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On the occasion of the publication of his newly translated book Mad Like Artaud (originally published in French in 2003) Sylvère Lotringer talks to Bookforum. In the excerpt below, Lotringer explains what drew him to write a highly personal book about Artaud:
Artaud is like a homing missile. He was searching for something, and I searched for something through him. Mostly I turned to him and to some of his contemporaries, like Simone Weil, Georges Bataille and Céline, to understand how we could have let the horrors of WWII happen, as if the massive killing fields of WWI hadn’t been enough of a warning. In 1933, just returning from Vienna, where he first heard of Freud’s death drive, Céline denounced the “incurable warring psychosis” that was launching entire countries “into extreme, aggressive, ecstatic nationalisms . . . a kind of amorous impatience, quasi-irresistible, unanimous, for death.” It seemed, he added, that nothing could oppose this desire for nothingness. He was right about that. It only took a few years before he rallied to those he had been condemning and became anti-Semitic. One foot in and one foot out, this handful of writers and philosophers undertook to embody at their own expense the violence that was raging outside, and use whatever means were at hand to preempt the catastrophe. Some among them became mystics, others went mad, like Artaud, but they all managed to retrieve some powerful antidotes that they hoped could be released like the plague, wreaking havoc in society and bringing people back to essential principles. Artaud didn’t remain silent, he shrieked and shrieked on the stage, trusting that the cruelty of his theater would alert the world, but the world grew louder and louder and covered his voice. In 1937, Artaud traveled to Ireland looking for the roots of paganism, but his delirium took over, and he had to be shipped back to France in a straitjacket. He spent the next nine years, and the entire war, in various asylums, where he was diagnosed as “suffering from chronic hallucinatory psychosis with profuse polymorphous delusions.”
Image of Sylvère Lotringer (with Chris Kraus) via lightmonkey.net