Bodies of Language. Antonin Artaud and the Expression of Life in Writing

Abstract

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) struggled his entire life both with his body and with language. Already in his early writings, but also in his cinematographic experiments and his conceptualisation of the theatre of cruelty, Artaud tried to find ways to adequately express the vital forces of life. These ungraspable forces are the disruptive and yet joyful manifestations of the vitality of matter and spring from the sacred ground in which the fullness of life is rooted. Eventually diagnosed with a delirium syndrome aggravated by paranoid tendencies and schizophrenia in the 1930s, Artaud experienced conventional acceptations of language as an enemy which had the power to reduce him to a patient or a madman. Yet, at the same time, especially in the course of his later writings, Artaud came to realise that this repressive language also had the potential to express the generative vitality of life by bringing forth a perpetually swelling, growing and vibrating “foreign” language and do so within and thanks to the words used in “conventional” language. In a post-secular society of absolute immanence where the secular itself has become sacralised, Artaud’s creative and “cruel” engagement with language – which I call the praxis of ‘crescive writing’ – is worth revisiting because of the way it unleashes the vital forces of this sacred life.