Abstract
Following the centennial celebration of Antonin Artaud's 1896 birth, a series of scholarly works on Artaud have appeared. Stephen Barber's The Screaming Body and Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin's The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud are concerned with Artaud's non-theatrical works—his drawings and audio recordings—and John Calder Publications has begun reissuing Martin Esslin's Antonin Artaud: The Man and His Work, a book that was first published in 1976, and six volumes of Artaud's Collected Works in translation. These publications come on the heels of several major Artaud exhibitions. Artaud's drawings have appeared at the Centre Georges Pompidou (1987 and 1994), Marseilles' Musée Cantini (1995), and New York's Museum of Modern Art (1996). Retrospectives of Artaud's work in the cinema—Artaud appeared in twenty-three films during the 1920s and early 1930s—were held at Centre Georges Pompidou in 1987, and in London, at the National Film Theatre, in 1993. And finally, Artaud's radio project, To Have Done With The Judgement of God (Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu), previously unavailable to scholars, was released in its entirety on compact disc in France, in 1995. The controversial recording, which was recorded six weeks before Artaud's death in 1948, was originally banned by the French director of the Radiodiffusion Française and labeled “blasphemous” and “obscene.” The ubiquity of Artaud's work and the current scholarly interest in Artaud cannot really be called a revival because Artaud has never gone out of fashion. In fact, Artaud's reputation—both in France and in non-Francophone cultures—has never been higher. Since the 1960s, Artaud's poetry, letters, and essays on dramatic theory have inspired theatre practitioners throughout the world.
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