Antonin Artaud Quotes (44 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Suicidez-vous, désespérés, et vous, torturés du corps et de l'âme, perdez tout espoir. Il n'y a plus pour vous de soulagement en ce monde. Le monde vit de vos charniers.
General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

“It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.”

Antonin Artaud

Appeal to Youth: Intoxication-Disintoxication (1934).

“All true language
is incomprehensible,
Like the chatter
of a beggar’s teeth.”

Antonin Artaud

Ci-Gît.

“The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.”

Antonin Artaud

Letter to the Chancellors of the European Universities. Collected Works, vol. 1, pt. 2 (1956, trans. 1968).

“It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh’s stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.”

Antonin Artaud

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

“I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.”

Antonin Artaud

“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”

Antonin Artaud

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

“How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.”

Antonin Artaud

Source: The Theater and Its Double

“Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.”

Antonin Artaud

“I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.”

Antonin Artaud

Source: The Theater and Its Double

“Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.”

Antonin Artaud

“All writing is filth”

Antonin Artaud

Source: The Theater and Its Double

“So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastiness.”

Antonin Artaud

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)
Context: And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.

“There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely desperate. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.”

Antonin Artaud

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”

Antonin Artaud

Si je me tue ce ne sera pas pour me détruire, mais pour me reconstituer, le suicide ne sera pour moi qu’un moyen de me reconquérir violemment, de faire brutalement irruption dans mon être, de devancer l’avance incertaine de Dieu. Par le suicide, je réintroduis mon dessin dans la nature, je donne pour la première fois aux choses la forme de ma volonté.
“On Suicide,” no. 1, Le Disque Vert (1925).

“Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.”

Antonin Artaud

Source: The Theatre and Its Double (1938, translated 1958), Ch. 1

“So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.”

Antonin Artaud

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

“Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined eternally to reenact their escape.”

Antonin Artaud

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

“It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.”

Antonin Artaud

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

“With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.”

Antonin Artaud

Quoted in Le Monde (Paris, Sept. 11, 1970)
Quoted in Renee Weingarten's Writers and Revolution, ch. 15 (1974).

“But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.”

Antonin Artaud

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

“I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.”

Antonin Artaud

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

“Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.”

Antonin Artaud

Source: The Theatre and Its Double (1938, translated 1958), Ch. 6

“Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.”

Antonin Artaud

Lee Jamieson, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice, Greenwich Exchange, 2007, p. 23.

“And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.”

Antonin Artaud

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

Antonin Artaud

Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.
General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)