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TO HAVE DONE WITH THE
JUDGEMENT OF GOD
by
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Note: Having spent
much of his final years in various mental asylums, Artaud resurfaced in
1947 with a radio play To Have Done With the Judgment of
god. Although the work remained true to his Theatre of Cruelty,
utilizing an array of unsettling sounds, cries, screams and grunts, it was
shelved by French Radio the day before it was scheduled to air, on
February 2, 1948. Artaud died one month later.
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puc te |
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Everything must |
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puk te |
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be arranged |
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li le |
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to a hair |
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pek ti le |
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in a fulminating |
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kruk |
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order. |
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I learned yesterday (I must be behind the times, or perhaps it's
only a false rumor, one of those pieces of spiteful gossip that are
circulated between sink and latrine at the hour when meals that have
been ingurgitated one more time are thrown in the slop buckets), I
learned yesterday one of the most sensational of those official
practices of American public schools which no doubt account for the
fact that this country believes itself to be in the vanguard of
progress, It seems that, among the examinations or tests required of a
child entering public school for the first time, there is the
so-called seminal fluid or sperm test, which consists of asking this
newly entering child for a small amount of his sperm so it can be
placed in a jar and kept ready for any attempts at artificial
insemination that might later take place. For Americans are finding
more and more that they lack muscle and children, that is, not
workers but soldiers, and they want at all costs and by every
possible means to make and manufacture soldiers with a view to all
the planetary wars which might later take place, and which would be
intended to demonstrate by the overwhelming virtues of
force the superiority of American products, and the fruits of
American sweat in all fields of activity and of the superiority of the
possible dynamism of force. Because one must produce, one must by
all possible means of activity replace nature wherever it can be
replaced, one must find a major field of action for human
inertia, the worker must have something to keep him busy, new fields
of activity must be created, in which we shall see at last the reign of
all the fake manufactured products, of all the vile synthetic
substitutes in which beatiful real nature has no part, and must give
way finally and shamefully before all the victorious substitute
products in which the sperm of all artificial insemination
factories will make a miracle in order to produce armies and
battleships. No more fruit, no more trees, no more vegetables, no more
plants pharmaceutical or otherwise and consequently no more
food, but synthetic products to satiety, amid the fumes, amid the
special humors of the atmosphere, on the particular axes of atmospheres
wrenched violently and synthetically from the resistances of a nature
which has known nothing of war except fear. And war is wonderful,
isn't it? For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been
preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step. In order
to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could
not fail to arise on all sides, one must have soldiers, armies,
airplanes, battleships, hence this sperm which it seems the
governments of America have had the effrontery to think of. For we
have more than one enemy lying in wait for us, my son, we, the born
capitalists, and among these enemies Stalin's Russia which also
doesn't lack armed men. All this is very well, but I didn't know the
Americans were such a warlike people. In order to fight one must get
shot at and although I have seen many Americans at war they always
had huge armies of tanks, airplanes, battleships that served as their
shield. I have seen machines fighting a lot but only infinitely
far behind them have I seen the men who directed them. Rather
than people who feed their horses, cattle, and mules the last tons of
real morphine they have left and replace it with substitutes made of
smoke, I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium
from which they were born I mean the Tarahumara eating Peyote off
the ground while they are born, and who kill the sun to establish
the kingdom of black night, and who smash the cross so that the spaces
of spaces can never again meet and cross.
And so you are going
to hear the dance of TUTUGURI.
TUTUGURI
The Rite of the Black Sun
And below, as if at the foot of the bitter
slope, cruelly despairing at the heart, gapes the circle of the six
crosses, very low as if embedded in the mother earth, wrenched
from the foul embrace of the mother who drools.
The earth of black coal is the only damp place in this cleft
rock.
The Rite is that the new sun passes through seven points
before blazing on the orifice of the earth.
And there are six men, one for each sun, and a seventh man who
is the sun in the raw dressed in black and in red flesh.
But, this seventh man is a horse, a horse with a man leading
him.
But it is the horse who is the sun and not the man.
At the anguish of a drum and a long trumpet, strange, the six
men who were lying down, rolling level with the
ground, leap up one by one like sunflowers, not like suns but
turning earths, water lilies, and each leap corresponds to the
increasingly somber and restrained gong of the drum until
suddenly he comes galloping, at vertiginous speed, the last sun, the
first man, the black horse with a
naked man, absolutely naked and virgin riding
it.
After they leap up, they advance in winding circles and the horse of
bleeding meat rears and prances without a stop on the crest of his
rock until the six men have surrounded completely the six
crosses.
Now, the essence of the Rite is precisely
THE ABOLITION OF THE CROSS.
When they have stopped turning they uproot the crosses of
earth and the naked man on the horse holds up an enormous
horseshoe which he has dipped in a gash of his blood.
The Pursuit of Fecality
There where it smells of shit it smells of being. Man could just
as well not have shat, not have opened the anal pouch, but he chose
to shit as he would have chosen to live instead of consenting to
live dead.
Because in order not to make caca, he would have had to
consent not to be, but he could not make up his mind to
lose being, that is, to die alive.
There is in being something particularly tempting for man and
this something is none other than CACA. (Roaring
here.)
To exist one need only let oneself be, but to live, one must be
someone, to be someone, one must have a BONE, not be afraid to
show the bone, and to lose the meat in the process.
Man has always preferred meat to the earth of bones. Because
there was only earth and wood of bone, and he had to earn his
meat, there was only iron and fire and no shit, and man was
afraid of losing shit or rather he desired shit and, for
this, sacrificed blood.
In order to have shit, that is, meat, where there was only
blood and a junkyard of bones and where there was no being to
win but where there was only life to lose.
o reche modo to edire di za tau dari do padera
coco
At this point, man withdrew and fled.
Then the animals ate him.
It was not a rape, he lent himself to the obscene meal.
He relished it, he learned himself to act like an animal and
to eat rat daintily.
And where does this foul debasement come from?
The fact that the
world is not yet formed, or that man has only a small idea of the
world and wants to hold on to it forever?
This comes from the fact that man, one fine
day, stopped the idea of the world.
Two paths were open to him: that of the infinite without, that of
the infinitesimal within.
And he chose the infinitesimal within. Where one need only
squeeze the spleen, the tongue, the anus or the glans.
And god, god himself squeezed the movement.
Is God a being? If he is one, he is shit. If he is not one he
does not exist.
But he does not exist, except as the void that approaches with all
its forms whose most perfect image is the advance of an incalculable
group of crab lice.
"You are mad Mr. Artaud, what about the mass?"
I deny baptism and the mass. There is no human act, on the
internal erotic level, more pernicious than the descent of the
so-called jesus-christ onto the altars.
No one will believe me and I can see the public shrugging its
shoulders but the so-called christ is none other than he who in the
presence of the crab louse god consented to live without a
body, while an army of men descended from a cross, to which god
thought he had long since nailed them, has revolted, and, armed with
steel, with blood, with fire, and with bones, advances, reviling
the Invisible to have done with GOD'S JUDGMENT.
The Question Arises ...
What makes it serious is that we know that after
the order of this world there is another.
What is it like?
We do not know.
The number and order of possible suppositions in this realm is
precisely infinity!
And what is infinity?
That is precisely what we do not know!
It is a word that we use to indicate the opening of
our consciousness toward possibility beyond measure, tireless and
beyond measure.
And precisely what is consciousness?
That is precisely what we do not know.
It is nothingness.
A nothingness that we use to indicate when we do not know
something from what side we do not know it and so we
say consciousness, from the side of consciousness, but there are
a hundred thousand other sides.
Well?
It seems that consciousness in us is linked to sexual
desire and to hunger;
but it could just as well not be linked to them.
One says, one can say, there are those who say that
consciousness is an appetite, the appetite for living;
and immediately alongside the appetite for living, it is the
appetite for food that comes immediately to mind;
as if there were not people who eat without any sort of
appetite; and who are hungry.
For this too exists to be hungry without appetite;
well?
Well the space of possibility was given to me one day like a
loud fart that I will make; but neither of space, nor
possibility, did I know precisely what it was,
and I did not feel the need to think about it,
they were words invented to define things that existed or did
not exist in the face of the pressing urgency of a need: the
need to abolish the idea, the idea and its myth, and to enthrone in
its place the thundering manifestation of this explosive
necessity: to dilate the body of my internal night,
the internal nothingness of my self
which is night, nothingness, thoughtlessness,
but which is explosive affirmation that there is something to
make room for:
my body.
And truly must it be reduced to this stinking gas, my body? To
say that I have a body because I have a stinking gas that
forms inside me?
I do not know but I do know that
space, time, dimension, becoming, future, destiny, being, non-being, self, non-self,
are nothing to me;
but there is a thing which is something, only one thing which
is something, and which I feel because it wants TO GET
OUT: the presence of my bodily suffering,
the menacing, never tiring presence of my body;
however hard people press me with questions and however vigorously I
deny all questions, there is a point at which I find myself
compelled to say no,
then to negation;
and this point comes when they press me,
when they pressure me and when they handle me until the
exit from me of nourishment, of my nourishment and its
milk,
and what remains?
That I am suffocated;
and I do not know if it is an action but in pressing me with
questions this way until the absence and nothingness of the
question they pressed me until the idea of body and the idea of
being a body was suffocated in me,
and it was then that I felt the obscene
and that I farted from folly and from excess and from
revolt at my suffocation.
Because they were pressing me to my body and to the very
body
and it was then that I exploded everything because my
body can never be touched.
Conclusion
- this emission of infantile sperm donated by children for the
artificial insemination of fetuses yet to be born and which will be born
in a century or more.
- To denounce, in this same American people who occupy the whole
surface of the former Indian continent, a rebirth of that warlike
imperialism of early America that caused the pre-Columbian Indian tribes
to be degraded by the aforesaid people.
- - You are saying some very bizarre things, Mr. Artaud.
- - Yes, I am saying something bizarre, that contrary to everything we
have been led to believe, the pre-Columbian Indians were a strangely
civilized people and that in fact they knew a form of civilization based
exclusively on the principle of cruelty.
- - And do you know precisely what is meant by cruelty?
- - Offhand, no, I don't.
- - Cruelty means eradicating by means of blood and until blood flows,
god, the bestial accident of unconscious human animality, wherever one
can find it.
- - Man, when he is not restrained, is an erotic animal,
he has in
him an inspired shudder, a kind of pulsation that produces animals
without number which are the form that the ancient tribes of the earth
universally attributed to god. This created what is called a
spirit. Well, this spirit originating with the American Indians is
reappearing all over the world today under scientific poses which merely
accentuate its morbid infectuous power, the marked condition of vice,
but a vice that pullulates with diseases, because, laugh if you
like, what has been called microbes
and do you know what the Americans and the Russians use
to make their atoms? They make them with the microbes of god.
- You are raving, Mr. Artaud. You are mad.
- I am not raving. I am not mad. I tell you that they have
reinvented microbes in order to impose a new idea of god.
They have found a new way to bring out god and to capture him in his
microbic noxiousness.
This is to nail him though the heart, in the place where men love
him best, under the guise of unhealthy sexuality, in that sinister
appearance of morbid cruelty that he adopts whenever he is pleased to
tetanize and madden humanity as he is doing now.
He utilizes the spirit of purity and of a consciousness that
has remained candid like mine to asphyxiate it with all the
false appearances that he spreads universally through space and
this is why Artaud le Mômo can be taken for a person
suffering from hallucinations.
- What do you mean, Mr. Artaud?
- I mean that I have found the way to put an end to this ape once and
for all and that although nobody believes in god any more everybody
believes more and more in man.
So it is man whom we must now make up our minds to emasculate.
- How's that?
No matter how one takes you you are mad, ready
for the straitjacket.
- By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to
remake his anatomy. I say, to remake his anatomy. Man is sick
because he is badly constructed. We must make up our minds to strip
him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him
mortally,
god, and with god his organs.
For you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more
useless than an organ.
When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will
have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him
to his true freedom.
They you will teach him again to dance wrong side out as in the
frenzy of dance halls and this wrong side out will be his real
place.
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