Antonin Artaud Quotes

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.

If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.

We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

To confront the metaphysics I have created for myself, in accordance with the void I carry within me.

All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it.

A host of scorpions crawl out from under the wetnurse's dress and start swarming in her vagina which swells and splits, becomes transparent and shimmers like the sun

Everything is going badly because at this moment the morbid conscience has an essential interest in not recovering from its own sickness.

Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination,

Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.

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

Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.

Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.

And truly
must it be reduced to this stinking gas,
my body?
To say that I have a body
because I have a stinking gas
that forms
inside me?
(To have done with the judgement of God, 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.

I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve. I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves ...

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.

Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

All those who have vantage points in their spirit... ; all those who are masters of their language; all those for whom words have a meaning; all those for whom there exist sublimities in the soul and currents of thought; all those who are the spirit of the times, and have named these currents of thought -- and I am thinking of their precise works, of that automatic grinding that delivers their spirit to the winds --
are pigs.

For the lost are lost by nature, all your ideas of moral regeneration will make no difference, there is AN INNATE DETERMINISM, there is an undeniable incurability in suicide, crime, idiocy, madness, there is an invincible cuckoldry in man, there is a congenital weakness of the character, a castration of the mind.

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.

- And do you know what the Americans and the Russians make their atoms with? They make them with the microbes of god.

- You are raving, Mr Artaud. You are mad.

- I am not raving. I am not mad. I'm telling you that microbes have been reinvented in order to impose a new idea of god.

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.

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

Those who live, live off the dead.

All writing is pigshit.

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

Because one must produce,
one must by all possible means of activity replace nature wherever it can be replaced,
one must find a major field of action for human inertia,
the worker must have something to keep him busy,
new fields of activity must be created,
in which we shall see at last the reign
of all the fake manufactured products,
of all the vile synthetic substitutes
in which beautiful real nature has no part,
and must give way finally and shamefully
before all the victorious
substitute products
in which the sperm
of all the artificial insemination factories
will make a miracle
in order to produce armies and battleships.

No more fruit, no more trees, no more vegetables, no more plants pharmaceutical or otherwise
and consequently no more food,
but synthetic products to satiety,
amid the fumes,
amid the special humors of the atmosphere,
on the particular axes of atmospheres wrenched violently and synthetically from the resistances of a nature which has known nothing of war except fear.

And war is wonderful, isn't it?
For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for
and are preparing for this way step by step.
In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition
that could not fail to arise on all sides,
one must have soldiers, armies, airplanes, battleships,
hence this sperm
w

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

The cinema implies a total inversion of values, a complete upheaval of optics, of perspective and logic. It is more exciting than phosphorus, more captivating than love.

I am a man by virtue of my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach whose knots reunite me to the putrefaction of life.

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.

Not only are mortals rotten, the very atmosphere in which we live is materially and physically rotten, swarming with maggots, with obscene appearances, poisonous minds, and foul organisms.

The theatre will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. [ ... ] If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything in love, crime, war and madness.

The fixation of the theater in one language
written words, music, lights, noises
betokens its imminent ruin.

Life consists of burning up questions.

The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes; that is the
secret of fascination. And in his book, St Augustine does not doubt the
reality of this fascination for one moment.

And when we tell ourselves we have reached the paroxysm of horror, blood and flouted laws of poetry that consecrates revolt, we obliged to advance still further into an endless vertigo.

In the manifested world, metaphysically speaking, evil is the permanent law, and what is good is an effort and already one more cruelty added to the other.

If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

I know that I believe in ETERNAL LIFE, and that I believe here in its entire meaning. I regret to live in a world where witches and wizards hide, and moreover, where there are so few true wizards.

The extreme point of mysticism, I hold it now in the real and in my body, like a toilet broom.

The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.

... not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/-as soon as I lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me back to her/(the motherfucker)...

There is nothing more useless than a organ. When you have given him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and restored him to his true liberty.

The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.

By suicide I introduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will ... now I choose the direction of my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.

In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.

I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.

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

I myself am an absolute abyss.

The theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice.

When I think about myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new space. I am on the moon as others are on their balconies. I participate in planetary gravitation in the fissures of my mind.

Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.

There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel

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.

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

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.

Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.

The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt ...

The life we lead is a front for all which the frightful criminal filthymindedness of some of us has left us. A grotesque masquerade of acts & sentiments. Our ideas are only the leftovers of a breath, breath of our choked & trussed lungs.

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.

All writing is filth

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

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

I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.

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.