Antonin Artaud

To Have Done with the Judgement of God, a radio play by Antonin Artaud

02.17.2010 Antonin Artaud

kré puc te kré Everything must puk te pek be arranged li le kre to a hair pek ti le e in a fulminating kruk pte order. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – - I learned yesterday (I [...]

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Schizophrenic Poems

11.07.2003 Antonin Artaud

POEMS WRITTEN AFTER STUDYING SCHIZOPHRENIA Before this picture, both people hated each other. They were accidentally thrown together for it. But a miraculous change took place. In the picture, they feel as if they are a picture, a complete thing. They’re aware of all the edges of picture and they accept them. Right after the [...]

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#13 A Thousand Plateaus: BwO

04.13.2003 Antonin Artaud

This is all twisted up. It’s not. Actually the BwO is an intensification of all feeling… However, achieving these intensities is delicate. In fact, D&G warn readers of the “ever-present dangers of that empty their BwO’s instead of filling them.” (ATP 152) Creating a BwO is a task that must be attacked with caution, `since [...]

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#12 A Thousand Plateaus: BwO

04.12.2003 Antonin Artaud

What’s with the masochism? D&G are using this kind of program to reveal the way that desiring machines attach themselves to the BwO. Sewing the body shut, as the paranoid body does, and flogging the body (attaching “waves of pain” to the body). This pain is like an intensity (remember?). Now here’s where it gets [...]

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#11 A Thousand Plateaus: BwO

04.11.2003 Antonin Artaud

So what’s a BwO this time? Hypochondriac body: “The organs are destroyed, the damage has already been done, nothing happens anymore. ‘Miss X claims that she no longer has a brain or nerves or chest or stomach or guts. All she has left is the skin and bones of a disorganized body. These are her words:’” (ATP, 150) [...]

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#10 A Thousand Plateaus: BwO

04.10.2003 Antonin Artaud

In A Thousand Plateaus (ATP), the BwO is depicted as productive – independent of goal-directed workings of the capitalist political economy, and irreducible to the Freudian mommy-daddy-me triangle. Invoking the BwO, D&G offer a different way of thinking about the body that contrasts with the notion of the organism. What do they mean by organism? [...]

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#9 Anti-Oedipus: BwO

04.09.2003 Antonin Artaud

So the celibate machine is a good thing? Well, sort of. Again. D&G don’t exactly like the categories of good and bad. But they do explicitly describe the residuum of the celibate machine as positive. A celibate machine takes on all kinds of different desiring-machines (thinking that these machines are his /her “true” subjectivity). However, these [...]

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#7 Anti-Oedipus: BwO

04.07.2003 Antonin Artaud

Capital is a body without organs of the capitalist (or the capitalist being), and labor is a productive machine. Recording: Capital is thus the unproductive surface on which the production of labor is recorded. “Recording” means that the value of labor/production is determined on capital. For the miraculous aspect they refer to Marx’s concept of [...]

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#6 Anti-Oedipus: BwO

04.06.2003 Antonin Artaud

If a BwO doesn’t produce anything, how does it function? The two aspects of the BwO that most interest D&G are its function of recording and its apparent miraculous form, that is, the appearance of miracles. “The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process [...]

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#5 Anti-Oedipus: BwO

04.05.2003 Antonin Artaud

What is a desiring machine? For D&G, there is no such thing as desire, only desiring-machines. It’s not a thing, but a process. Roland Bogue describes desiring machines by way of an infant feeding a the mother’s breast. Here the “mouth-machine” of the infant and the “breast machine” enter into an circuit (through the flow of [...]

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