Antonin Artaud citations

“Quand nous reverrons-nous? Quand le goût terreux de tes lèvres viendra-t-il à nouveau frôler l'anxiété de mon esprit? La terre est comme un tourbillon de lèvres mortelles. La vie creuse devant nous le gouffre de toutes les caresses qui ont manqué. Qu'avons-nous à faire auprès de nous de cet ange qui n'a pas su se montrer?”

“[…] de cette minute d'erreur il me reste le sentiment d'avoir ravi à l'inconnu quelque chose de réel. Je crois à des conjurations spontanées.”

“J'ai pour me guérir du jugement des autres toute la distance qui me sépare de moi.”

“Une grande ferveur pensante et surpeuplée portait mon moi comme un abîme plein.”

“Elle a des mains qui entourent les livres de leurs cartilages de miel. Elle a des seins en viande crue, si petite, dont la pression donne la folie; elle a des seins en dédales de fil. Elle a une pensée toute à moi, une pensée insinuante et retorse qui se déroule comme d'un cocon. Elle a une âme.”

“Messieurs les dictateurs de l'école pharmaceutique de France, vous êtes des cuistres rognés : il y a une chose que vous devriez mieux mesurer; c'est que l'opium est cette imprescriptible chose et impérieuse substance qui permet de rentrer dans la vie de leur âme à ceux qui ont eu le malheur de l'avoir perdue.”

“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.”

“Sans un élément de cruauté à la base de tout spectacle, le théâtre n'est pas possible.”

“Tu as gagné, psychiatrie, tu as GAGNE et il te dépasse. La fourmilière du rêve agace ses membres en sommeil. Un rassemblement de volontés adverses le détend, élevé en lui comme de brusques murailles. Le ciel s'effondre avec fracas. Que sent-il? Il a dépassé le sentiment de soi-même. Il t'échappe par mille et mille ouvertures. Tu crois le tenir et il est libre. Il ne t'appartient pas.”

“Certes je fais encore (mais pour combien de temps?) ce que je veux de mes membres, mais voilà longtemps que je ne commande plus à mon esprit, et que mon inconscient tout entier me commande avec des impulsions qui viennent du fond de mes rages nerveuses et du tourbillonnement de mon sang. Images pressées et rapides, et qui ne prononcent à mon esprit que des mots de colère et de haine aveugle, mais qui passent comme des coups de couteau ou des éclairs dans un ciel engorgé.”

“Le soleil a comme un regard. Mais un regard qui regarderait le soleil. Le regard est un cône qui se renverse sur le soleil. Et tout l'air est comme une musique figée, mais une vaste, profonde musique, bien maçonnée et secrète, et pleine de ramifications congelées.”

“On a beau me dire que c'est en moi ce coupe-gorge, je participe à la vie, je représente la fatalité qui m'élit.”

“Nous ne sommes pas libres. Et le ciel peut encore nous tomber sur la tête. Et le théâtre est fait pour nous apprendre d'abord cela”

“Il y a dans toute poésie une contradiction essentielle. La poésie, c'est de la multiplicité broyée et qui rend des flammes. Et la poésie, qui ramène l'ordre, ressuscite d'abord le désordre, le désordre aux aspects enflammés; elle fait s'entre-choquer des aspects qu'elle ramène a un point unique : feu, geste, sang, cri.
Ramener la poésie et l'ordre dans un monde dont l'existence même est un défi a l'ordre, c'est ramener la guerre et la permanence de la guerre; c'est amener un état de cruauté appliqué, c'est susciter une anarchie sans nom, l'anarchie des choses et des aspects qui se réveillent avant de sombrer et de se fondre a nouveau dans l'unité. Mais celui qui réveille cette anarchie dangereuse en est toujours la première victime”

“Chers Amis,
Ce que vous avez pris pour mes oeuvres n’était que les déchets de moi-même, ces raclures de l’âme que l’homme normal n’accueille pas.
Que mon mal depuis lors ait reculé ou avancé, la question pour moi n’est pas là, elle est dans la douleur et la sidération persistante de mon esprit.
Me voici de retour à M…, où j’ai retrouvé la sensation d’engourdissement et de vertige, ce besoin brusque et fou de sommeil, cette perte soudaine de mes forces avec un sentiment de vaste douleur, d’abrutissement instantané.”

“Les asiles d'aliénés sont des réceptacles de magies noire, conscients et prémédités.”

“You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief?… We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.”

“Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.”

“There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.”

“I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.”

“I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.”

“I myself am an absolute abyss.”

“All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.”

“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself”

“I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.”

“We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.”

“Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.”

“Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord of morality! Since they left their mothers they have never sinned, have they? They are apostles, they are the descendants of priests; one can only wonder from what source they draw their indignation, and above all how much they have pocketed to do this, and in any case what it has done for them.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“When we speak the word “life,” it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.”

“However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practise to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.”

“Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.”

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

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

“All writing is filth”

“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.”

“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.”

“It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.”