“In our present degenerative state, metaphysics must be made to enter the mind through the body,” Antonin Artaud wrote in the first manifesto of his Theatre of Cruelty.¹ Analyses of Artaud’s work tend to focus on this body-mind duality, on Artaud’s obsession with blood, pain, and excrement – often linked to his medical problems, including meningitis and neuralgia. However, an intensive study of Artaud’s work will reveal that this pairing is only the superficial extension of a deeper duality, a Being/World link that is central to the construct of madness. Artaud’s work has always been embroiled in the argument over the line between madness and creativity, extending into the ideas of belief and subjectivity, spanning from the philosophers like Descartes and Heidegger to the psychologists like Freud. The theme that persists, however, is the idea that madness results from a disconnect between the Being and the World. Artaud extends this to the idea that true madness is a total separation, a void state, and throughout his career actively strove to attain this true madness. He tried theater, drugs, the destruction of language – but none of them reached the true void state he desired. During the last few years of his life, as his writings became more erratic, he reached the conclusion that it was his body anchoring him to the world. Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty was thus a mirror image of his eventual ideal – the Theatre of Cruelty forced life, the World, onto the spectator through violence of the body, but in the end Artaud believed life was Being alone, a divorce from the body.

Artaud spent the latter half of his life in various asylums, most notably Rodez, where he was administered electroshock treatments – he claimed the treatments robbed him of creativity and kept him in constant pain, but it was also during this period that he began to write again. Modern psychiatry labels him as a schizophrenic, although this seems to be based on a diagnosis of ‘disorganized thinking’ since there is no record of auditory hallucinations, the most common symptom of schizophrenia. Additionally, his family and friends never believed that he was mentally ill and eventually secured his release from Rodez, allowing him to return to Paris for the last two years of his life. In a homage to Artaud, his friend André Breton expressed regret that: “The real tragedy is that the society to which we are less and less honoured to belong to persists in making it an inexpiable crime to have gone over to the other side of the looking glass.” ² The common agreement of his acquaintances was that society had not appreciated Artaud, rather than him being too mad for society.

Madness and creativity has always been inextricably linked in the analysis of Artaud’s work. Gilles Deleuze in his analysis of Artaud’s poetry points out “the grotesque trinity of child, poet, and madman”, three types which are defined from a break in reality, but in very different ways. ³ Artaud was located at the merge between poet and madman, and the temptation is strong to define Artaud’s creativity in solely the terms of clinical psychology. Francis Garelli warns against this in his article “Ontology and Madness”; he points out that “the psychic fact of a man’s ‘madness’ located in a sick brain can only appear a fundamental vice, afflicting his works with a non-delineable defect, to the degree that the function spontaneously attributed to them would be to ‘represent’ or to objectively ‘reproduce’ ‘reality.’”⁴ He argues that when a madman directly equates two objects in reality, such as himself to Napoleon, madness may be defined in purely clinical terms, but when creating an alternative form of reality, such as in art, the presence of clinical madness is no longer clear. Artaud’s work should be considered by creative standards, not just the standards of his madness, because he was not trying to objectively represent reality. “What counts is the internal coherence of the work, that which is entirely different from a conformity to the standards of common sense,” Garelli says.⁵ The criterion of artistic judgment is whether or not a piece of art conforms to its own rules, not the rules of ‘reality’. Without specific reference to reality, madness is indistinguishable from sanity; one could even say that sanity and reality are not synonymous, that madness creates its own reality. Already the Being/World duality begins to emerge, as a break between the reality of the Being and the reality of the World.

In fact, as Shoshana Felman states in her article “Madness and Philosophy”, those who do not believe in their own reality, such as artists, are not considered mad, while madmen are defined by their total belief in their reality. “If madness as such is defined as an act of faith in reason,” she points out, “no reasonable conviction can indeed be exempt from the suspicion of madness.”⁶ Internal coherence enables faith in the reality of Being, making it at first glance impossible to tell a reality of Being from a reality of World. Both are consistent realities, only judged as madness by misalignment. Artaud himself wrote about the delusions that he suffered at Rodez: “False beliefs are merely the immoderate enlargement and distortion of accurate feelings and perceptions which have taken on a disproportionate value because consciousness had wrongly dwelled on them too long.”⁷ He blamed his delusions on the suffering of his confinement, but insisted on their root in accurate perceptions.

The classical philosophers go even farther; Descartes and Heidegger both posit that the reality of Being is superior to the reality of World. Descartes followed up his cogito sum with the statement that: “It is an impossibility of being mad inherent not in the object of thought, but in the subject who thinks.”⁸ This statement has been interpreted in different ways – Michel Foucault said that Descartes was excluding madman from the category of thinking subjects, and thus relegating madness to a state of non-being, while Jacques Derrida took it to mean that if the subject is thinking, he cannot be mad.⁹ Derrida’s interpretation, when carried to its full extent, implies that if the subject cannot be mad, it is the object of thought that is mad. The Being cannot be mad because he is thinking; thus the World is the one that must be mad.

Martin Heidegger’s philosophy contains the original vocabulary of Being/World, and his work is often mentioned in reference to Artaud – “Derrida’s work on Artaud is characterized by a desire to affirm Artaud as a protodeconstructor when he is more of a two-headed Heideggerian destroyer,” Edward Scheer remarks in his introduction to Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader.¹⁰ Heidegger’s complex theories of Da-sein establish the primary state of Being, and a World that emerges in reference to the faith of the Being. “Faith in the reality of the ‘external world’, whether justified or not, proves this reality for it,” he writes in his critical work Being and Time.¹¹ “We cannot say that the world in its turn is objectively present in space…The ‘surrounding world’ does not arrange itself in a previously given space, but rather its specific worldliness articulates in its significance the relevant context of an actual totality of places circumspectly referred to each other.”¹² Thus the World only exists in reference to the Being, whether through faith or through spatial construction. The Heideggerian existence is based around the Being as the only stable reference, like the pendulum of another Foucault, swinging along an axis from the one fixed point in the universe.

This Being/World boundary becomes specific to Artaud when viewed through the lens of his schizophrenia. Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of Artaud’s poetry, mentioned above, brings in several observations on the schizophrenic mind that emphasize the problem with boundaries. He writes:

The first schizophrenic evidence is that the surface has split open. Things and propositions have no longer any frontier between them, precisely because bodies have no surface. The primary aspect of the schizophrenic body is that it is a sort of body sieve. Freud emphasized this aptitude of the schizophrenic to grasp the surface and the skin as if they were punctured by an infinite number of little holes.¹³

Without a surface, there is no difference between inside and outside – everything turns into gaping depths and interlocking pieces, either a sucking abyss or fragmented, spinning parts. There are no longer categories or separations; this perhaps is the actual experience of the ‘disorganized thinking’ named by the psychologists. Deleuze continues: “The problem is a clinical problem, that is, a problem of sliding from one organization to another…a sliding is produced, and even a creative, central collapse, causing us to be in another world and in an entirely different language.”¹⁴ The latter half of that quote is a direct comment on Artaud’s translation of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” – the translation started out close to the original but as it continued, diverged radically, disintegrating with exponential speed. “With horror, we recognize it easily,” Deleuze says. “It is the language of schizophrenia.”¹⁵ His reaction of horror emphasizes the fact that there is a terrifying element to this disintegration of boundaries and the eternal depth that results. In a sense, schizophrenics are constantly in danger of having their Being swallowed up by the World.

Deleuze references Sigmund Freud in his description of schizophrenia; Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents has further insights on the boundaries between Being and World. He says that the ego, which we would equate with the Being, is created out of an effort to distinguish the pleasure/pain inflicted by external sources from those by internal sources. This boundary, however, is easily blurred – even a simple psychological source such as infatuation or love erases the line, so for pathology such as schizophrenia, the effect is even more severe. “Pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines between the ego and external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly.”¹⁶ Incorrect is up for debate, but the Being/World blurring is clear.

As a result, the only solution to the pain and fear that results from this disintegration of boundaries is a complete disconnect of the Being from the World, in order to hold onto the wholeness of the Being. “[Pathology] regards reality as the sole enemy and as the source of all suffering, with which it is impossible to live, so that one must break off all relations with it if one is to be in any way happy,” Freud writes.¹⁷ Yet as mentioned above, society defines madness as a misalignment between the reality of Being and the World. The solution of a total separation between Being and World would be in essence the embrace of true madness. Felman supports this idea of true madness, combining Foucault, Descartes, and classical literature to declare that: “Madness, in other words, is for Foucault pathos itself, a metaphor of pathos, of the unthought residue of thought.”¹⁸ In other words, madness is an absence, a void – the moment it is named, it ceases to be madness. Madness is that which does not exist in the World, that which has been erased by history.

This, then, was Artaud’s ultimate ideal – the neutral void state of a Being totally disconnected from the World. He may or may not have been clinically mad, but he was certainly striving for the state of true madness. His quest for life became a quest for void; on achieving this through culture he wrote, “Culture in space means culture of a mind which never stops breathing and feeling alive in space and which summons up the bodies of space like the very objects of its thought, but which, as far as the mind is concerned, is located in the dead center of space, in other words, in a neutral void.”¹⁹ He quotes Tao te King of Lao-Tseu with the proverb: “Thirty spokes meet in the center, but it’s the void in the middle which makes the wheel go round.”²⁰ This quest for void, a state of non-existence, occurs over and over again in his writings. He speaks of theatre as a way to achieve non-existence; he glorifies Oriental theatre as nearing that ideal state through repetition and gesture; he tries to destroy language as an abomination to the void. His experiments with drugs were yet another extension of his quest for void – but throughout his search he never discovered fulfillment of the void state.

Theatre for Artaud was always to some extent about completing the disconnect between Being and World. In his early writing “The Evolution of Set Design”, or mise-en-scéne, he declared that: “We must learn to be mystical again at least in a certain kind of way… by forgetting ourselves, forgetting the theatre… ridding ourselves not only of all reality, of all verisimilitude, but even of all logic, if at the end of all illogicality we still perceive life.”²¹ Violence and cruelty were not a way to access the mind through the body, as commonly supposed, but to eliminate the mind, thrusting it into the void state. The focus on the body was only a foil, a counterpart to the real goal of achieving a non-existent mind. The Theater of Cruelty had some success in this aim – André Breton observed with some uneasiness that, “The space that Artaud led me into always strikes me as an abstract, a hall of mirrors… It’s a place of lacunae and ellipses in which, personally, I lose all my means of communication with the innumerable things that, despite everything, give me pleasure and bind me to this earth.”²² Breton’s phrasing evokes Freud’s ideas – pleasure defines his ego, creating a clear boundary and a clear link to the things of earth. However, under Artaud’s influence, he begins to feel the blur, the disconnect. The reference to a hall of mirrors also reflects a growing metaphor that surrounded Artaud – Breton’s earlier rhetoric of the looking glass, Artaud’s translation of Lewis Carroll, and Artaud’s own fascination with repetitive motion and endless reflections, as evinced in the title of his most famous work, The Theatre and Its Double.

Artaud’s encounter with Balinese dance theater intensified his desire to find a true void state through theater. He was dazzled by the metaphysical meanings of the gestures and sounds and the intricacies of the dance. “There is no transition from a gesture to a cry or a sound,” he wrote, “all the senses interpenetrate, as if through strange channels hollowed out in the mind itself!”²³ The attack on the senses through spatial language, similar to the attack on the senses of the Theatre of Cruelty, was a way to open up void space in the mind, clearing it free of intellectual thought. He further glorifies the Oriental theater in declaring that they had achieved an true theater foreign to the West: “There is an absolute in these constructed perspectives, a real physical absolute which only Orientals are capable of envisioning.”²⁴ He determined that this absolute was achieved through the creation of a spatial language, a realization that inspired his later drive to destroy word language.

However, his glorification of the Oriental theater meant that he reformed it into an impossible ideal. Brian Singleton observes that: “Artaud’s theater signs are a result of a process of hybridization of an imaginary Orient… the exoticism of Artuad’s intercultural practice operates in a virtual space. The forms he borrows and applies are a series of simulacra unhinged from their contents.”²⁵ In his eagerness to appropriate the forms of the Balinese dance theater, Artaud pulls them from their social and historical roots, thus warping them into something different. Artaud’s idea of the Oriental theater did not exist in the real world, and his attempts to recreate it were therefore futile.

Finally, at the end of his life, Artaud’s desire for a void state through theater became obsessive and desperate; in his disjointed, jagged writings after his return to Paris from Rodez, he wrote “Derangement of the Actor”, which declares that to become a deranged lunatic was the only way to achieve true theater.

True theater is much more thrilling,

much more deranged

Spasmodic state of the open heart

which gives everything

to what does not exist,

and which is not

and nothing to what is, and which one sees,

which one can make out,

where one can stop and

stay.²⁶

Yet these are the last writings of a dying man; Artaud no longer writes with the fervor to change the world, but with the despair of what could have been. With Oriental theater he came close to a void state, but the realities did not match up to his conception of it; the actual theater fell short of his ideal.

Artaud also pursued the attainment of void through the elimination of word language. He frequently referred to language as filth, despite his own literary prolificacy – or perhaps because of, since to control language is to understand its limitations. For Artaud words were only a tool, and he was looking for something more eternal, more mystical. In the first manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty, he demanded that: “We must first break theater’s subjection to the text and rediscover the idea of a kind of unique language somewhere between gesture and thought.”²⁷ He emerged with the technique of glossolalia, sounds composed of random syllables, which he inserted into performances and even his written work. He also considered the Balinese dance theater, with their ‘heiroglyphic’ patterns, the ultimate form of gesture language, but was unable to synthesize it into a working Western form.

Artaud’s hatred of language also was linked to his madness. Deleuze hypothesizes that for schizophrenics, “the moment that the maternal language is stripped of its sense, its phonetic elements become singularly wounding. The word no longer expresses an attribute of the state of affairs; its fragments merge with unbearable sonorous qualities.” Words, with their fragmented nature, become an endless wave of tiny little pieces that threaten to overwhelm the schizophrenic. Even if Artaud did not experience the physical pain of words through his schizophrenia, language was the antithesis of the true madness that he was seeking. “Sentences are normal by nature,” Jacques Derrida says. “They contain normality and meaning, no matter what the state of health or madness of their utterer may be…”²⁸ Sentences are structured by grammar, measured by letters, and inevitably linked to meaning – they create order out of the world and reduce ideas to a finite form. For Artaud, searching for the infinite, this reduction was a violation to the unutterable silence of the void.

Artaud’s final, and perhaps inevitable, attempt at the void was through experimenting with drugs, notably opium and Mexican peyote. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud remarks disparagingly, “The most interesting methods of averting suffering are those which seek to influence our own organism… The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one – intoxication.”²⁹ Artaud did not consider himself an addict; in fact, he expressed contempt for the perpetually intoxicated. He considered himself exempt because he used opium primarily as a painkiller, but his later obsession with opium as a way into void-state approaches the fanaticism of the addict. “Nothing is lost, but everything creates itself and it was in opium that life was created one day, but hate has denatured it,” he wrote. He considered opium the only remnant of the soul of life, a soul that religion had destroyed. Without that soul, man wades through a sea of perpetual boredom. Opium was the perverted form of the original soul, Artaud believed, and the prohibitions on drug use were “to prevent people from ever returning to an old pre-genital notion of being, which all the sects and religions have buried.”³⁰ Even opium could not achieve true madness, since it only held traces of the original. “In L’Ombilic des limbes, he contrasts the two states of intoxication, one caused by opium, the other ideal,” Jonathan Lyons writes in his article “Intoxication and Its Double”. “In the ‘nothingness’ of opium he felt a certain impurity, images which violated the void, the ultimate experience which Artaud found his martyrdom and his source of insight.”³¹ Peyote was even less successful at achieving void state, Artaud discovered, but neither could reach his ideal. Even intoxication, the last resort to shut down the mind, could not disconnect him totally from the World.

In the last two years of his life, Artaud’s exhausted anguish comes across clearly in his writings. Nerves destroyed by years of electroshock treatments, his intestines inflamed with cancer, Artaud recognizes his bane, the thing anchoring him to the World and keeping him from nothingness:

but there is one thing,

which is something,

one single thing

which is something,

and which I feel

because it wants

TO GET OUT;

the presence of the pain

in my body,

the threatening,

never tiring

presence

of my

body³²

All of his efforts at achieving a pure, neutral void state are in vain, because the pain of his physical body locks him into existence. He is unable to create his own, perfect reality of Being because the World is constantly intruding with the presence of pain. Artaud has come full circle and emerged facing the opposite direction – once enthusiastic about attacking the body to eliminate the mind, Artaud now finds that the mind cannot be eliminated because the body is attacking itself. The Being/World disconnect is impossible because of the body/mind duality.

Artaud’s madness was more intense for his active pursuit, but his ultimate goal was true madness, a complete disconnect of the Being from the World. Such a disconnect would eliminate his suffering and protect him from the schizophrenic blurring of boundaries where the Self was in danger of being swallowed. Yet in his vociferous and exhaustive quest for the void state, through the mediums of theater, non-language, and opium, he never reached the ideal that he was striving for. The real tragedy of Artaud’s career was not that he was too mad, but that he was too sane.

¹ Schumacher & Singleton, 117.

² Schumacher & Singleton, 15.

³ Schumacher & Singleton, 28.

⁴ Garelli, 22.

⁵ Garelli, 24.

⁶ Felman, 206.

⁷ Sontag, 436.

⁸ Felman, 210.

⁹ Felman, 210.

¹⁰ Scheer, 8.

¹¹ Heidegger, 207.

¹² Heidegger, 94, 97.

¹³ Schumacher & Singleton, 31.

¹⁴ Schumacher & Singleton, 29.

¹⁵ Schumacher & Singleton, 29.

¹⁶ Freud, 13.

¹⁷ Freud, 31.

¹⁸ Felman, 224.

¹⁹ Schumacher & Singleton, 149.

²⁰ Schumacher & Singleton, 149.

²¹ Schumacher & Singleton, 15.

²² Schumacher & Singleton, 13.

²³ Artaud, 57.

²⁴ Artaud, 65.

²⁵ Schumacher & Singleton, xxxv.

²⁶ Schumacher & Singleton, 215.

²⁷ Schumacher & Singleton, 112.

²⁸ Felman, 216.

²⁹ Freud, 27.

³⁰ Sontag, 459.

³¹ Lyons, 128.

³² Schumacher & Singleton, 225.

Sources

Artaud, Antonin. “On the Balinese Theater.” The Theatre and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. Grove Press. (New York, 1958.)

Felman, Shoshana. “Madness and Philosophy or Literature’s Reason.” Yale French Studies, No. 52, Graphesis: Perspectives on Literature and Philosophy, (1975): 206-228. Access through JSTOR. <www.jstor.org/stable/2929755>

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. W.W. Norton & Co. (New York, 1961.)

Garelli, Jacques. “Ontology and Madness: The Question of Clinical and ‘Eidetic’ Reduction.” SubStance No. 2, 12.39 (1983): 21-25. Access through JSTOR. <www.jstor.org/stable/3684485>

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. State University of New York Press. (Albany, 1996.)

Lyons, John D. “Intoxication and its Double.” Yale French Studies, No. 50, Intoxication and Literature, (1974): 120-129. Access through JSTOR. <www.jstor.org/stable/2929470>

Scheer, Edward. Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader. Routledge. (London, 2004.)

Schumacher, Claude & Brian Singleton, eds. Artaud on Theater. Ivan R. Dee. (Chicago, 2001.)

Sontag, Susan, ed. Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. University of California Press. (Berkeley, 1976.)