Antonin Artaud Quotes

A collection of quotes by Antonin Artaud.

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was a French playwright, poet, actor, and theorist. He is best known for his contributions to the Theatre of Cruelty, a form of avant-garde theater that aimed to shock and provoke the audience. Artaud's works often explored themes of madness, violence, and the subconscious. He believed in the power of theater to awaken dormant emotions and challenge societal norms. Despite struggling with mental illness throughout his life, Artaud's ideas and artistic vision continue to influence theater and performance art to this day.

Que les poÃ¨tes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous

Que les poÃ¨tes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de mÃªme voir que c'est notre vÃ©nÃ©ration devant ce qui a Ã©tÃ© dÃ©j? fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit, qui nous pÃ©trifie, qui nous stabilise et nous empÃªche de prendre contact avec la force qui est dessous, que l'on appelle l'Ã©nergie pensante, la force vitale, le dÃ©terminisme des Ã©changes, les menstrues de la lune ou tout ce qu'on voudra.

Poetry Theater Inspirational French Inspiration Theatre Essay Artaud Writting

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be des

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

It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, bu

It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea,

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.

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built,

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

The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in i

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 moldy 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.

Theater of cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for m

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.

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bri

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

Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord

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.

However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an

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 practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never ha

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries

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.

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.

It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who

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 oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.

With society and its public, there is no longer any other la

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

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be des

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of

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.

And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred t

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.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a

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