Chapter 5 - Antonin Artaud's Unending Death Rattle

Summary

Sa signature aussi me regarde. Est-ce possible?

—Jacques Derrida, Signéponge

I have wounds to show you, which shall be yours in private

—William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

Antonin Artaud was discussed in the final chapter of section one alongside Shakespeare's tragic warrior Coriolanus. Both were conjoined in their shared resistance to and rejection of the theatrical prompter, a figure perceived by each as a cause of corruption to one's sovereign voice, a violation of one's singular standing. However, it would be Derrida who, in his early essays on Artaud, in Writing and Difference, theoretically outlined the fatal dimensions of such resistances to being spoken for, and how, in the rejection of the prompter, there was uncovered, beneath it all, further layers of further promptings. Like those of an onion, these layers, too, seem in their unpeeling finally to expose at their core only a seed of further representation, as the singular is now split and divided, made multiple.

In what follows, we will again see Artaud struggling to locate a performative space in which he might still singularly affirm himself, a stage upon which to tell his own story. However, what develops in Artaud's early search is a dramatic engagement that does not occur on a theatrical stage, but in a more private space that either precedes or exceeds theatrical display.