theatrical theoreticians, if not the leading theatrical theoretician of the twentieth century. Madness has a tendency to attract the intellectual inside of all of us, leading us to question our own natures and philosophies, affect confidence in our sense of self, raise awareness of our personal otherness, and reinforce the reality in which we live while simultaneously smashing down the walls surrounding that reality.

Decades of study have placed Artaud among a long line of mad geniuses, including Pablo Picasso, Juan Miro, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, etc.2 These famous examples are part of an abundance of artists and scientists that have infected much of the world with another sort of madness – turning us all into a kind of insanophile. We wonder when the next mad genius will bring us into another age, lead us through the next episteme shift, and change our collective perception of the universe as we know it.

Michael Foucault mourns the future loss of this madness in his essay Madness, the Absence of Work. He declares, “madness is language that is excluded,” 3 which places madness firmly in the realm of language. As perhaps the world’s greatest proponent of the minimalization of language, it is almost as though Foucault is talking about Artaud himself.

This paper, however, is not delving solely into the realms of Artaud’s incredible madness. Artaud had an obsession with the body that was unlike any other before or after his life. Much of his work was focused on that body in performance, and near the end of his life with that body in space and time, regardless of its placement into a space of performance. This paper will use Foucault’s Madness, the Absence of Work to bring into question the theatrical practicality of these bodily theories that Artaud formulated in his madness, particularly the deep stage of madness that he exhibited during and after his stay in the asylum at Rodez.

In the theatre, theory and practice have a long and difficult relationship. It has been in the collective mindset for a long time that the theorists “think”, and the practitioners “do.” In theatre, this idea is nothing short of absurd. There is an enormous amount of work from theatre practitioners regarding their theories and ideologies on theatre making. Because of this, a far better way to describe what the theatrical practitioner/scholar figure does is praxis.4

According to Stephen Farrier, there are two ways to describe praxis. The first is simply as a synonym for practice, but the second way that he describes it is “an effort of will to transform theoretical concepts and considerations into shared physical activity.”5 In order to make a serious impact on theatrical art, all theorists must look to praxis as the end goal of their process. 

Artaud, as a theatrical theorist, had praxis as an end goal. He was successful at points in this: as a director at the Alfred Jarry Theatre, Artaud appreciated significant critical applause.6 After his stint at the Jarry, however, Artaud struggled to find funding for any major theatrical productions, and much of his work was not produced until after his death. His theoretical writings, however, were consistently published throughout his life. While much of his practice suffered, potentially as a result from his antisocial behavior,7 his theory is well documented. Perhaps this is why there are so many questions regarding the plausibility of Artaud’s concepts in practice.

So, Artaud himself lacked praxis beyond some small amount of directing work early in his career. Even in his last exhibition of works, a group of self-portraits showcased at a café in Paris, there was a question as to what exactly they were. Artaud wrote "My drawings are not drawings but documents / You must look at them and understand what's inside."8 Artaud, at the end of his life, was creating that which he had railed against in perhaps his most famous essay, No More Masterpieces: literature. Because madness is language based, Foucault relates the utterances of madness to the utterances of literature:

By the end of the nineteenth century (around the time of the discovery of psychoanalysis, when there was certainly no dearth of discoveries), literature had become utterance that inscribed in itself its own principle of decipherment. Or, in any case, it implied, in every sentence and in every word, the power to modify in sovereign fashion the values and significations of the linguistic code to which in spite of everything (and in fact) it belonged; it suspended the reign of that code in one actual gesture of writing.9

In order to understand what Artaud was working with theoretically late in his life, one must examine the rest of his life’s work as well. Scholars have conveniently split Artaud’s life into three phases in order to accomplish this.

In his first phase, Artaud struggles with an unstoppable and impenetrable self- awareness. It seems as though he observes himself with subjectivity as though outside of his own body.10 This is apparent in his early writings:

. . . the brain sees the whole thought at once with all its circumstances, and it also sees all the points of view it could take and all the forms with which it could invest them, a vast juxtaposition of concepts, each of which seems more necessary and also more dubious than the others, which all the complexities of syntax would never suffice to express and expound.11

Here Artaud recognizes a complexity in his own mind from outside of the process of the mind itself. In this first phase of his theoretical life, a preoccupation with the mind and its processes is clear. “The brain wants to say too many thinks of all at once, ten thoughts instead of one rush toward the exit.”12 Apparent in this is Foucault’s idea of madness being a “reserve” of meaning. It is beyond a simple inability to express every thought, but a withholding of the meaning intended, leaving behind an empty space in which the only proposition is the possibility that meaning could be found there.13 However, in Artaud’s troubled mind, the ability to find that meaning is another of those ten thoughts rushing to the exit, leaving an infinite regression into the empty space, devoid of meaning and filled only with maddening and inexpressible potential. It is this potential for which Artaud spends his life attempting to widen the exit.

This Foucaultian reserve of meaning is also apparent in Artaud’s second phase of theoretical work – work being an extremely important word in that phrase. It is during this phase that Artaud wrote his first and second manifestos on the Theatre of Cruelty, and is described as a decidedly Nietzschean Dionysian phase.14 It is in this phase that Artaud begins his assault on language as a series of signification – something discussed endlessly in graduate programs and scholarly works, but not at the core of this phase.

The central war that Artaud wages in this, his most well known section of life, is one against Apollonian consciousness. Artaud is likely to have read Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy,15 and it is plausible that Artaud’s ideas of Cruelty stemmed directly from Nietzsche’s concepts of the Dionysian vs. Apollonian. “Dionysian music especially awoke in that world fear and terror. The Music of Apollo was Doric architecture expressed in sound.”16

Artaud attempts in his Theatre of Cruelty to fill the void created by Foucault’s reserved meaning. If the mind is not restricted in its expression of thought by a signifying language, perhaps thoughts will be able to flow out of that jammed up door in a more efficient manner. Given a new language, “a different language of nature . . .whose sources will be tapped at a point still deeper, more remote from thought,"17 he can remove himself from his obsession with the mind, leaving behind consciousness as a barrier. It is during this time that Artaud slows down his practical creation. He dedicates himself, ironically, to the expression of his thought in writing, and his few practical creations were monumental failures.18 He decided to move on to a new basis for the application of praxis: the Dionysian body.

In order to find this body, Artaud looks to the primitive. He embarks on an ultimately unsuccessful trip to Mexico in search of “a new idea of man.”19 This would be the beginning of the end of his Dionysian experiment, and it is at this point that both Artaud’s ideas regarding the body and his actual physical body begin to deteriorate, perhaps due to his massive heroin withdrawal, having thrown the last of it away in order to free himself from European influence.20 Artaud, at this point, seems uninterested in praxis: he is on a search for ideas, not on a mission to create.

In Mexico, Artaud visits the Tarahumara, specifically to participate a ritual in which they ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms. He was sorely disappointed. He writes: “I had not conquered by force of mind that invincible, organic hostility in which it was I who no longer wanted to function, only to bring back a collection of outworn imageries.”21 The rite for which he had suffered so intensely to be a part of had not healed him. He is fetched back to Europe, is detained during a trip to Ireland, and returns to France wrapped in a straitjacket.22

Finally, we arrive the last phase of Artaud’s life. Artaud spends time in a series of Mental Hospitals from September of 1937 to February 1939, detained and in a catatonic state, and declared incurable. It is after this declaration that Artaud begins again to write.23

Artaud is still, in these writings from the third phase of his life, extremely critical of the mind, and again seeks escape early in this phase in drugs, specifically opium and heroin. In a letter dated November tenth, 1940 to Genica Athanasiou, an actress romantically connected to Artaud, he requests that she come to get him so they can go away together. Fourteen days later, he writes another letter that begins “You must find heroin at all costs and you must risk death to get it to me here.”24 Artaud is now the endlessly relapsing addict, paranoid and with loathing of a world and a desire for escape. After being transferred to Rodez, he writes letters regarding the use of opium and the way it affects him.25 He has regressed back to his European addictions, and it would be easy to say that with his attempts to escape his mind that he has also regressed back to the theories of his first phase.

Artaud’s madness, though, has a curious way of constantly moving forward. He shows a denunciation of the body of cruelty in a letter to Pierre Loeb, dated 1947: “For the great lie has been to make man an organism, / ingestion, / assimilation, / incubation, / excretion, / thus creating a world of hidden functions which are outside the realm of the / deliberative will.”

No longer are the biological functions of the body tied into Artaud’s reality, into his ideal body. Where, in the Theatre of Cruelty, the body was the vessel for the transition of a primal, universal idea, Artaud’s final body is one that is pre-primal, resisting even the necessary functions Artaud had previously thought were the signs of his “new idea of man.” It is a body that does not simply deny the signification of language, but exists beyond and before language. It is a body that escapes the chains of Foucault’s language based madness, finally allowing Artaud freedom. Artaud now wants “to destroy difference, to destroy the history that supports the dualities of text and body, speech and existence.”26

Artaud foreshadowed this final bodily transformation in his essay Appeal to Youth Intoxication/Disintoxication when he discusses the affects of Opium withdrawal: “The body is there, but as if emptied of itself and its organs.”27 Organs, being the source of this biological function that Artaud has deemed unnecessary as agents of the supreme consciousness, must be eliminated. Artaud, therefore, relates the perfect body to a tree in a letter to Pierre Loeb, April 23, 1947: “The time when man was a tree without organs or function, / but possessed of will, / and a tree of will which walks / will return.”28

From this point on, Artaud’s writings show an obsession with the body and its automatic functions. He no longer has desires connection to the automatic functions of the body, because “the balance between magical production and automatic production is very far from being maintained, / it is abominably broken.”29

Artaud wants to find a way to reattach that broken link between the magical and automatic “like the one who did not begin and never ceased reaching his body.”30 Artaud wants to be able to refuse Foucault’s utterances, to fill the void created by the madness of literature and language, not with thoughts, but with a supreme indifference to that void. Artaud’s body is no longer Dionysian, but also decidedly not Apollonian – in this new body he becomes paradoxical; desiring indifference, free from agency, while at the same time allowing for the affectation of explosive will.

This period of work following the letter to Pierre Loeb is mostly in a poetic form. Again, this is Artaud creating literature in the understanding that literature is precisely the linguistic code that transmits his madness. If he could only find the utterances necessary for transmission of his particular code of madness in literature, perhaps he could break through them in his body, and allow for praxis.

Sadly, though, Artaud is alone. He blames the rest of the world, in fact all beings, for his malady. “And now, / all of you, beings, / I have to tell you that you have always made me shit.”31 It is the others, a world of others, holding him back. Artaud must cease to exist in this reality in order to accomplish his goals.

This could be enough to declare that Artaud’s final body lacks the capability for praxis. It is a body full of paradoxes, not of this reality, existing before the primal and therefore outside of time and incapable of being shared because the universal consciousness, according to Artaud, does not admit its existence. Artaud, however, is not finished, and stands defiantly alone, declaring victory. “For me, plain / Antonin Artaud, / no one has influence over me / who is no more than man or / god.”32 Perhaps, in this, he is correct. He will not submit, seems staunch in his madness, and appears unaffectable. He even, in this state, creates.

His last piece of writing for performance, To Have Done with the Judgment of God, was also Artaud’s final practical failure. It was not produced in his lifetime, and even had a long conversation by letter with a radio station attempting to produce it, offering cuts and changes, but it did not materialize.33 It is another work of theory, a microcosm of that third phase of his life, an argumentative production aimed at affecting minds.

In the end, all we have of Artaud is literature. Even the work that exists beyond a singular point in time, such as his self-portraits, Artaud declared documents, turning them into literature. Society, in opposition to Artaud’s goals, has created secondary languages in order to decipher the mad language of that literature: criticism. Artaud may have left this reality behind and achieved his goals; one cannot assume the processes of the mad mind/body. The literature that he leaves with us, however, will never allow for pure praxis. Foucault explains this:

Once uncovered as a language silenced by its superposition upon itself, madness neither manifests nor narrates the birth of a work (or of something which, by genius or by chance, could have become a work); it outlines an empty form from where this work comes, in other words, the place from where it never ceases to be absent, where it will never be found because it had never been located there to begin with. There, in that pale region, in that essential hiding place, the twinlike incompatibility of the work and of madness becomes unveiled; this is the blind spot of the possibility of each to become the other and of their mutual exclusion.34

So, for Artaud, the literature shows us the void from which work could appear. It is a form of potential where praxis lives but is not manifest. It is this heterotopic space that Artaud wanted so badly to embody. Foucault continues:

It is time to recognize that the language of literature is not defined by what it says, nor by the structures that render it significant. Rather, it has a being, and it is about this being that it ought to be questioned. What, in fact, is this being? Undoubtedly something connected to self-implication, to the double and the void that expands within it.35

It is no coincidence that Foucault discusses the void and the double in this writing, as they are two motifs used so often in Artaud’s writings. The void is the space that would allow Artaud to connect his work and his madness, but it is the double of that space that disallows praxis.

Artaud most likely understood this. In the letter to Pierre Loeb, Artaud writes: “but in the void, / and there was no one / and there was no beginning.” 36 For his whole life, Artaud was implicating himself as an agent of madness, and by the act of creation, its double: literature. He constantly railed against the secondary languages of criticism and of culture that could not translate his madness, and sought refuge from the agency of these secondary languages in the place that he thought they could not affect – his body. By placing that body into the ever-expanding void that lives at the threshold of madness and work and their doubles, theory and praxis, his potential was forever lost in the annals of literature.

1 Antonin Artaud. Selected Writings. ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976], 535-543.

2 Phil Barker, “Creativity and Psychic Distress in Artists, Writers and Scientists: Implications for Emergent Models of Psychiatric Nursing Practice.” Journal of Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing 5, no. 2 [1998]: 108-111.

3 Michel Foucault. “Madness, the Absence of Work.” trans. Peter Stastny and Deniz Sengel. Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 [1995]: 295.

4 Stephen Farrier. “Approaching Performance Though Praxis.” Studies in Theatre 25, no. 2 [2005]: 140.

5 Ibid., 129.

6 Kimberly Jannarone. “The Theatre Before Its Double: Artaud Directs in the Alfred Jarry Theatre.” Theatre Survey 46, no. 2 [2005]: 207.

7 Christopher Ho. “Antonin Artaud: From Center to Periphery, Periphery to Center.” PAJ 19, no. 2 [1997]: 6.

8 Quoted in Christopher Ho. “Antonin Artaud: From Center to Periphery, Periphery to Center.” PAJ 19, no. 2 [1997]: 12.

9 Michel Foucault. “Madness, the Absence of Work.” trans. Peter Stastny and Deniz Sengel. Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 [1995]: 296.

10 Arnorsson Sass Louis. "’The Catastrophes of Heaven’: Modernism, Primitivism, and the Madness of Antonin Artaud.” Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 2 [1996]: 79.

11 Antonin Artaud. Selected Writings. ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976], 293.

12 Ibid.

13 Michel Foucault. “Madness, the Absence of Work.” trans. Peter Stastny and Deniz Sengel. Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 [1995]: 295.

14 Arnorsson Sass Louis. "’The Catastrophes of Heaven’: Modernism, Primitivism, and

the Madness of Antonin Artaud.” Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 2 [1996]: 79. 15 Ibid., 80.

16 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. ed. Michael Tanner, trans Shaun Whiteside [London: Penguin Group, 2000], 11.

17 Antonin Artaud. The Theatre and Its Double. trans. Mary Caroline Richards. [New York: Grove Press, 1958], 110.

18 Arnorsson Sass Louis. "’The Catastrophes of Heaven’: Modernism, Primitivism, and the Madness of Antonin Artaud.” Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 2 [1996]: 80.

19 Antonin Artaud. Selected Writings. ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976], 372.

20 Arnorsson Sass Louis. "’The Catastrophes of Heaven’: Modernism, Primitivism, and the Madness of Antonin Artaud.” Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 2 [1996]: 81.

21 Artaud, Antonin. Selected Writings. ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976], 391.

22 Arnorsson Sass Louis. "’The Catastrophes of Heaven’: Modernism, Primitivism, and the Madness of Antonin Artaud.” Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 2 [1996]: 83.

23 Ibid.

24 Antonin Artaud. Selected Writings. ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976], 417-418.

25 Ibid., 461-462.

26 Wendy Cealey Harrison. “Madness and Historicity: Foucault and Derrida, Artaud and Descartes.” History of the Human Sciences 20, no. 4 [2007]: 83.

27 Antonin Artaud. Selected Writings. ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976], 339.

28 Ibid., 515.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 518.

31 Ibid., 544.

32 Ibid., 550.

33 Ibid., 575-585.

34 Michel Foucault. “Madness, the Absence of Work.” trans. Peter Stastny and Deniz Sengel. Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 [1995]: 296-297

35 Ibid., 297.

36 Antonin Artaud. Selected Writings. ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976], 518.