OLIVIER PENOT-LACASSAGNE, ANTONIN ARTAUD. «MOI, ANTONIN ARTAUD, HOMME DE LA TERRE» & VIES ET MORTS D'ANTONIN ARTAUD

Review par Bernard Baillaud

One already thinks, after having closed the first of these two books, of reading it a third time. For it suffices to have tried it: it is not easy to write about Antonin Artaud. Sixty years after the poet's death, what was a myth no longer "functions." Mimicry has largely shown its limits (why write if it is only a matter of repeating?), metaphorization enriches critical writing but does not always make it more pertinent for all that, and the "concepts" derived from the work remain of fragile construction. Olivier Penot-Lacassagne's first courage is to have taken up this challenge, without being impressed by the recurring polemics born from the conditions of publication of the Complete Works, nor by the immense library that today constitutes the works devoted to Antonin Artaud. Two books share the fruit of this effort, founded on the conviction that there could not "exist" a definitive reading.

The first volume places Artaud in the framework of a deepening of pain by European romantic discourse. Modernity reevaluates man's relationship to the world; Artaud questions this relationship and this reevaluation, by tracing two routes, that of the infinitesimal within and that of the infinite without. Each of his choices underlines his marginality. The chronological work operated by Paule Thévenin made it possible to silence a certain number of legends. Olivier Penot-Lacassagne would probably see no inconvenience in this clarification work being continued, for one of two things: either Artaud's text is encumbered with parasitic discourses that hinder reading, and there will be no inconvenience in joyfully cleaning house; or it is too weak to support critical work, in which case it will not be useless either to be instructed of it. By provisionally relying on chronology, Olivier Penot-Lacassagne abandons the relative facilities of a simply thematic reading and approaches a disruptive reading, which sketches, engraves and chisels the moments of writing, the slippages, the resumptions, the abandonments, and whose anthropological implications are always numerous. On gnosis, on the Orient, on cruelty, on theater, the meaning of words is progressively constructed. The sequences succeed each other without completely overlapping. In 1924, Artaud claims a right to speak that he is powerless to exercise. In 1937, a theurgical, metaphysical period opens, during which Artaud sees himself as savior and victim, messiah and destroyer. In 1945, Artaud violently deconstructs his relationship to the world, enters into a perpetual autogenesis, without recognition of a filiation. The characters of a saga of the verb are numerous: aphasics, coprolaliacs, discredited from language, pariahs of thought, and so on. The scene of the origin, whose fallacious character is evident, designates the stake of a protest against the progenitors and the claim of a becoming other.

The choices of Olivier Penot-Lacassagne's second book are different, but they were perceptible—and desired, if not expected, by the reader—in the margins of the first. An opening borrowed from an Artaud text, expelling "fifty years" from a restless civil status, and which founds a "biography" in the form of a living wandering. Useful details are provided on Artaud's cinematographic presence, often omitted in literary works, so tenacious are disciplinary tensions. Same utility regarding the stay in Mexico. The reader will complete in petto what he reads with what he would have liked to read, for example regarding Antonin Artaud's interlocutors from Rodez, who overcame prejudices even more tenacious than their Parisian counterparts: Jean Digot and the printer Jean Subervie. But by letting the text swell too much with its annotations and its virtualities, it would have become rigorously impossible. Olivier Penot-Lacassagne has the other merit, at the very heart of a biographical text that in other hands would have done without it (it would have been wrong), of giving Artaud's text the first and last word, as if this life, beyond the information by which it can always be specified, had entirely passed into the text. We already knew that Artaud's text survived, since the author was abandoned by his body. But the occasion is good to verify that the criticism of the Artaud myth is an effective form of respect for the text, and that this text itself retains an intact strike.