Selected Writings

by Antonin Artaud, Helen Weaver (Translator), Susan Sontag (Introduction)

Brings together essays on art, literature, social problems, drama, and cinema and other prose writings that best represent the French critic's revolutionary thinking

Genres: Poetry, Philosophy, Essays, Theatre, Fiction, Art, France

661 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1976

About the author

French surrealist poet and playwright Antonin Artaud advocated a deliberately shocking and confrontational style of drama that he called "theater of cruelty."

People better knew Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, an essayist, actor, and director.

Considered among the most influential figures in the evolution of modern theory, Antonin Artaud associated with artists and experimental groups in Paris during the 1920s.

Political differences then resulted in him breaking and founding the theatre Alfred Jarry with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. Together, they expected to create a forum for works to change radically. Artaud especially expressed disdain for west of the day, panned the ordered plot and scripted language that his contemporaries typically employed to convey ideas, and recorded his ideas in such works as Le Theatre de la cruaute and The Theatre and Its Double .

Artaud thought to represent reality and to affect the much possible audience and therefore used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound, and other performance elements.

Artaud wanted that the "spectacle" that "engulfed and physically affected" this audience, put in the middle. He referred to this layout like a "vortex," a "trapped and powerless" constantly shifting shape.

Reviews

[Lee Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh man how long ago I loved this shit 12+ years ago when drunk and my hair was all crazy before crazy hair was even close to cool and I was all like I'm the late 20th century's carbohydrate-addled Artuad update and I was all about how Van Gogh was suicided by society and oooooo ccccccaaaaaa hhhhhhaahahahaha kkkkkkskskskss ththshshthht how i loved those pages of chanting - definitely worth checking out, especially if you've ever seen that silent movie about that Joan of Arc chick that Artaud's in - he also was a founding Surrealist but thought Breton was a total loser and also believed he was the reincarnation of Arthur Rimbaud because if you compress the name Arthur Rimbaud you get Artaud.

[clinamen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If my stray musings on texts ever encourage you to go out, buy a book, and read it both meticulously and with abandon, repeatedly, thru all the peaks and valleys of yr life — this is the one. Artaud occupies an esteemed, mythic place within my personal hagiography, inhabited by few others. Few before him or since have proven so adept at making the expressive capacities of an individual - written, gestural, spoken - into an arsenal deployed against language’s alienation. This volume is without any doubt the superior choice as far as english translations go. Susan Sontag’s 60 page introduction sets a high standard from the beginning; she makes no attempts to recuperate Artaud, to render him more comprehensible or situate him with regard to literature, the theater, film, etc. The 700+ pages comprising this thiccboi contains pretty much all of his published writing, at least most everything the average reader of Artaud is looking for (whatever that means...) along with ample epistolary detritus and peripheral pieces, meaning this collection will likely satisfy all but all the most obsessive of Artaud readers. The relative exhaustiveness of this collection makes it well worth owning even if you have other volumes of Artaud, and undoubtedly the first stop after the ubiquitous City Lights anthology.

If you find Artaud as beguiling as I do, you’ll definitely want to pick up the only works I’m aware of that this volume doesn’t include (ignoring for a moment Artaud’s entire life being one uninterrupted gesture): the very late texts found in Watchfiends and Rack Screams and the visual works -- tortured visages etched in pencil with sparse blotches of crayon, or the many spells he sent in the mail, scrawled sigils embodying a personal iconography kissed by ritual flame. The MoMa catalog “Artaud - Works on Paper” does a decent job with this material. As far as secondary literature, I enthusiastically recommend The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud by Jacques Derrida & Paule Thévenin, arguably the most enduring critical work yet written on Artaud, which comprises Thévenin's "The Search for a Lost World" and Derrida's "To Unsense the Subjectile". If you enjoyed that, you will likely also enjoy Derrida’s “The Theatre of Cruelty and the closure of representation”, Maurice Blanchot’s essay “Artaud”, Stephen Barber’s two books on him — Blows and Bombs & The Screaming Body — and Sylvere Lotringer’s wonderfully speculative Mad Like Artaud.

That should be enough smut to keep all you slurpers busy for a while. But in case you’re not yet convinced, I’ll close with two short fragments that evoke the kind of luminous ferocity found in Artaud’s writing, an embodied cruelty capable of giving the assiduous and attentive reader ecstasies never to be forgotten:

I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve. I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves...

To confront the metaphysics I have created for myself, in accordance with the void within me.

[Esraa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never read a stronger collection of writings in my life. Artaud the genius, the tormented genius, manifesting all the damage and horrors of the human psychological condition in modern times. His strong early writings, the letters, the fragmented poems, the film scenario, were incredibly written, with outstanding use of words and images. This is not a light material to read. It’s an account of a fragmented personality, lacking the means to fully express itself. Lost in the loops of language, he finds difficulty to maintain his thoughts in their original form, free of the distortion that occur once these thought are written down. But nevertheless, his texts sounds like the works of a conductor, musical, captivating, and throbbing like blood from an open vain, or maybe a wound in the deepest of his existence. I was able to relate to him, feel his words, and tried my best to understand him, even-though this was a bit difficult to do sometimes due to the weight of this writings on the reader. Susan Sontag declared this difficulty in her introduction to this book, which was, by the way, a great piece to read and enjoy. So many things one can say about this book, but nothing can describe the experience of reading it. It’s a window, a time capsule to the begging of the 20th century, to witness the surrealist period- reading about Breton, Cocteau, Anais Nin, and so many others. His piece on Van Gogh was amazing too. I did read some of his other writings, poems in particular, from outside the book, and I’m still interested to read more of Artaud’s writings in the future. I was deeply moved by this book, but now, I really need a break from all this "Cruelty", to something much more lighter.

[Ali ghasemi · Rating 5 out of 5]

مهم‌ نیست که آنتونن آرتو فرانسوی بوده و تو از کتاب مجموعه نوشته ها با تلاش سوزان سانتاک در زمان دانشجویی ات یکبار‌ به انگلیسی خوندی یا با فرانسه شکسته و داغونت سعی کردی به متن اصلی رجوع کنی، نثر‌ و ایده ها ویران کننده ست یا با گذشت چند سال وقتی ترجمه فارسی بدستت می رسه و متوجه می شی خیلی از ایده ها و شیوایی کلام در فارسی از میان رفته است و یا دچار سانسور شدیدی شده ولی باز دلیل نمی شه که از ویران کنندگی اثرش کم‌بشه. این اثر در هر زبانی همچون تئاتر فیزیکی خودش که از اصوات و آواهای و هیروگلیف ها و سحر و جادو و ماوراءالطبیعه تشکیل شده مستقیم و بی واسطه با تو حرف می زنه.
" همه زبان های درست
فهم ناشدنی اند،
همچون پچ پچ دندان های گدا
یا کف زدن های فاحشه خانه
یا استخوان رانی دندانه دار، خونی "
همونجوری که خودش گفته بود به کلمات همان قدرت و کیفیتی رو داده که در رویاها دارن متشکل از rebus ها proverb ها .
آرتو را نمیشه فهمید، آرتو رو باید لمس کرد، همچون لمس ناخواسته تنی در پیاده رو به وقت قدم زدن و اندیشیدن به ناممکن.
گاهی فکر‌می‌کنم‌که تئاتر مدرن بیشتر مدیون آنتونن آرتو هست یا برتولت برشت یا‌ میرهولد.

[baby · Rating 4 out of 5]

the piece that the 'body without organs' comes from is in here, i got so excited i wrote in my library book.

[C. Quabela · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those like me who are going into this book without being familiar with Artaud the preface will be invaluable. Underneath the veneer of derangement that it is hard to not look past there is a beautifully elucidated and powerful/creative/even optimistic desire to redeem life that is beyond words and which lends to his mental decline a martyrdom for mankind. A refusal to accept defeat (or to even acknowledge the existence of defeat.) Artaud is an invaluable resource to those who wish to look into the depths of consciousness unrestrained and an eerie premonition towards those who wish to find that wellspring of creativity from which true art comes forth.

[?0?0?0 · Rating 5 out of 5]

* edit
If any person knows where I can locate a copy of his peyote book for a Decent price, please let me know. Thank you.

The best collection of Artaud's writing currently available with a highly valuable introduction by none other than Susan Sontag. A must own, the Van Gogh is worth the price alone.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not keen on Sontag's introduction. At certain points she inappropriately evaluates Artaud in terms of her own Marxist revolutionary ideals....

[Katrina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally found the right words.

[Adnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"WE may talk about the good mental health of Van Gogh, who, during his whole life in this world we live in, burnt only one hand in addition to cutting off his left ear. However heartbreaking it may appear, contemporary life preserves itself in its old atmosphere of lechery, anarchy, disorder,
delirium, dissoluteness, chronic madness, bourgeois inertia, psychic anomaly (for it is not man but the world which has become abnormal), deliberate dishonesty, flagrant hypocrisy, sordid contempt of everything which shows distinction, laying claim to a whole order founded on the fulfilment of primitive injustice - an order of organized crime, in fact. Everything is going badly because at this moment the morbid conscience has an essential interest in not recovering from its own sickness. And so a vicious society has invented psychiatry to defend itself from the investigations of certain superior lucid minds whose intuitive powers were disturbing to it."

Artaud describes his mental illness in such precise details that it is quite jarring to read this at times, if not most of it. It's astonishing that against this illness he was still able to greatly contribute to literature and the theatre. Yet, its quite hard to recommend this book to anyone not academically invested in Artaud, although I would recommend the following pieces of him which I'm sure you can find online quite easily: To be Done with God's Judgement, An End to Masterpieces, The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto, The Umbilicus of Limbo, and his correspondence with Jacques Riviere.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Along with the Jack Hirschman edition (published by City Lights) this Susan Sontag edition is a winner and a great introduction to the man and his unique and always strange work. A sampler of his writings that will make you want to read more and more about him. Good lookin' man about town as well!

[Harley Claes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deeply dark and introspective, Artuad manages to capture the nature of a self-aware neurosis, with all the qualities if an ornate & well-spoken madman, he had the capacity for creative ambition, the kind that skirted on pessimistic genius. Despite his resentment of writing, he had a way with words that was both beautiful and brilliant, employing a complex & eloquent vocabulary to eternalize the most morose of subjects and ravings.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Artaud is the whole point. It's because I hate him and I'm building an arsenal against him shelf by shelf and I'm turning nothing over to him. He is an eatereatereatereater.

...It's the spider-web sanctuary,
the onouric tuft
of where-ere the sail,
the anal plate of anayou

(You're not taking anything away, god,
because it's me.
You've never taken anything like this away from me.
I'm writing it here fo rthe first time,
I'm finding it for the first time.)...

(The Return of Artaud, le Momo, 523)

[Thomas Baughman · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite Books.

[Dylan Kiewel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"where others present their works, i claim to do no more than show my mind.
life consists of burning up questions...
all these pages float around like pieces of ice in my mind. excuse my absolute freedom. i refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself. i do not recognize any structure in the mind...
i would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality. and this is no more the preface to a book than the poems which are scattered here and there, or the enumeration of all the rages of ill-being.
this is only a piece of ice which is also stuck in my throat."

"contemporary theater is in a state of decadence because it has lost feeling on the one hand for seriousness and on the other for laughter. because it has broken with gravity, with efficacity that is immediate and pernicious-in short with Danger.
because it has also lost the sense of true humor and of the physical and anarchic, dissociative power of comedy.
because it has broken with that spirit of profound anarchy which is at the root of all poetry."

"when i live i do not feel myself live. but when i act, it is then that i feel myself exist.
what is to prevent me from believing in the dream of the theater when i believe in the dream of reality?
when i dream i am doing something and in the theater i am doing something.
the events of the dream, directed by my deep inner consciousness, teach me the meaning of the events of the waking state in which a naked fatality directs me.
but the theater is like one long waking state in which it is i who directs the fatality."

"it is a real Desperate Person who speaks to you and who has not known the happiness of being in the world until now that he has left this world, now that he is absolutely separated from it. the others who have died are not separated. they still turn around their dead bodies.
i am not dead, but i am separated."

"i penetrate, i persist, i inspect, i seize, i force open, my dead life conceals nothing, and nothingness moreover has never hurt anyone, what forces me to return within is this desolating absence which passes and submerges me at times, but i understand it clearly, very clearly, i even understand what nothingness is, and i can say what is in it."

"then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place."

artaud wanted to write a book that would drive men mad and i wanted to read one

[daaltena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mooi, kon wel meer biografie gebruiken. De notes aan het eind waren namelijk een zeer goede aanvulling (en misschien wel hetgeen wat de vertaling de meeste 'authenticiteit' verleent), als dit meer in het boek verweven was, de intro en de notes iets korter waren, zou je met hetzelfde aantal bladzijden denk ik meer impact maken. Tevens zou ik hetzelfde zeggen voor een meer thematische samenhang, dan de puur chronologische. Ja, het absolute verloop wordt duidelijk, maar een mensenleven blijft relatief, meneer A. pleit hier ook voor, me dunkt. Blijkbaar nog steeds de meest uitgebreide vertaling van zijn werk. Aan het begin is er meer expliciete blijk van schizofrenie (exoteries -> letterlijk) en verloopt geleidelijk na zijn Theater van de wreedheid (in het Nederlands uitgebracht bij Uitgeverij IJzer, 2009. Vertaling Simon Vinkenoog, 1982: Het theater van de wreedheid) naar de esoteriese kant, met veel verwijzingen naar de kabbala, Ramón Llull, Bardo Thödoll, et cetera. Hier zijn zijn ideeën, meer gesynthetiseerd en in samenhang gebracht. Zou de total art die Artaud najoeg uiteindelijk schuilen in de kunst van de webpagina? Een verloren kunst die misschien wel tot leven gewekt kan worden door de Apple Vision Pro. Visie, enzo. Het theater van de wreedheid kan zo doorgetrokken worden naar de kunst van het livestreamen. Laat de ruimte toch ademen, laat de space toch spatializen. Intimideer de kijker, maar tenslotte ook jezelf. Mag ook best lang staan om opgenomen te worden in de textiel van het brein, en dat ga ik misschien ook doen, maar dan liever met een 15-deels oeuvre. Laat de krankzinnigheid de gifbeker doen legen. Algoeds.

Geleend bij UB
University Library City Centre
THE (for loan)
24.06 21 arta *1988sa

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

After 600 pages of Artaud, I want to re-read the Sontag essay which is miles above Artaud in quality though doesn't touch his influence. And that is one of her critiques: that despite his wellspring of ideas and his sui generis texts, he's not an artist who gets plagiarized much, if at all. Michel Foucault sums up (what I could not): "Artaud's madness does not slip through the fissures of the work of art; his madness is precisely the absence of the work of art, the reiterated presences of that absence, it's central void experienced and measured in all its endless dimensions." Additionally, what I found fascinating was his his life story which appears in meticulous notes at the book's end. They provide a much needed context for such acrid, self-flagellating, self-mythologizing, mysterious, scattered, painful, curious, fascinating work.

[Jeff Pavlick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though at times this book drove me into a state of madness, I came out of it with more of an understanding and appreciation of Antonin Artaud.

I would recommend this book, particularly for the occasional look-through. Though I am certainly biased because that is not only what some of my friends have done but I also followed suit. It has this aura that dives into your psyche forcing you to pick it up.

“If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.”

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This near-comprehensive collection of Artaud's writings is an absolutely fabulous introduction to his work. I supposed a bit of biographical information interspersed with the texts provided would have made for a complete portrait of the man, but these texts speak for themselves. From his introduction to the Paris art community, to his trip to Mexico, to his mental breakdown and imprisonment, to the illuminated work of his last years, this massive collection paints a fantastic portrait of one of the most inspired madmen of modern times.

[sander1818 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good book for anyone who is just starting to get into the theatre of cruelty. the preface is an invaluable companion and the selected writings reveal the inner workings of theatre of cruelty over a long time and clearly show Artaud's changing mental state. so well organized that out almost feels concise.. My only critique is that i would like to hear more of Susan Sontag's own critique, she is clearly a fan of Antonin Artaud, but so am i now!

[Gregory Eidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

he looks normal in that photograph on the cover of the book . . . i guess the elder version of him was hiding underneath the surface? he looks more like a ghoulish caricature towards the end . . . partly possessed by an uncountable amount of demons and the look of many meth addicts lined up in rows.

[Matthew Kinlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

[She bites God in the wrist].

[Not_british_floof · Rating 5 out of 5]

Artaud was pretty fuggen hot

[aloveiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of what I've read from this book is the introduction.
For some reason,
collections of "selective writings" curated by externals tend to drive me to more extensive selecting measures.
i've enjoyed what i've selected so far.
but the introduction is really something anyone passing by this book should take a moment with.
If you know something about Artaud it might be related to him being a frightful and troubled man, fascinatingly inhuman or uberhuman by the same velocity. You may have wondered if reading his works could transfer a strain of his disease mindborne. You may have avoided them. This introduction, though extreme in academic frippery and rhetoric will make you want to hold his hand, and watch him sleep, and cater to him as if there could be no greater honor than the semblance of your genomes.
I can't help but think, Susan Sontag, with her name printed here, mysteriously larger than the title, could have done this great service to many droves of dark and despairingly misunderstood art boys. I hope I someday find my way to her secret archive of crispin glover commentaries.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

America is denounced as a baby factory war-mongering machine. Bloody and apocalyptic death rituals are described. Shit is vividly exalted as evidence of life and mortality…. And …God itself turns up on an autopsy table as a dissected organ taken from the defective corpse of mankind.
One suggested for getting an approximation of an idea of antonin Artaud’s last radion work: turn on the radio to any station (except WFMU of course), turn on the TV with the sound up and the picture off, smoke a joint and just listen to the glorious sound of the babbling media. As good as electroshock therapy.

After several years in psychiatric institutions, almost a decade silence, Antonin Artaud released "Pour En Finir Avec le Judgement de Dieu" with an extreme of the linguistic lunatic fringe.

[Yuval · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know you're in trouble when the preface encourages you to only read excerpts of the book you have in front of you... But dipping into various sections, I can see why. Artaud's writings are searing and thrilling but also unrelenting and repetitively emphatic. I read about one-third of the book before I couldn't motivate myself to open the book anymore. I hope to read more of it, maybe one day all of it, but I think I can only do a bit at a time without losing my mind.

In a way, the concise collection THE THEATER AND ITS DOUBLE, which was one of my all-time faves in college, is much more potent at one-fifths this volume's size. But Susan Sontag's introduction to Artaud's thinking and life really makes this a must-have almost on the level of THEATER AND ITS DOUBLE.

[Nik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Difficult writer to know what to do with. Feels limiting to call Artaud’s life a “cautionary tale,” though it seems uncritical to take the ideas of a writer whose every word seems secondary to the art they ACTUALLY wanted to make—an art which seems like it would be just awful were it to actually take shape—on face value.

It's mostly the earnest quality of his intensity that moved me by the end— his pained reflections on Rodez cast as black magic, his unmoored critique of America in “To Have Done With the Judgement of God,” and writing in one of his final letters that he planned to return to the theater, which is like the most unhinged but touching pieces a selection like this (and in turn, a life like his) could end on. Astonishingly Quixotic.

[Nessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic sensory/mental states clearly elucidated by a luntic. Sometimes a bit annoying because of his fascination with drugs, but he acutally did have mental issues.

The man knew himself best because he knew what he was made of- nothing. He knew he could not descibe himself in any words, therefore knew his person better. Reading this book is like reading with all the senses plus more you never knew you had (or could describe)

The most vivid description of things that cannot be described in words. No wonder philosophers like Derrida have jumped all over him!

[Greg Cummings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in 1987, day after day, I took this book with me while I searched the backstreets of London for myself...Intoxicating, like addictive narcotic to a famished vampire. Between the shock and awe of Artaud's nightmares and his garish illumination of theatre's shadowy recesses are sound and sanguine life tutorials. His lessons about writing are invaluable to the tortured.

[Eleni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Artaud is a tough read, but you can't deny the power of his insights into theatre. It's always good to read someone who has enormous passion about the subject, that being said, it gets a little scary and sad at times since Artaud was losing his grip on reality.