#antonin artaud

[milksockets]

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society - Antonin Artaud

[sofysta]

L'amore senza tregua. Questo triangolo d'acqua che ha sete, questa rotta senza scrittura. È il segno delle vostre alberature sopra questo mare in cui annego. I messaggi dei vostri capelli, il colpo di fucile delle vostre labbra, questa bufera che mi rapisce nella scia dei vostri occhi. Quest'ombra infine, sulla riva dove la vita ha tregua, e il vento, e l'orribile scalpiccio della folla al ns passaggio.

Antonin Artaud

[magnetar1]

"He who is unfamiliar with depression, who never feels his soul being broken by his body, invaded by its weakness, is incapable of gaining any insight into man. One must go below, must look at the underside. One must be no longer able to move, to hope, to believe, in order to perceive."

-Jacques Riviere (in a letter to Antonin Artaud)

[cloudswamp]

the theatre and its double, antonin artaud

[questcequecestqueca]

Man Ray. Antonin Artaud's hands 1925

[altrbody]

Antonin Artaud, The Projection of the True Body (La Projection du veritable corps), 1946 - 1948.

[thenervebible]

To have done with the judgment of God , Artaud, 1947

[arylleth]

- Antonin Artaud - from General Security: The Liquidation of Opium 

Destroy yourself, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh. And you, lucid madmen, spastics, cancer patients, chronic meningitis cases, you are misunderstood. There is a point in you which no doctor will ever understand, and for me this is the point which saves you and makes you august, pure, wonderful: you are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief? In the name of what superior lucidity that usurps our very souls, we who are at the very root of knowledge and lucidity? And this because of our desire, because of our determination to suffer. We whom pain has sent traveling through our souls in search of a calm place to cling to, seeking stability in evil as others seek stability in good. We are not mad, we are wonderful doctors, we know the dosage of soul, of sensibility, of marrow, of thought. You must leave us alone, you must leave the sick alone, we ask nothing of mankind, we ask only for the relief of our suffering. We have evaluated our lives well, we know what restrictions they impose on others and above all on ourselves. We know what willed deterioration, what renunciation of ourselves, what paralyses of subtle functions our disease inflicts on us each day. We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.