ABSTRACT
The work of Antonin Artaud, writer, visual artist, performer, dancer, film actor, theatre director and actor, traveller and ‘destroyer of languages’, continues to ‘ricochet strongly through contemporary culture’ long after his death in 1948 (Barber, 1993 p. 2). He has been called a ‘modern master’, a pioneer, even a prophet (Esslin, 1976 pp. 10-11). Such hyperbolic assessments may well have been influenced by Foucault’s celebration, in the closing pages of Madness and Civilisation (1961/1967), of Artaud, alongside Nietzsche and Van Gogh, as an exemplar of madness as a fundamental experience, an absolute Otherness. In this early work, Foucault suggests that the ‘sovereign enterprise of unreason’ might open up a ‘total contestation’ of Western culture; and, echoing Nietzsche’s turn away from Apollonian processes, he looks for this opening where madness effects an absolute break with the work of art. In what Dreyfus and Rabinow describe as an early ‘flirtation with hermeneutic depth’, he asserts that madness itself draws an absolute ontological boundary, ‘the exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void’.1 Much as Heidegger had located the cusp of Nietzsche’s madness at the crest of Western metaphysics, Foucault accords Artaud an exalted position for having journeyed closest to that point where some unspecified yet utterly profound truth about the human condition might be revealed. Artaud’s oeuvre
experiences its own absence in madness, but that experience, the fresh courage of that ordeal, all those words hurled against a fundamental absence of language, all that space of physical suffering and terror which
surrounds or rather coincides with the void-that is the work of art itself: the sheer cliff over the abyss of the work’s absence.
