Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism

4. JACQUES DERRIDA: Addressing the Future

Chapter F o u r JACQUES DERRIDA Addressing the Future I Hapax For what [Artaud’s] screams [hurlements] put before us, articulated through such words as existence, flesh, life, theatre, or cruelty, prior to both madness and the work, is the sense of an art which does not give rise to works, the existence of an artist who is no longer a vehicle or experience leading to something other than itself, and of an act of speaking that is a body, a body that is a theatre, a theatre that is a text in so far as it is no longer subordinate to any anterior writing, arch-text [archi-texte], or archspeaking [archi-parole]. If Artaud resists all clinical or critical exegesis absolutely, in a way never attempted before, in our view, it is by virtue of that which in his whole adventure (using the term to indicate a totality prior to any separation between life and work) is protest itself against exemplification itself. Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence1 On 2 February 1947, some eight months after his release from the asylum in Rodez, the last in a series of mental institutions where he had been held since October 1937, Antonin Artaud, now living in a nursing home in Ivry, was prompted to visit an exhibition of paintings by van Gogh that had recently opened at the Orangerie in Paris. The previous 233 234 Radical Indecision week, Artaud had received from the gallery owner, Pierre Loeb, a letter urging him to consider writing a piece on van Gogh, and enclosing by way of encouragement a cutting from the magazine Arts that in its coverage of the exhibition had reproduced an extract from a recent monograph on the artist by the psychiatrist François-Joachim Beer, who had concluded, in no uncertain terms, that he was a diminished, pathologically unstable, violent and impulsive individual, given to excessive, eccentric behaviour, and displaying all the symptoms of a congenital mental condition, probably unrelated to his talents as a painter, but clearly exerting a deleterious effect upon them. Galvanised by this brutally reductive and dismissive assessment, only too reminiscent of the diagnoses with which he himself had to contend over the previous decade, and powerfully affected by his subsequent, albeit brief visit to the Orangerie, Artaud quickly set to work. By the end of February a contract for publication had been signed, and weeks later Artaud was already putting the finishing touches to his typescript. Van Gogh le suicid é de la société (Van Gogh, Society’s Suicide Victim), as Artaud’s slim volume was called, appeared in mid-December that year and, bizarrely enough, was duly fêted the following month for its contribution to art criticism with the award of the prix Sainte-Beuve.2 Like much of what Artaud wrote in the brief but intense period of activity between his transfer to Rodez in February 1943 and his death in March 1948, Van Gogh le suicidé de la société is a highly charged, fervently committed, rhapsodic mixture of querulous invective, tenacious affirmation, and gnomic insight, staged both on and off the page, in a relentless, insistent, and percussively theatrical, not to say histrionic manner, interrupted at crucial moments with densely enigmatic passages of incantatory glossolalia, as though to express the conviction that all language could not but strain towards the pure idiomaticity of an invented, gestural performance. Though hardly a work of criticism in any conventional sense, Artaud’s book nevertheless sought to make an incisive critical intervention. As such, it belonged to a sequence of letters , articles, and other texts by Artaud, written in the mid-1940s, some published but many left unpublished at the time, which shared the same uncompromising gesture of rejection and reversal that challenged the authority or legitimacy of every alien interpretative grid imposed upon the work of poets or painters, and sought by dint of its own linguistic dynamism to disengage the properly irreducible, bodily, experi- Jacques Derrida 235 ential force of the artwork, and release its insurgent potency from all attempts at social normalisation and the always imminent threat of being diverted, purloined, and appropriated for its own purposes by society itself.3 In this way, as Artaud’s title suggests, Van Gogh le suicidé de la société was at least as much an indictment of Western culture in general as an attempt to describe...