Analects of the Influence¹ of Artaud

When I was in graduate school, I saw a posting on the bulletin board in my department in­dicating that poets were 50percent more likely than those in other professions to experience mental illness. In the moment, it didn’t occur to me to wonder why it was necessary to post these survey results, where any number of poets were liable to see them. Instead, I thought they bore some important news: that poets were the genuine article. Because: nothing was more genuine than mental illness.

Where’s the beginning and the ending of the theater, the building which houses this evening’s drama? This is one of the first questions I ask when I’m reading Antonin Artaud. Artaud no longer seems to think of the theater as inhabiting a particular space, just as there is no longer a space in the world uncontaminated by his ­theater. His is a theater as big as the world. No part of our lives is untouched by the need for its spectacle.

In senior year of college, I appeared in a production of The Cenci, by Artaud. True, this particular drama is unproducible, generally speaking, and not terribly “good,” according to the standards of conventional ­theater. Probably The Cenci is an example of the failure of Artaud to find a way to apply his ideas. This didn’t stop us, the players of my under­graduate years. In the course of the action I was meant to simulate copulation with an actress who just then happened to be both my apartment mate and the lover of one of my best friends. I threw myself into it, the simulation. I believed in the cruelty part of “Theater of Cruelty.” I simulated so violently, one night, that I banged my hand on the set, on the mise-en-scène, as it were, and gashed myself. It took a long while for the wound to heal. When it did, I was launched on the world. I was a graduate.

In those days: Genet and Der­rida and Barthes and Foucault and Deleuze, as well as Artaud. Thus, the specific Artaud influence was a general French influence, and the general thrust of that French influence, as I understood it, included trusting in imagination as an anarchic force, the unstoppable force, a force in the midst of forestalling the attempts of society and metaphysics to control and organize. “Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and...