Anna Powell - Passional Bodies: Artaud’s graphics as interstitial force

A/V#18.04 2014 Spring
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Artaud’s work is a crucial force in schizoanalysis as developed by Deleuze and Guattari. His drawings, along with his poetic commentaries on them, play a significant role in the wider anti-oedipal project. The drawings operate three interlocking machines: figures of the body, figures of the face and gris-gris or magical spells. All repudiate formal artistic rules and work in their interstices to release powerful affects via ‘the lifting of malediction’. Artaud’s counter-attack works instead by ‘bodily vituperation against the constraints of spatial form, perspective, measure, balance, dimensions’.
Artaud’s graphics link to his writings as part of the same vital project; affect and concept working in tandem to undermine the fixity of both representation and language. To counter baleful attempts to incorporate reality, his own figures that ‘have nothing to say/and represent/absolutely nothing’. The written marks he incorporates into the images are glossolalia at the interstice between language and sounds. In Artaud’s portraits, which shape Deleuze and Guattari’s own thinking about faciality, he seeks to resurrect the living human face from the tabula rasa of signification that has reduced it to ‘an empty force, a/field of death’.
Artaud’s bodies without organs are eviscerated and stripped bare to reveal the raw force of sensations neither inside nor out, as ‘there is no inside, no spirit, no outside or consciousness, nothing but the body’. These interstitial bodies are in a state of latency intended to ‘work in concert with each other so that with the colors, the shadows, and their emphases the whole would become valid and singular’. Artaud’s ‘improbable bodies’ would thus release schizo forces to work on and in other responsive bodies. My paper will connect Artaud’s figures, portraits, self-portraits and prophylactic spells with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the schizo body in its ‘general breakdown of surfaces’ as well as relevant material from A Thousand Plateaus and elsewhere.