Antonin Artaud

Man’s Dark Interior: Surrealism, Viscera and The Anatomical Imaginary

“…Framed by Artaud's own experience of mental illness, his drawings resist conventional narratives of illness and corporeal selfhood by transforming the body into a site of both socio-institutional subjugation and revolt that forms, and is formed by, its visceral representation. 83 This sense of narratological disruption is sustained through the facture of the images themselves, their rough-and-ready aesthetic, their multimedia nature and dense overworking of anatomical forms. For Jacques Derrida, Artaud's expressive struggle (the way in which language and material, corpus and word interweave and exceed the limits of established narrative within the drawings) is inherently chimerical, a destabilising mingling of form 'with everything it is not'.…”

“…72 Visceral alterity, of the sort imaged by Artaud's graphic scrawls, thus operates as a kind of disavowal of the hygienist (and, correspondingly, materialistic) body as, within its parameters, the soma's psychosomatic integrity is pulled apart at the seams. 73 For it is here, in the Stygian dusk of the entrails, that the deliquesced frontiers of the self express their psychical otherness and physical estrangement from the mind's conscious self-image. A fl uid, psychodynamic comprehension of the body in this way emerged in Surrealist art and philosophy as a mechanism through which conventional sociomedical notions of selfhood could be questioned, contested and disassembled.…”