Artaud and His Doubles

Chapter 2 : Reactionary Modern

chapter 2 : Reactionary Modern In the long history of alternatives to rationality, Artaud’s writing occupies a critical place. A vein of irrationalist and vitalist thought that had flowed through late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe found a ferocious and climactic articulation after World War I, a war that had, in the words of Robert O. Paxton, “discredited optimistic and progressive views of the future, and cast doubt upon liberal assumptions about natural human harmony” (Anatomy of Fascism, 28). At the same time, a reaction against Western civilization manifested itself in a seeking out of inspiration in cultures as far removed from the one at hand as possible . While a strong revulsion against the cultural, intellectual, and political systems of Western civilization might have seemed to contain the potential for positive and emancipatory creativity in some avant-garde circles, destructive and reactionary tendencies were always deeply interconnected with this potential.1 Indeed, intellectual and political historians have argued that reactions against positivism, liberalism, materialism , and Western culture—drawing on and developing trends established in the nineteenth century—set the stage for the rise of fascism .2 A particularly aggressive rejection of rationalism and Western civilization drew from the urge for further destruction after World War I, the yearning for a connection with something bigger than the self, and the craving for a cataclysmic event to wipe out humanity’s mistakes. This fueled Céline’s hunger for “planetary conflagration” and Artaud’s return to the Black Plague. This chapter examines Artaud’s list of rejections— science, reason, discourse, individual psychology—and counter-propositions —vitalism, non-Western and “primitive” cultures, and occultism— that he shares with a darker set of doubles among the flourishing interwar opposition to the legacy of the rationalist Enlightenment and contemporaneous Western civilization. 50 The Controversions of the Counter-Enlightenment The intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin established the term “counter-Enlightenment ” as a way to analyze the reactions against rationality and social progress whose history extends back to the eighteenth century. This current of European thought, he argues, came to “a point of violent hysteria ” in the 1930s and ’40s with fascism (Magus, 52).3 The Enlightenment represented faith in reason and the belief that intellect could lead to the eventual happiness of humanity; it situated logical systems against what it deemed “guesswork, tradition, superstition, prejudice, dogma, fantasy and ‘interested error’” (Berlin, Magus, 28). Enlightenment thinkers and their heirs had worked—through the emerging fields of psychology, sociology , economics, and political science—toward the discovery of general laws governing human behavior that would replace intuition and myth. But this business of attempting to manage existence through quantifiable knowledge seemed not just distasteful but profoundly immoral (or sacrilegious ) to those who did not set great store by mankind’s intellectual powers and did not believe in the possibility of scientific or historical progress. Counter-Enlightenment thinkers counter empirical science with vitalism , rationalism with irrationalism, putting belief not in man’s powers of reason but in forces either more sublime (God) or more primitive (organic energies). Such thinkers oppose individual psychology with an extreme de-individuation, an emphasis on annihilation of self and union with a primitive, universal, or national spirit. History is countered by Myth with a capital “M,” as discrete historical events, political negotiations , and the like, fall into insignificance compared to another order— fate, destiny, divinity—that reveals the true nature of events. Materialism is countered by mystery so that magic, religion, or essential forces can reclaim their primary places in the experience of the world. Rainer Friedrich describes an “irrationalist vitalism” animating The Theater and Its Double that manifests itself in “Artaud’s vision of an ecstatic liberation from the burden of reason, subjectivity, and autonomy, and his longing for primitive forms of life.”4 He is right to see in the book’s worldview and vision for a live event a set of concerns directly related to intellectual and cultural currents flourishing in the interwar era. Artaud’s privileging of force, power, and energy over intellect, reason, and science signifies an alliance with those who, in Berlin’s phrase, regarded the EnReactionary Modern : 51 lightenment as “a personal enemy” (“Joseph de Maistre,” 110) and who yearned for a return to a state of being that would supposedly be more authentic and dynamic. The first term of this reaction whose parallels to The Theater and Its Double we examine is the opposition to...