Introduction

Abstract

In one of his early texts, Le Pèse-nerfs, Antonin Artaud summed up his entire life’s work, most of which was yet to come, in a single sentence: ‘ce que vous avez pris pour mes oeuvres n’etait que les déchets de moimeme, ces raclures de l’âme que l’homme normal n’accueille pas’ (‘what you mistook for my works were merely the waste products of myself, those scrapings of the soul that the normal man does not welcome’).¹ Artaud’s life and his work are intricately bound, and everything he wrote was a direct result and expression of his own corporeal experiences. Much later on at the Rodez psychiatric hospital, following several bouts of electroconvulsive therapy, he wrote ‘Je suis mort sous un électro-choc. Je dis mort. Légalement et médicalement mort’ (‘I died under an electro-shock treatment. I was dead. Legally and medically dead’),² yet despite claiming to have died on various different occasions, he continued to write with ever-increasing ferocity, his words, drawings and gestures scattered in fragments around his body like fallout from an explosion. The body from which these fragments emerged is, read through the fragments themselves, barely recognisable as human, described famously in Pour en fnir avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgement of god) as a perpetual striving towards an anti-anatomical ‘corps sans organes’ (‘body without organs’).³