The Healing Practices Of Language: How Life Matters In Antonin Artaud’s Later Writings

Abstract

The life of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) has been tormented by physical and mental illnesses, by the inexorability of the avant-gardists and modern times but most of all by language. Already in the early twenties, Artaud tried to express his physical and mental suffering, but perceived the obstructive and sick making role of language. After his failed career as a poet, a playwright and a scenarist. Artaud travels to Mexico where he hopes to find an organic culture in which one engages with hitherto unexplored forces of the body. This organic culture is a culture of absolute immanence where the mind is intricately related to the body. His Mexican experiences change his personality, because, after his return, Artaud’s writings develop from messianistic, occult and Kabbalistic texts to more mystical and religious texts that are traversed by dramatized complaints of his various internments, demands for drugs and critiques to, following his words, an advanced civilization. During the nine years of his various internments, Artaud more and more sustainably focuses on language with which he starts to play, that he starts to twist, torment and on which he inflicts a torsion and with which he creatively engages in order to express the vital forces of life and matter, or what he calls ‘the true nature of evil.’ This research focuses on Artaud’s later writings in particular – that are somewhat neglected or understudied in the Anglo-Saxon literature on his works – in which we investigate, through a critical textual analysis, based on a close reading, the constitutive role of an affirmative language. Asserting that there are still active forces at work in Artaud’s writings, a revaluation of his later works in particular is interesting, healing and even necessary if we consider and analyze the subjugating structures that are still at work in our society. In this new materialist or schizoanalytic reading of Artaud’s later writings – that focuses on the ruptures and the cracks within his use of language –, we analyze the vital forces with which Artaud’s language engages, the form of this language and the significance of this language. Focusing on a postsecular religion of immanence – the word ‘religion’ is etymologically understood as ‘reconnecting’ or ‘rereading’ – that reconnects man to the vital forces of his body, matter and life, we contend that Artaud’s later writings engage with the ungraspable and joyous as well as terrible forces of life that we can only accept as an inevitable submission to its necessity. This life is modelled, subjugated and codified by a language that permits communication from which the functioning of society is regulated. At the same time, this language also restricts the infinite capabilities of the singularities of our bodies, expressions and desires. Following Artaud’s later writings, the reader perceives how life matters in writing through a creative play with language, that we will eventually call the art of ‘crescive writing,’ through which we can reengage sustainably with the joyous as well as the terrible forces of life.