Life in Excess: Insurrection and Expenditure in Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty

I have no life, I have no life!!!

—Antonin Artaud, to René Allendy (1927)¹

We cannot approach the immensity, the obscurity, and the isolated beauty of Antonin Artaud's life and work from a purely hermeneutic direction, as though careful attention to the text might reveal intelligible meanings, manageable signs, or a systematized discourse. To do so would be to efface the profound and basic ambiguity of Artaud's challenge: his is an insurrection without an immediately recognizable enemy, an elaboration of terms that resist dialectical recovery, a set of prescriptions without an institutional foundation and thus without a predictable trajectory. Recognizing this, Michel Foucault elevated Artaud's writing as a paradigmatic unraveling of the thread that has joined instrumental reason with the representational capacities of language at least since the Classical Age; against the work of reason, Artaud represents "an absolute rupture of the oeuvre": a confrontation of language with the absence that animates it and that it seeks, anxiously and impossibly, to contain; a corrosive contamination of contemporary ways of knowing by the excess against which their constitutive discourses have been articulated and sustained; in short, Artaud's is a work that protests and unworks its own conditions of possibility, without telos or guarantee, without recuperation, and without reference to anything beyond itself.² Foucault thus suggests that Artaud, like Friedrich Hölderlin, "occupies a unique and exemplary position" along the strange, unlocatable limit between work and its absence, between signification and its irrecuperable excess.³

One gets the impression from this and similar readings that Artaud's work, if exposed to the harsh light of critical inquiry, will immediately begin to decompose—as though, like a corpse left in the open air, criticism will reduce the work and its singularity to a decrepit, uncanny shell of the life they once expressed.⁴ Artaud prefigured this concern through his attempt to imagine—or to insist upon—a metaphysics of the theater that places itself both beyond and against the necessarily violent and mutually reinforcing impulses of representation and understanding. If we are to pursue, without overtaking, the elusive intensity provoking this excess—that which Artaud calls life—we cannot simply subjugate it to the annihilatory force of the understanding, to the dissecting and desiccating logic of instrumental reason.

And yet, we cannot without contradiction raise Artaud to the stifling dignity of an unapproachable ideal. While it may be true that to dissect the work is to enact a kind of obscene violence against an artistic intensity that evades conceptual understanding, Foucault's own sympathetic reading—his insistence upon Artaud's exemplary uniqueness—risks absorbing the resistant force of the artist's project into the structure of his own critique, or reducing Artaud to a "martyr," as Jacques Derrida has suggested, "to a structure whose essential permanence becomes the prime preoccupation of the commentary."⁵ Exemplification, in other words, risks domestication, neutralization, and instrumentalization in the service of an extrinsic critical project, no matter its purported alliances.⁶

The dilemma we face thus lies in somehow discussing Artaud's work without putting it to work in the service of another conceptually productive discourse or system of intelligibility, even and especially if this other discourse aims, as with Foucault, to disrupt the history from which the work has been foreclosed. In what follows, then, I will confine my interest to that curious and cruel force that Artaud calls life, and to a few of its philosophical and political implications, without providing any explicit philosophical alliance or political prescription—any productive or institutionally organizable social project—into which this force could be inscribed. Moreover, if some of Artaud's words resonate with those of, say, Friedrich Nietzsche or Georges Bataille, these similarities will remain largely unexplored. While either a direct politicization or a philosophical contextualization of Artaud's work may be worthwhile, such efforts might also drain it of the startling ambiguity in which Foucault saw its most radically disruptive potential.⁷

At the same time, however, and in order to acknowledge Artaud's stated disruptive ambitions, this...