Journey to the land of excrement: The Artaud's metaphysics

Abstract

This article develops Antonin Artaud’s life and work, not only literary and philosophical but also artistic and theatrical. This is to show how his thinking and sense of cruelty were linked intrinsically and violently to his life. We have divided the corpus into three acts to simulate a theatrical play in which the indispensable moments for criticizing modern Western and American life were exposed as opposed to the Tarahumara rituals. Such moments are: An abject body exposed to shock, Artificial insemination, the army of children, and the last act, Surrealism turned into psychoanalysis, turned into a drumbeat. In the first moment, we stop to analyze the consequences of the use of electroshock therapy on the body of the artist of the theater of cruelty, as well as the use of his expression on these experiences translated into rational and pseudoscientific discourse. In the second act, we bring the discussion about Artaud’s critique of the current forms of life where the most defenseless and younger humans are forced to natural detachment and force to live artificially, generating unwary human lives and bodies. And for the last act, we emphasize the separation between Artaud and Surrealism.