{"id":110934,"date":"2022-05-22T14:35:45","date_gmt":"2022-05-22T13:35:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=110934"},"modified":"2022-05-22T14:35:45","modified_gmt":"2022-05-22T13:35:45","slug":"letters-to-an-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/letters-to-an-other\/","title":{"rendered":"Letters to An Other"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Steve Finbow.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Antonin Artaud, A Sinister Assassin: Last Writings, Ivry-sur-Seine, September 1947 to March 1948<\/i><\/a> <\/i>(Infinity Land Press, 2022). Edited, translated and with an introduction by Stephen Barber.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Martin Amis \u2014 that long-forgotten satirist of Britain\u2019s long-forgotten ethics and morals (and whose name one does not expect to encounter in an essay on Antonin Artaud) \u2014 wrote in the opening note to London Fields<\/em> that \u201cthere are two kinds of titles \u2014 two grades, two orders. The first kind of title decides on a name for something that is already there. The second kind of title is present all along: it lives and breathes, or it tries, on every page.\u201d Originally, I planned to call this piece, \u201cFuck Off, Roland Barthes, And, While We\u2019re At It. You Can Sling Your Hook An\u2019 All, Michel Foucault.\u201d But thinking that too drily academic, I decided on the second kind of title, \u201cLetters to an other,\u201d as an implicit naming of Artaud\u2019s new revelations of being.<\/p>\n

Rather like those people on buses talking on their phones in a non-stop monologue, making you question if there is an interlocutor on the end of the line or just an empty room lined with mirrors and an echo chamber, Artaud wrote thousands of letters \u2014 to Jean Paulhan, to Andr\u00e9 Breton, to Jean Dubuffet, to Arthur Adamov, to Georges Braque, to Anne Manson, to Colette Thomas, and many others \u2014 but always to his self. In an early letter to Jacques Rivi\u00e8re, Artaud confessed, \u201cThere is something which destroys my thought; something which does not prevent me from being what I might be, but which leaves me, so to speak, in suspension. Something furtive which robs me of the words that I have found, which reduces my mental tension, which is gradually destroying in its substance the body of my thought, which is even robbing me of the memory of those idioms with which one expresses oneself and which translate accurately the most inseparable, the most localized, the most living inflections of thought\u201d. To which Rivi\u00e8re responded, \u201cOne thing strikes me: the contrast between the extraordinary precision of your self-diagnosis and the vagueness, or at least the formlessness, of your creative efforts\u201d. And Rivi\u00e8re published their correspondence in the Nouvelle Revue Fran\u00e7aise<\/em> rather than the poems Artaud had submitted.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

These fragments and letters are epistolary grenades, fragments of finitude, auto-autopsies, in which Artaud\u2019s pen \u2014 filled with ink or blood or shit \u2014 became a scalpel with which he incised (inscribed) himself, forcepping his memories, retracting his theories, scissoring his fears in the reflection of the page; so much so that his auto-consumption resembled Michel Lotito\u2019s ingestion of bicycles, televisions and even a Cessna 150 airplane \u2014 after all, there is nothing more indigestible than the self. Barthes wrote that, \u201cWe are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author\u201d. But can we really read Artaud without thinking of Artaud, an artist \u2014 like his beloved Vincent van Gogh \u2014 ignored, smothered and destroyed by society? A writer who exists unaware of readers, whose auto-cannibalism (literally not textually) creates the myth of Artaud the writer. If the reader is Thyestes, thief of the Golden Fleece of \u201cmeaning,\u201d and Artaud is Atreus, then the two heads under the silver platter at the reconciliation dinner are those of Barthes and Foucault. The House of Artaud \u2014 Friedrich H\u00f6lderlin, G\u00e9rard de Nerval, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Michaux and Pierre Guyotat \u2014 are authors\/artists ever present in and impossible to remove from their work.<\/p>\n

As Stephen Barber explains in his introduction, \u201cThis book assembles Artaud\u2019s crucial work from September 1947 to March 1948, when that work was concentrated spatially into its location at his pavilion in the grounds of a convalescence clinic in Ivry-sur-Seine, on the southern edge of Paris \u2014 and especially on the insurgent, fragmentary work of the final weeks of his life\u201d. And that combined image of spatial location and fragmentary insurgence succinctly summarises the detonation of denotation in Artaud\u2019s work \u2013 the subjectile and the projectile. The introduction provides fascinating insights into Artaud\u2019s final years \u2014 his madness, illnesses, drug addiction, penury and genius. Barber is always particularly good at topographical correspondences and illuminates Artaud\u2019s connection and disconnection with the artistic world of Paris and his treatment in a dilapidated clinic at the end of a M\u00e9tro line. And when we think of Artaud\u2019s work, we tend to think of places \u2014 of Marseille, Paris, Bali, Mexico, Ireland, Rodez \u2014 and Barber has firmly situated Ivry-sur-Seine as a topos of Artaud\u2019s demise and passing: another geodesic sphincter between and linking sanity and madness, art and writing, life and death.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

If nothing else, Artaud\u2019s work is a complete revaluation of all things human. He asks\u2026<\/p>\n

from myself
\nto myself
\nwho is it that comes
\nand who is it that goes?<\/em><\/p>\n

That precise moment during illness when one becomes embodied completely in suffering and yet disembodied and staring down at that body, no longer the self but some other, where the only question is the question of identity and wholeness, where the unitary self realises that it contains multitudes in dizzying perpetual interchanges of emotions and instincts. Few writers \/ artists were \/ are as brave as Artaud in examining his self and his self as an other.<\/p>\n

All of us are enveloped by a secondary humanity<\/em>
\na humanity that is malevolent and sinister<\/em><\/p>\n

Artaud confronts the body as if it were Satan and God in perpetual battle and he tackles God and Satan as if they were his own internal organs. Artaud\u2019s final works maintain the dual concept of revolt he had been developing since before his Surrealist days, a revolt against tradition, against culture, against language but also a revolt confronted by the corporeal body \u2014 organs, emissions, genitalia. Artaud\u2019s writing creates a sublimated uncompromising anti-libidinal counterpoint to that of his near contemporary D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence\u2019s inherent messianic pleasure principle negated by Artaud\u2019s bodily struggle \u2014 rather than intimate and animated, Artaud\u2019s body exists as foreign and fragmented. More yuck than fuck. The corpus incorporates the soon-to-be corpse; the texts internalise the corporeal disintegration.<\/p>\n

I believe we are the dead who exist beneath the dead<\/em>
\nand we stink of a horrendous shit<\/em><\/p>\n

These fragments and letters exemplify what Derrida commented on in his analysis of Artaud\u2019s writings, that he is \u201cBeating his flesh in order to reawaken it at the eve prior to the deportation\u201d.<\/p>\n

I think you must be bothering that eye<\/em>
\nby having fucked up a pair of balls, for it<\/em>
\nand some shit, that now has to be swallowed<\/em>
\nthrough the entrails of its nose<\/em><\/p>\n

and<\/p>\n

I believe that\u2019s the real truth<\/em>
\nthe raw, true and evident<\/em>
\ntrue truth of the truth<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Artaud continually moves toward an exit, an anti-vaginal re-birth or an eternally recurring death. In each of these fragments and letters, Artaud reinvents his birth and relives his death \u2014 both Heideggerian impossibilities. Artaud\u2019s writing and artworks manifest an ante-natal and even anti-natal intentionality; a constant denial of a being towards the beginning and a persistent desire for a being toward the end. And where Heidegger mentions birth and moves swiftly on in an ever-metastasising proliferation of all things thanatic, Artaud struggles to transcend the moment and the horror and the ongoing terror of his bodily birth.<\/p>\n

my birth: that was a horrendous struggle<\/em>
\nan act of abysmal warfare<\/em>
\nan extreme sin<\/em><\/p>\n

This collection of fragments, letters, last works, collected, edited and translated by Barber, provides an intriguing glimpse into Artaud\u2019s last months before his death, in 1948, from an accidental overdose of chloral hydrate \u2014 a favoured drug of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Andr\u00e9 Gide and a component of the fatal cocktail in the Jonestown mass-murder suicides. But what Barber provides is an anti-institutional and energetic translation \u2014 some transcribed and traduced from Artaud\u2019s original handwritten texts \u2014 that breathes life into these moribund works, gives them, in a sense, a rebirth.<\/p>\n

The book closes with a collection of Artaud\u2019s notebook drawings and glossolalia, each an attempt to escape language; yet, four days before his death, during Jean Desternes\u2019s last visit to the clinic, Artaud told the journalist, \u201cI am haunted \u2014 haunted for a long time now \u2014 by a kind of writing which is not within the norm. I\u2019ve wanted to write outside of grammar, to find a means of expression beyond words. And now and then I\u2019ve believed myself to be very close, to that kind of expression\u2026 but everything is driving me back to the norm\u201d. And Artaud felt that from his earliest letters to Rivi\u00e8re, \u201cI suffer from a horrible sickness of the mind. My thought abandons me at every level. From the simple fact of thought to the external fact of its materialization in words. Words, shapes of sentences, internal directions of thought, simple reactions of the mind \u2014 I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Thus as soon as I can grasp a form, however imperfect, I pin it down, for fear of losing the whole thought. I lower myself, I know, and I suffer from it, but I consent to it for fear of dying altogether\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Along with Infinity Land Press\u2019s other Artaud publications, this important book \u2013\u2014 with outstanding forensic topographic photographs by Karolina Urbaniak and an exquisite cover by Martin Bladh \u2014 increases and transforms our knowledge of Artaud\u2019s life, death and work \u2014 all so intricately and essentially intertwined \u2014 or as Artaud would have put it, \u201ctarabut rabut karviston rabut rabut kur a vitctron\u201d.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"
By Audrey Szasz<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nSteve Finbow<\/strong>\u2019s current project \u2014 Anticipated Memories<\/em> \u2014 will include an artist\u2019s book, printed facsimiles and an exhibition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rather like those people on buses talking on their phones in a non-stop monologue, making you question if there is an interlocutor on the end of the line or just an empty room lined with mirrors and an echo chamber, Artaud wrote thousands of letters \u2014 to Jean Paulhan, to Andr\u00e9 Breton, to Jean Dubuffet, to Arthur Adamov, to Georges Braque, to Anne Manson, to Colette Thomas, and many others \u2014 but always to his self.<\/p>\n

Steve Finbow<\/strong> reviews Antonin Artaud<\/strong>‘s final writings, A Sinister Assassin<\/em>, translated by Stephen Barber<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110941,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110934"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110944,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110934\/revisions\/110944"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}