Notes on:
Vaughan-Johnston, T. (nd) A Artaud: To Have Done
with the Judgement of God. http: www.
youtube.com/watch?v=0jj98AOeqws
Dave Harris
The Americans are developing artificial
insemination to create an army of adults for the
future, in order to defend consumerism. This
is why they take a small amount of sperm from all
children entering public school. The
Terahumara knew better with their Rite of Black
Sun [an earlier piece of work], with their rituals
involving horses, men, blood, uprooting crosses,
and recognizing shit as being, as a sign of
humanity. Shit stands for meat on the bone
and for the earth on its own bones.
[A sequence of nonsense language, or so I assume,
ensues]
Men become animals, they become debased.
This is at the beginning of the world. They
wonder about the infinite and the infinitesimal,
but decide to explore the infinitesimal, with an
inward focus, and this is how they discovered
God. God is from the body. God is
either shit or is nonexistent, a void.
Transubstantiation is a farce. Christ is the
crab louse of God. When we eat his body in
the ritual, we want to shit him out. Men
want to revolt, to have done with God's judgment,
but there is another order of the world too,
genuinely infinite, and not even yet realizing the
extent of its open possibilities [presumably,
modernity and modern technology]. That
exceeds consciousness, which is a matter of not
knowing. Consciousness shows links with
sexual desire and hunger, but these are not the
only or the most real factors: consciousness is an
appetite which is not the same as hunger [so the
new humanist order is insatiable].
Necessity and nothingness have abolished the role
of ideas and myths. Thoughtlessness becomes
affirmation. The human body becomes reduced
to a matter of 'stinking gas'. Space, time,
becoming, being and non being, self and non self
are all nothing. Only one thing is something
- bodily suffering, the presence of the body.
Yet others manipulate my body. They press me
with questions, they press and press so that my
idea of the body is suffocated [perhaps a
reference to his obvious maltreatment and
subjection to ECT when he was in the asylum at
Rodez?]. Now, however, my body can never be
touched.
[An imaginary dialogue takes place with a critic]
What was the purpose of this broadcast?
It was to announce the social obscenities and
official policies covering things like the
obligatory sperm test, American imperialism.
Is it not too bizarre? Yes, it is
bizarre -- the preColumbian Indians were extremely
civilized, and their civilization was based on
cruelty [perhaps the Terahumara again?
Apparently, Artaud had actually visited Mexico and
contacted some of the Indians]. Do you
have a definition of cruelty? I have
no definition, but cruelty means eradicating by
blood. God is an accident of human
animality. Man is erotic and his pulsations
produce Creation. The American Indians knew
this, but creativity has also been rediscovered in
modern science. Science now works with
microbes. Microbes are God: atoms are made
with the microbes of god. Is this not
raving, and mad? The new idea is of
God as consisting of microbes. God has been
invented via unhealthy sexuality and morbid
cruelty, under the guise of purity and innocence:
it is suffocating. My hallucinations are to
lead to an end to 'this ape'. People believe
in Man, but he needs to be emasculated.
Is this mad? At my autopsy they will need to
remake anatomy. Man needs to be scraped off,
of the residue of god and therefore of his
organs. We need to make a man into a body
without organs to remove automatic reactions and
restore freedom. Then he will be able to
'dance wrong side out', and this will restore his
true place.
There is now a full transcript of the play here
[Overall, I can see that there are some important
themes and arguments for and into this short play,
heavily overlaid in with Artaud's attempts to
shock the bourgeoisie and annoy the catholic
church. It can be read as an argument about
the increase in and change of the creative powers
of human thinking, and the way in which overcomes
constraints. First religious ones are overcome as
people understand that god is a human creation
and, for that matter, that many of his miracles
can be duplicated by modern science.
However, a new set of constraints soon emerges in
the form of modern consumerist and imperialist
social formations which limit human consciousness
to instrumental goals, to use Habermas's terms for
a moment. These also have to be overcome, in
the form of the remodelling of the human body,
which is seen here as a metaphor.
The human body becomes a metaphor for god himself
in the early stages of human civilizations.
Products of the human body, including shit, but,
according to Levi Strauss other bodily fluids like
sperm or blood, become important for constructing
myth, including myths of origin. Artaud does
mention both sperm and blood in his discussion:
sperm appears in the bizarre opening claim that
all American male children have to donate some
when they attend school, so that American
scientists can start producing artificial humans;
and blood appears in his brief summary of the Rite
of the Black Sun. To borrow Levi Strauss for a
moment, these products are special because they
are midway between nature and culture, and thus
are ideally placed to form myths about how human
beings sprang from nature. I cannot remember
the details of Levi Strauss's analyses, but I
imagine that shit became a metaphor for the earth
itself, the primeval ooze, the swamps which rose
above the waters [I am probably quoting a
vulgarised version of the Egyptian myth of origin,
clearly based on the emergence of fertile land
from the Nile floods every year. While I am
here, I understand that the ancient Egyptians also
saw the scarab beetle as sacred because it seemed
to be able to spontaneously call forth life as its
tiny eggs hatched and the little beetles swarmed
out into the world - they swarmed out from balls
of dung]. It is easy to see how these myths
connects with notions of the divine order, of
gods. Artaud references a central Indian
society, the Tarahumara, who might well have had
similar myths of origin.
Being Artaud, he cannot resist putting this in a
very provocative way, hoping to wind up the
Catholic church. He says that God is shit,
which is a statement based on this metaphorical
analysis above, showing a certain logical quality
even though it ends in bizarre conclusions, and,
as an aside, refers to an ancient theological
problem with the catholic
transubstantiation. If the communion wafer
is indeed miraculously turned into the body of
God, then it must also turn back into an ordinary
wafer: the alternative would be to insist that the
body of God is then carried through the intestinal
tract and crapped out at the end. He gets in
a few jibes about God, the ambiguities of Jesus as
both divine and human, and the creation of rather
unlovely creatures such as crab lice. Above
all though, he raises the mystery of God's
judgments - God often seems to us to be punitive,
unfair, cruel, or arbitrary. These doubts
must lie still in the Catholic consciousness.
He then turns to the development of human
consciousness away from religious
constraint. However, the wonders of modern
science and technology, which have been produced
by this break, are still themselves highly
limited. There is a lingering Christian
conception of God underpinning nature still, hence
the argument that conceptions like the modern
molecule are still seen as God's molecules.
There is also a serious constraint introduced by
directing science and technology towards
imperialism and consumerism. Artaud wants to
suggest that the important thing about
consciousness is exploring what it is that we do
not know, the open possibilities.
There is a more personal account about how bodies
are heavily repressed, which reminded me at least
have the terrible treatment that Artaud underwent
during his confinement in the lunatic asylum at
Rodez. According to the documentaries about
his life, the physician in charge of his treatment
used a punitive regime based on behaviour
modification through confinement and restriction
of diet, combined with ECT, which Artaud found
painful and damaging. He would be constantly
interrogated about his bizarre beliefs, and
constantly punished. He came out of the
treatment addicted to laudunum, toothless and in
seriously bad health
It follows from this that if we want to liberate
consciousness and human creativity as we have to
do away with these old constraints. Again,
the focus will be on the human body as the source
of mythical constraint. His own body will
demonstrate the possibilities at autopsy.
The human body needs to be scraped clean of the
residues that led to religious sensibilities, both
shit and the organs that produce it [and other
bodily fluids]. The famous remark about
needing to make a body without organs ensues,
virtually at the end of the whole piece, and this
is actually about the only reference to bodily
organs specifically.
Deleuze is clearly influenced by the play, which
he assumed, no doubt, would be well known by the
literary avant-garde of Paris. He uses the
phrase body without organs to indicate a state of
freedom, an escape from limiting forms of
thought. The metaphor might indeed be
extended so that the organs stand for the organs
of State specifically, which would give it a kind
of Marxist twist, although there is no sign of
Marxism in Artaud's play - a generalised idealism,
about releasing the full powers of human
creativity, supplies the critique and the
alternative. Artaud's use of nonsense
language is also cited as an example of how
nonsense makes sense: Artaud include some nonsense
syllables in his play, and as the documentaries
about his life also show, nonsense language and
bizarre ways of expressing it, including screams
and wails, featured in other plays, and also in
Artaud's own speeches and presentations.
There is also a reference to this play in a
shorter piece written by Deleuze called To
Have Done with Judgment (in Essays).
This is a more general discussion, however,
picking up on themes in other writers, including
Spinoza, and turning, if I recall it correctly, on
the need to abandon transcendental argument in
general as some superior world which can be used
to judge this one.
The (double)documentary about Artaud:
My LIfe and Times with Artaud/Artaud
the Momo (dir Mordillat, Laura Productions,
USA, 1995)
back to Deleuze page
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