Preserving Life Force: Antonin Artaud and Zhuangzi on the Body

Abstract

This chapter examines the body paradigm in the late writings of Artaud, the “body without organs” (“corps sans organes”), in relation to the body ethics of the Chinese thinker Zhuangzi (ca. 400 BCE).¹ The reason I set up a comparative dialogue between Artaud and Zhuangzi—thinkers widely disparate in time and space—is that I find a proximity of thought in their shared concern for the body’s life force. As I will argue here, both Artaud and Zhuangzi understand the body as a holistic unit identified with its life force and consequently both demand an ethics of life that preserves the body and refuses to instrumentalize it for any teleological purpose. Therefore, through a distinctly non-Occidental perspective on Artaud’s “body without organs,” I intend to highlight the current problem underlying the reception of Artaud’s oeuvre and thought: that Artaud, championed by the major post-World War II critics such as Deleuze and Derrida, has unfortunately, for that very reason, become a figure that voices the (post)structuralist concerns of schizophrenia, glossolalia, and archi-writing rather than a voice that speaks for itself. The critical attention paid to Artaud’s “body without organs,” which is already very slight in comparison with that directed toward his theater, has therefore followed upon these interpretative approaches and become dominantly poststructuralist, eclipsing alternative possibilities for seeing Artaud with new eyes.