Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, and theatre director whose influence on modern drama theory is profound. Initially associated with Surrealist writers and artists, he later broke away to pursue his radical theatrical visions independently. Artaud criticized the conventional Western theatre of his time, deeming it overly reliant on ordered plots and scripted language. He championed theatre as a visceral, impactful experience designed to overwhelm and physically affect the audience, employing disturbing forms of lighting and sound to create a sense of a 'vortex' that would engulf and disempower spectators.
The narrative follows Antonin Artaud's transformative journey to Mexico in 1936, exploring vibrant urban life in Mexico City and the serene isolation of the Sierra Tarahumara. Over ten months, Artaud immerses himself in the culture and spirituality of the Tarahumara people, experiencing a significant shift in his artistic and personal perspective. This journey serves as a pivotal moment in his life, highlighting the intersection of art, nature, and indigenous wisdom.
Artaud worked on his book "Interjections" from late 1946 to early 1947 while at a psychiatric hospital, expressing intense and obscene thoughts. Initially rejected by his publisher, it was published posthumously in 1978. This volume presents the first complete English translation, including contributions from various translators.
Last Writings, Ivry-sur-Seine, September 1947–March 1948
A Sinister Assassin presents translations of Antonin Artaud’s largely unknown final work of 1947–48, revealing new insights into his obsessions with the human anatomy, sexuality, societal power, creativity and ill-will. Artaud’s preoccupations are seminally those of the contemporary world. Those last writings form the most extraordinary element of Artaud’s entire prolific body of work—and is the element now most enduringly inspirational, for artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, choreographers, and others inspired by Artaud, through their fiercely exploratory, extreme and combative forms. Artaud’s last conception of performance of 1947–48—following his Theatre of Cruelty provocations of the 1930s, and finally incorporated into fragmentary writings and drawings as well as into sonic experimentation in screams and percussion—is that of a dance-propelled act of autopsy, generating the ‘body without organs’ which negates malevolent microbial epidemics. This book assembles Artaud’s crucial writings and press interviews from September 1947 to March 1948, undertaken at a decrepit pavilion in the grounds of a convalescence clinic in Ivry-sur-Seine, on the southern edge of Paris, as well as in-transit through Paris’s streets. Drawing from extensive consultations of Artaud’s manuscripts, and from many original interviews with his friends, collaborators and doctors of the 1940s, this book brings together translations of all of the many manifestations of Artaud’s final writings: the contents of his last, death-interrupted notebook; his letters; his two final key texts; his glossolalia; the magazine issue which collected his last fragments; and the two extraordinary interviews he gave to national newspaper journalists in the final days of his life, in which he denounces and refuses both his work’s recent censorship and his imminent death. Edited, translated and with an Introduction by Stephen Barber, A Sinister Assassin illuminates Artaud’s last, most intensive and terminal work for the first time.
Following his release from the Rodez asylum, Antonin Artaud decided he wanted his new work to connect with a vast public audience, and he chose to record radio broadcasts in order to carry through that aim. That determination led him to his most experimental and incendiary project, To Have Done with the Judgement of God , 1947-48, in which he attempted to create a new language of texts, screams, and a language designed to be heard by millions, aimed, as Artaud said, for “road-menders.” In the broadcast, he interrogated corporeality and introduced the idea of the “body without organs,” crucial to the later work of Deleuze and Guattari. The broadcast, commissioned by the French national radio station, was banned shortly before its planned transmission, much to Artaud’s fury. This volume collects all of the texts for To Have Done with the Judgement of God , together with several of the letters Artaud wrote to friends and enemies in the short period between his work’s censorship and his death. Also included is the text of an earlier broadcast from 1946, Madness and Black Magic , written as a manifesto prefiguring his subsequent broadcast. Clayton Eshleman’s extraordinary translations of the broadcasts activate these works in their extreme provocation.
After publishing a manifesto prophecy about the catastrophic immediate-future entitled The New Revelations of Being , Antonin Artaud abruptly left Paris and travelled to Ireland, remaining there for six weeks and existing without money. On his return, he spent nine years in lunatic asylums, including the entire span of the Second World War. During that journey to Ireland—on which he accumulated signs of his forthcoming apocalypse, and planned his own role in it as ‘THE REVEALED ONE’—he wrote letters to friends in Paris. Antonin Artaud’s 1937 apocalyptic journey to Ireland and his writings from that journey form an extraordinary moment of accumulating disintegration and tenacious creativity in his work. With an afterword and notes by the book’s translator/editor Stephen Barber.
Rooted in Antonin Artaud's nine years in mental asylums, this collection features writings and sketches from 1946 to 1948 that reveal his battle with schizophrenia and haunting visions. The first eleven notebooks present fragmented thoughts and striking illustrations, showcasing his artistic evolution. The twelfth notebook shifts focus to a profound exploration of the loss of magic to the demonic, culminating in the text that inspired the book's title. Artaud's influence on the avant-garde persists, underscoring his enduring significance in literature and art.
A collection of essays that details the author's radical theories on drama,
which he saw as being stifled by conservatism and lack of experimentation. It
contains the famous manifestos of the 'Theatre of Cruelty', analyses the
underlying impulses of performance, and provides some suggestions on a
physical training method for actors and actresses.
Tracing artists' increasing use of their bodies as subject and actual material of their artworks, this title charts the rise of new forms of expression such as Body Art, Happenings, Performance and Live Art.
