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In the last two years of his life, following his release from the Rodez asylum, Antonin Artaud decided he wanted his new work to connect with a vast public audience, and chose to record radio broadcasts in order to carry through that aim. That determination led him to his most experimental and incendiary project, To have done with the judgement of god, 1947-48, in which he attempted to create a new language of texts, screams, and cacophonies: a language designed to be heard by millions, aimed, as Artaud said, for 'road-menders'. In the broadcast, he interrogated corporeality and introduced the idea of the 'body without organs', crucial to the later work of Deleuze and Guattari. The broadcast, commissioned by the French national radio station, was banned shortly before its planned transmission, to Artaud's fury.
This volume collects all of the texts for To have done with the judgement of god, together with several of the letters Artaud wrote to friends and enemies in the short period between his work's censorship and his death. Also included is the text of an earlier broadcast from 1946, Madness and Black Magic, written as a manifesto prefiguring his subsequent broadcast. Clayton Eshleman's extraordinary translations of the broadcasts activate these works in their extreme provocation.
List of contents
5 - 10 Introduction (Ros Murray)12 - 55 Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu - To have done with the judgement of god (Antonin Artaud)56 - 79 Le théâtre de la cruauté - The Theater of Cruelty (Antonin Artaud)81 - 96 Letters on "To have done with the judgement of god" (Antonin Artaud)98 - 107 Aliénation et magie noire - Alienation and Black Magic (Antonin Artaud)109 - 122 Clayton Eshleman's Translations of Artaud's 1946-48 Radio Works (Stephen Barber)
About the author
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is one of the seminal figures of twentieth century writing, art and sound experimentation, known especially for his work with the Surrealist movement, his performance theories, his asylum incarcerations, and his artworks which have been exhibited in major exhibitions, at New York's MOMA and many other art-museums.
