I Artaud BwO: The Uses of Artaud's To have done with the judgement of god

Abstract

I, Antonin Artaud, am my son, my father, my mother, and myself … I don't believe in father or mother, don't have papa-mama. (OC XII: 65, 70) For I am the father-mother, neither father nor mother, neither man nor woman, I've always been here, always been body, always been man. (OC XIV**: 60) These fragments taken from late Artaud texts, Ci-Git (Here lies) and Suppots et suppliciations (Henchmen and torturings), written in 1946 and 1947 respectively, represent a singular version of the twentieth-century avant-garde contestation of the world as it appears to be. They represent the artist claiming the right to be the author of himself, to create a more authentic version of the self. They have also become familiar for readers of Deleuze and Guattari's own avant-garde adventure throughout the two volumes of Capitalisme et schizophrenie : L'anti-Oedipe and its sequel Mille Plateaux. Artaud's apparent acknowledgement and denial (disavowal) of the Oedipal law resonates powerfully with the anti-Oedipal themes of these works. It is a theme he returns to in the later writings: Between the body and the body there is nothing, nothing but me. It is not a state, not an object, not a mind, not a fact, even less the void of a being, absolutely nothing of a spirit, or of a mind, not a body, it is the intransplantable me. But not an ego, I don't have one. I don't have an ego … what I am is without differentiation nor possible opposition, it is the absolute intrusion of my body, everywhere. (OC XIV**: 76)