ARTAUD THE MOMA

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY,

SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS

Lydia Goehr and Gregg M. Horowitz, Editors

ADVISORY BOARD
Carolyn Abbate

J. M. Bernstein

Eve Blau

T. J. Clark

Arthur C. Danto

John Hyman

Michael Kelly

Paul Kottman

Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts presents

monographs, essay collections, and short books on philosophy and aesthetic
theory. It aims to publish books that show the ability of the arts to stimulate
critical reflection on modern and contemporary social, political, and cultural
life. Art is not now, if it ever was, a realm of human activity independent of
the complex realities of social organization and change, political authority
and antagonism, cultural domination and resistance. The possibilities of critical
thought embedded in the arts are most fruitfully expressed when addressed
to readers across the various fields of social and humanistic inquiry. The idea
of philosophy in the series title ought to be understood, therefore, to embrace
forms of discussion that begin where mere academic expertise exhausts itself;
where the rules of social, political, and cultural practice are both affirmed and
challenged; and where new thinking takes place. The series does not privilege
any particular art, nor does it ask for the arts to be mutually isolated. The series
encourages writing from the many fields of thoughtful and critical inquiry.

For a complete list, see page 95.

ARTAUD THE MOM A

I N T ER J E C T I O N S O F A P P E A L

JACQUES DERRIDA

TRANSLATED BY

PEGGY KAMUF

EDITED, WITH AN AF TERWORD BY

KAIRA M. CABAÑAS

Columbia University Press New York

 Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu

Columbia University Press extends its appreciation for the support

of the University of Florida College of the Arts and Center for the
Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment).
Artaud le Moma copyright © 2002 Editions Galilée
Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Derrida, Jacques, author. | Kamuf, Peggy, 1947– translator. | Cabañas, Kaira
Marie, 1974– editor. | Translation of: Derrida, Jacques. Artaud le Moma.
Title: Artaud the Moma: interjections of appeal / Jacques Derrida; translated by
Peggy Kamuf; edited, with an afterword by Kaira M. Cabañas.
Other titles: Artaud le Moma. English
Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. | Series: Columbia
themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017011391 | ISBN 9780231181662 (cloth: alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780231181679 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231543705 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Artaud, Antonin, 1896–1948—Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC NC248.A72 D4717513 2017 | DDC 792.02/8092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011391

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky

Cover image: ©CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
To the memory of Paule Thévenin

1
CONTENTS

Preface ix

Artaud the Moma 1

Afterword 79
Kaira M. Cabañas

Notes 87
Acknowledgments 93
Kaira M. Cabañas
 PREFACE

T
his lecture was delivered on October 16, 1996, at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, for the opening
of the first large worldwide exhibition of the paintings
and drawings of Artaud: Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper.
I was responding thereby to the invitation of Margit Rowell,
chief curator, Department of Drawings. She was responsible for
this exhibition, and I would like to thank her once again.
This lecture attempts to draw close to the one who nick-
named himself Artaud the Mômo. Its title, Artaud the Moma,
was making allusion in advance, of course, to the theme of the
museum that is in fact at the center of my remarks (MoMA, as
everyone knows, is the familiar nickname given, throughout the
world and by way of abbreviation, to the Museum of Modern
Art). But Artaud the Moma also interrogates the strange event
represented, in 1996, by the exhibition of works of Artaud in one
of the greatest museum institutions in New York City—and
the world.
This title was not deemed presentable or decent by MoMA.
My lecture, the only one given in the museum itself on this occa-
sion, therefore bore no public title (“Jacques Derrida .  .  . will
present a lecture about Artaud’s drawings”). At my request, the
 x Y Preface

voice of Artaud (Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu [To Have

Done with the Judgment of God]) was heard at the beginning and
the end.
This lecture is thus published here, for the first time, with its
original title and accompanied by the necessary reproductions.1
It was also given, in 1997, at the Fondation Maeght, in Saint-
Paul-de-Vence, France, and I want to thank Jean-Louis Prat for
the generous hospitality he offered me there once again.
I am also grateful for the immense courtesy of Antoine Gal-
limard at Éditions Gallimard and of Serge Malausséna, Antonin
Artaud’s nephew, whom I had the chance to meet for the first
time in New York on the occasion of this great exhibition.
ARTAUD THE MOMA
“And who / today / will say / what?” “Et qui/aujourd’hui/dira/quoi?”

What a question. You see it thrust its letters with one blow into
a drawing; this question asks no determined question. With one
stroke, it draws back. It awaits no word in answer from the draw-
ing. First of all, it inscribes itself in fact, in its fashion (it is the
fashioning or facture of this faire that interests us) in a graphic
work, it participates in the putting-into-space of visible bodies,
forms, and lines. One word beneath the other. Second, it is not
a theoretical question but a coup—a blow struck or a stroke—
specifically, a stroke of the pencil that took place, the day of
today when it was struck, as one strikes a blow, on the paper, only
once, one unique time.
“And who / today / will say / what?”: this mimed question of
a blow, at one blow, is not, however, a “rhetorical question.” So
then what? I am miming it in turn; I am relaunching it and then
I am framing it. I am immobilizing it in a tableau. Finally, I am
pretending to install it here, today, on the threshold of this
 2 Y Artaud the Moma

exhibition. Here it is, at MoMA, here it is once again, after the

fact, après coup, one more time, in the imminence of what has
just barely begun: “And who / today / will say / what?” “Et qui/
aujourd’hui/dira/quoi?”

I repeat these words; they precede us and not just in time. They
are before us and in front of us. Today, which is to say, when?
Today, in an instant, someone is going to sign, asking himself
“And who / today / will say / what?”; today, October 16, 1996, is
July 2, 1947. For a long time, almost a half century, these words
will have set out their graphic body in a unique space. Their super-
imposed handwritten letters had already been planted near a skull
crowned in blue, and their lines had been aligned, spread out,
stacked in color, like musical notes at different heights, on the sur-
face of a certain support. I am citing these chromatic notations
as a reminder; we know that they date a certain day and that they
date from this day on which they took place at one blow. But
anyone can decipher right here their silent graphism, this mute
interrogation that, in effect, says nothing at all: neither who nor
what. “And who / today / will say / what?”
What is that question mark doing lost in the indecisive deci-
sion of the author, on the border between two colors? It seems to
suspend what is a question in form alone, a mute sentence that
attempts through color, plastically, to give us to hear that it cer-
tainly wants to say nothing yet: neither who nor what. A thing—
because it is also a thing—does not know what it wants to say,
neither who nor what. Perhaps, in truth, it means nothing, it wants
to say nothing at all and especially not to know yet how to want to
say: “And who / today / will say / what?”
Although it says nothing, this phrase-thing acts: thing, act and
art, it does, it fashions something with words. In what fashion
 Artaud the Moma Z 3

does it do what it does? This fashion, this facture, is what we

are going to call its coup, the event of a coup, the taking-place of
its coup.
Who does what? Today? What is a coup? And what does
the facture of this act do with a museum? What does it do to a
museum of modern art? To the address of a museum of mod-
ern art?
I am not just quoting this interrogative grammar. It is as if I
were already pointing out, on a hanging at MoMA, a little piece
of graphic art, a half-lost inscription in the corner of a portrait in
pencil and pastel, a cluster of words hung on the blue crown that
covers the hair of Jany de Ruy:
“And who, / today, / will say / what?”
The question mark is inscribed July 2, 1947; the date is read-
able there where it seems to form the pedestal of the signature:
Antonin Artaud, July 2, 1947. I will not overload its meaning and
its necessity. It is not impossible that for a brief moment, on that
date, before or after the drawing, Artaud searched for words. In
a light and accidental fashion, with a stroke of chance, while smil-
ing a little, he would then have decided to leave here the ironic
trace of a signature forever suspended on the edge of a work
whose subject and object also remain to be interpreted: “And
who, / today, / will say / what?” A signature in the form of a sen-
tence, on the edge of the work, but in it and along the upper edge,
this time, as if Artaud had wanted both to extend and invert the
tradition of certain medieval emblems. The latter, as you know,
often bore at the bottom of the image, near the lower edge, a
text, a legend, what was called a subscription.
Who will ever say why, today, at the intersection of necessity
and chance, I had to begin by letting you hear the spectral voice
of Artaud, a moment ago: a dumbfounded speech, both repro-
duced and alive, animal and superhuman, crying out, piercing,
 4 Y Artaud the Moma

cruel, older than we are, so much more archaic but also younger
with the future that, manifestly, it announces?
Let us not confuse this future with the New York triumph
of a glorious autumn. Ascension or assumption of a Western
autumn that, quite rightly, would have stunned, worried, or out-
raged Artaud’s friends and accomplices a few decades ago—not
to speak of the revenant Antonin Artaud himself. Not to speak
of him, that is, to speak otherwise than the one who often pre-
sented himself as a ghost or revenant, and not only in Le retour
d ’Artaud, le Mômo (The return of Artaud, the Mômo). To speak,
in other words, of the future, of the coming and the event of the
one who, in his “Interjections,” greeted the “electrical discharge
of the child revenant,” while on the facing page he feigned to
sign in these terms: “Well, it is I, Antonin Artaud, who has said
all this, and it is what I want, because Satan, that’s me.”1
Let us try to think another future whose provocations still
come to us, prefigured, from all the faces that look at us here.
During that year, and especially around the month of July 1947,
Artaud draws more and more portraits and writes several great
texts on the face. On the face: understand by that on the subject
of the so-called human face and even right on the faces he draws
in color.
Who will ever say, above all, why I had to begin again with this
question of the “today” (“And who, / today, / will say / what?”),
there where it precipitates everything, at the point of the pencil
and the chalk, which, striking a blow at the head, anticipate, cap-
italize, and at the same time decapitate the whole of the whole,
which is to say, the who and the what? Which is to say the who
and the what that puncture in advance the walls of the which is
to say? Who will say the which is to say that carries beyond saying
when it articulates the organs of a discourse with those of a visual
art? And when it regulates grammar and syntax by the laws of
 Artaud the Moma Z 5

the phoneme? When it adjusts vociferation to a graphic of words

and things, or even to a graphic without word and without thing?
I believed I had to decide to begin in this way for at least one
reason: in view of dating right here, that is, of signing the event
of the right-here and of recalling an injunction. Which injunc-
tion? If we hear him, if at least we want to listen to him, then we
have to obey Artaud the Mômo; we have to obey the order, the
demand, or the imprecation (an imprecation, as its name indi-
cates, is also a prayer) that carries Artaud’s last signature, which
is to say, on the work, on art, and on the body of the one who
called himself one day, and then forever after, until his death and
beyond, Artaud the Mômo. Sometimes the article was effaced by
the hyphen and the couple or the pair copulated until there was
only one: uph’en, Artaud-Mômo. Sometimes even the hyphen
disappeared.
The voice that calls and nicknames itself thus, Artaud-Mômo,
enjoins us to demand the singularity of the event, namely the coup,
the chance coup but also the indivisible coup. It enjoins us to rebel
against reproductive representation, whatever the cost. To be sure,
by the reproduction, again, of a doubled coup, a re-percussion, but
against reproduction, against technical reproduction, genetic or
genealogical reproduction, it enjoins us to reaffirm the singularity
of the coup.
Our question, then, one of our questions would be, I repeat:
what is a coup? What does the word coup mean in French? And
what happens to a question when it is done in one blow, d ’un coup,
when it is made into a blow, when it strikes a blow? What would
this have to do today with a museum? And, for example, with an
exhibition in a museum such as MoMA?
So as to give oneself over to the force of this blow, one must
cruelly expose, I mean exhibit, this exhibition. To reaffirm singu-
larity is sometimes the chance afforded by a museum, the chance
 6 Y Artaud the Moma

of a hospitality to which one must give thanks, since a museum

exhibits original works and in principle banishes reproduction.
Gratitude to MoMA does not prohibit us, however, from posing
a question here, but a question always lightning-struck, that is,
foudroyée‚ by Artaud-Mômo: it is the serious and inexhaustible
question of the Museum. Here, today.
I say foudroyé, lightning-struck so as to salute what I see as
the very figure of a phenomenal apparition, the event named
Antonin Artaud, his meteoric existence, his passage in a flash
across literature, poetry, theater, and the arts you call visual, his
apparition as luminous, dangerous, mortal, exceptional lightning,
as well as his thunderbolt, his coup de tonnerre, in our history’s
skies, in a history of art whose concept he will have sought to
attack and virtually destroy (and one may say this even if, like me,
one does not always like or approve of the philosophical or political
content, the ideological themes at which, in spite of everything,
this lightning-man stops, against which he strikes without always
raising them, transfixing them, or submitting them to powerful
enough X-rays; in particular I resist everything in this work
that, in the name of the proper body or the body without organs,
in the name of a reappropriation of self, is consonant with an
ecologico-naturalist protest, with the contestation of biotechnol-
ogy, reproductions, clones, prostheses, parasites, succubim, sup-
ports, specters, and artificial inseminations—in short, everything
that is im-proper and that Artaud-Mômo, as you heard, identifies
very rapidly with America, in 1947, in Pour en finir avec le jugement
de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of God ). I must admit,
too quickly of course, that unlike almost all those with whom I
share a passionate admiration for Artaud, I am also bound to him
by a sort of reasoned detestation, by the resistant but essential
antipathy that is aroused in me by the declared content, the body
of doctrine—assuming one can ever dissociate it from the rest—of
 Artaud the Moma Z 7

what might be called, thanks to a certain misunderstanding, the

philosophy, politics, or ideology of Artaud. This would deserve a
long explanation; you could follow its just visible thread through
what I am going to say today, as I have been saying already for
thirty years. I thought it incumbent on me, however, to situate
here, if only in a few words, the front, a sort of incessant war that,
like antipathy itself, makes Artaud for me into a sort of privileged
enemy, a painful enemy that I carry and prefer within myself, at
closest proximity to all the limits against which I am thrown
by the work of my life and of death. This antipathy resists, but it
remains an alliance; it commands a vigilance of thinking, and I
dare to hope that Artaud, the specter of Artaud, would not have
disavowed it. And before accusing Antonin Artaud of this meta-
physical rage for reappropriation, I believe one must lay blame on
a machination, on the social, medical, psychiatric, judicial, ideo-
logical machine, on the machine of the police, which is to say, on
a philosophico-political network that allied itself with more
obscure forces so as to reduce this living lightning to a body that
was bruised, tortured, rent, drugged, and above all electrocuted
by a nameless suffering, an unnameable passion to which no other
resource remained than to rename and reinvent language. Which
was done and signed Artaud, Artaud the Mômo, during the last
ten years of his life, no doubt the most terrible years, the most
wounded and the most creative. This glossolalic or glossopoetic
rebirth of language is never separated, in his project, from the
graphic lightning that burns all the drawings and portraits that
surround us. One need not subscribe to Artaud’s theses, to his
implicit or explicit philosophy, to his ideological propositions to
recognize the torture endured, the suppliciation, as he would have
said, the electricity of the electroshocks that he underwent liter-
ally and figuratively. This whole electrocution irradiated him.
Like a lightning bolt, like a bomb of light, it lit up this witness;
 8 Y Artaud the Moma

it made a torch of this seer—I dare not say this martyr for fear
of re-Christianizing his insurrection against the Christianity that
devoured and parasited his body. He burned and pierced holes in
the very limits and metaphysical figure of his discourse, just as
he did with the paper of the Sorts (Spells) that we will talk about
later. I find that in those who, from within the metaphysical enclo-
sure, let themselves be electrocuted, all the same, at the crossing
of the hyperbolic limit, there is always more of interest and more
passion than in so many others who believe they are criticizing
or deconstructing from some comfortable and presumed out-
side. And for him, for us if we know how to see and hear him, the
fiery blows, the flashes of this lightning lit up everything with an
incomparable lucidity, to the point of inflaming the edges and
the center, the system of limits and the expropriating machine
whose victim he was. This system and this machine (La machine
de l ’être [The machine of being], to mention the title of a work
exhibited here whose literality I have tried to analyze elsewhere,
trait by trait, word for word, or syllable by syllable), articulate
together in a same body, in a same spectral figure, the Christian
West, the god who steals my body, the spirit, the holy spirit and
the holy family, all the forces—ideological, political, economic—
that are one with this thief of bodies, with the literature, theater,
and art that descend from them, with the archive and the hier-
archy, the sacralizing and poisoned hierarchive of this accumu-
lated culture, between Europe and the American colonization.
The museographic institution, as we will hear, would be one of
the great bewitched incarnations of this evil, something like the
Western pyramid of this hierarchive.
Artaud himself named this lightning passage, this flash of elec-
tricity in his drawing, and he did so precisely through the insulting
imprecations he casts, like so many deliberate blasphemies, against
 Artaud the Moma Z 9

god, against the god of the holy family. In the sort of vade
mecum that accompanies the drawing titled La maladresse sex-
uelle de dieu (The sexual maladroitness of god), he explains his
own apparent and feigned maladroitness. This vade mecum,
which is also a vade retro Satanas, recalls the electricity of light-
ning. It pretends to propose to electroshock god in turn by the
very act of the drawing, more precisely by causing to pass
through him a new electricity that will recharge the worn-out
batteries of the Trinity:

The tomb of everything waiting while god fools around with the
instruments at the level of his belly that he hasn’t known how
to use.
Themselves maladroitly drawn so that the eye looking at them
falls.
yo kutemar tonu tardiktra
yo kute drikta anu tedri

It is my work that has made you electric, say I to god, when you
always took yourself to be a battery that will not be worth the
battery with which I am going to do you
knicky knack [dont je vais te/coli fi ficher]
with which I am going to knick knack you
you rascally old antero-colitic . . .

( OC 20:170 ff.)

Later, in the same vade-mecum-retro-Satanas, an analysis of

which could show that each of its syllables in French is just as
untranslatable as the glossopoiesis that seems to interrupt them,
the drawing electrocutes once again the holy family, after another
 10 Y Artaud the Moma

glossopoetic interjection. Two more blows, two rifles / fusils, two

rifle shots / coups de fusil—and two charcoal strokes, deux coups de
fusain—explode there, they cause history to explode, the bril-
liant luster of “the illustrious history of belief in god.” One must
realize that the blow struck is always the percussion of an elec-
trocution. To strike a blow, le coup férir, is not only to electroshock
but also to light up with fire, to take into view and to make visible
the electroshock, to draw its picture as if on an operating table or
a torture table:

For it is thus that with the four irons of the table of the sex of
the open incest the soul who wanted to lie with its father,
to sleep astride the way one horses around the virgin phallus,
rifle root of the electric night,
rifle to pierce through the illustory misery, the illustrious history
of belief in god,
when I’m the one who does it,
pronounces the soul,
when I ejaculate this yellow-bellied fart.

And I say that my soul is me and that if it pleases me to do

a girl who one day wants to lie down on me
do caca and peepee on me,
I will do her in the face of and against god the spirit of shitty
retention who is always farting on me, spurting out like a bomb with
his paradise on the walls of my cranial niche, where he has incrusted
his nest.

( OC 20:172)

Fart against fart, a double rifle coup, the electrocuting pencil

coup is not merely going to recharge the divine battery. It explodes
 Artaud the Moma Z 11

the bomb that god, the parasite, has deposited in his skull like an
animal that has taken up residence there, where this animal-god
installs its offspring, like a dog that finds its niche there or a bird
that lays eggs in its nest.
About this drawing, Artaud says that it is

deliberately botched, thrown on the page like some scorn for the
forms and the lines, so as to scorn the idea taken up and manage
to make it fall.
The maladroit idea of god deliberately made not to stand up
straight on the page . . .

One would have to analyze the whole quasi description, the

active and playful interpretation of this sexual maladroitness of
god. From one end to the other, it commands a jubilant admira-
tion, notably as concerns the play of the tombe and the bombe of
the divine maladroitness and of a detumescence that is both
graphic and sexual. The meaning joins up with the sonorous
form of the words tombe, tomber, tombeau (grave, falling, tomb) so
as to play with the graphic forms of the drawing. The text attacks
with the word tombeau and the first phrase ends—or falls—in its
last word on the word tombe as verb (“l’oeil qui les regarde tombe,”
“the eye looking at them falls”) and not as noun (la tombe [grave
or tomb]):

The tomb of everything waiting while God fools around with the
instruments at the level of his belly that he hasn’t known how to use.
Themselves maladroitly drawn so that the eye looking at them
falls [tombe].

A little further on, everything gets reversed. The phrase

moves from the tombe to the tombeau, more precisely from the
 12 Y Artaud the Moma

singular noun tombe (“la tombe de mes fesses,” “the tomb of

my buttocks”) to its division or multiplication into double
tombeau (double tomb). The trajectory, therefore, sets out from
my own body, at once the belly of a pregnant and necrophoric
mother from whom emanates in a fall, as in the dropping of
childbirth, the handicapped spirit of this retarded god; then
from the pregnant tomb of my body the line goes to the coffin
in which I am, or even to the coffin that I still am, “la boîte de
l’ange dans mon double tombeau craquant,” “the angel’s box
in  my double cracking tomb.” One always reads in this text,
and quite rightly of course, the active commentary, or even the
credits, of La maladresse sexuelle de dieu (February 1946). I
wonder if it does not also refer to, and by the same token
agree  with, the picture from the following month (March
1946) titled Le théâtre de la cruauté (The theater of cruelty).
Metonymy of Artaud’s entire work, this theater of cruelty also
exhibits the mortuary box, in a more identifiable fashion, as a
doubled coffin, twice doubled around the double mummy that
is thereby commemorated, commummified, commomofied,
commomotumefied by the blows. In the margins of another
picture, La Mort et l ’homme (Death and man, April 1946), the
concerted configuration of the verb tomber, conjugated in four
grammatical forms (tombait, tombant, tombé, tomber [fell, fall-
ing, fallen, to fall]), verges on the tomblike “boxes” or “coffins”
(with or without padded lining), repeated coups and souffles
(breaths) that breathe as much as they steal the breath away. It
is a matter then, as always, of producing a physical effect on
the very body of the spectator and of leaving a trace there of a
quasi-organic transformation, depriving him precisely, and
violently, of his objectifying position as spectator, as contem-
plative voyeur, by affecting his very eye. It is a matter of chang-
ing the eye with the drawing, of inventing or adding a new eye
 Artaud the Moma Z 13

or, through the violence of a paradoxical prosthesis, of restor-

ing a lost eye. Through this surgical operation, though the
ophthalmological traumatism produced there by a sort of vir-
tual fire or laser (and Artaud names, at this point, virtuality),
the drawing would thus proceed to detach the retina. But this
detachment would permit the installation of the thing itself,
the represented thing, the skeleton of death, in the eye itself,
without support. Separated from the page, lifted from a sub-
jectile that figures that from which the retina is thus detached,
the body of the thing itself, death or its skeletal representation,
would then come to plant itself in the gaze. More precisely,
thanks to the detachment of the retina, it would come to find
its “place,” there where it finally would take place, namely, “in
my eye.” What will be important for me from now on, in these
traits and these blows, is also the attack on the support, this
way of putting an end to the stable support, and therefore to
art and the Museum, to the static state of the work of art and
to the state period, but also to all that can be figured by the
support, beginning with the matrix or the patrix, the father-
mother, the pair of the father-mother. Speaking of his draw-
ing La Mort et l ’homme insofar as it “remains then not in space
but in time,” Artaud in fact dreams (“I would like,” he says) a
sort of virtual prosthesis of the gaze. He dreams of putting in
place a new eye, the first or the last, in another place. He would
like the event of another taking-place in the eye:

I would like that while looking at it more closely one finds there
that
sort of detachment of the retina, that as it were virtual
sensation of a detachment of the retina that I had while
detaching the skeleton from the top, of the page, as a
putting-in-place for an eye.
 14 Y Artaud the Moma

The skeleton from the top without the page with its putting-
in-place in my eye.

( OC 21:232–33)

Death, eye, phallus, blow. The discourse on the sexual mal-

adroitness of god is addressed first of all to god, to an imitated
god incorporated in oneself (and the evil, the grievance con-
cerns the dramatic history of this forced incorporation). Each
drawing, as we will see, is a blow, strikes a blow, and this blow
falls (tombe) on someone only to the extent that, far from being a
representative reference—either figurative or abstract—it apos-
trophizes someone, it attacks an addressee, only to the extent
that it knows how to strike a blow (un coup férir) against this one
and not that one and knows how to fall on him or her on such and
such a day in such and such a place. Now, any spectator of the
drawing can become the addressee, that is, the target of this
blow. The addressee is the one who receives the blow. An inevi-
table result to the extent that, receiving, seeing, reading, he feels
hit by the message or the missile, the insult or the assault of the
apostrophe:

While you are farting in your clouds, you species of spiritual

incompetent, issued from the tomb of my buttocks,
yak ta kankar ege
narina
ege narina
anarina
I turn over the angel’s box in my double cracking tomb.

( OC 20:170–7 1)
 Artaud the Moma Z 15

The polyphony of the near homonyms of tombe and tombeau,

which scan the narrative of the “sexual maladroitness of god,”
“the illustrious history of belief in god,” can be heard rebounding
from bombe to pudibonderie (prudishness) by means of the soul
qui se débonde (that unstoppers itself ), up until the maladroit
drawing causes once again the idea to “fall” (tomber). Across this
polyphonic narrative of alliterations (bombe, tomber, pudibond,
débonder—the latter is very close to débander, that is, to give in to
detumescence: the fall of the phallus or the pencil in sexual and
graphic maladroitness), one deciphers also a genealogy of god,
spirit, religion, namely, of all that is engendered in the repression
of “retention” (retenue), of modesty and prudishness. How is
one to read this retention or restraint, this retenue? The word is
Artaud’s and he repeats it within several lines, aligning it both
with modest reserve and with the intestinal retention of excre-
ment; elsewhere, in a seemingly very different context, I have
tried to show that the experience of retention, restraint, modesty,
or respect is the experience of religiosity, sacralization, or sancti-
fication itself.2 Retenue is at once the origin and the manifestation
of spirit (of the inside), of god, of the holiness of the holy virgin
(vierge) or holy candle (cierge); it is also that which, in intestinal
retention, produces the wind of spirit, the fart that Artaud also
calls “the internal gas of spirit” (and let us not forget that gas is
also Geist, an etymological and semantic affinity I have analyzed
elsewhere, in the vicinity of Hegel and, that time, of Genet; Geist,
spirit, is also ghost, the specter that comes to haunt or parasite
the body proper, the stranger that must be chased outside). This
holy spirit, this restraint, this farting retention is what Artaud
no doubt wants to deliver himself from, but first of all he wants,
through the coup of this drawing, to assign it to others and recall
that it is not his: it has been imposed on him, like a tax or a hound
 16 Y Artaud the Moma

from hell, by a law of the holy family that first of all stole his own
body proper. It’s a matter here of a malevolent and universal
conjuration, that of a spirit sufficiently diabolical and perverse to
worm its way into its own victims and make them accomplices
in their own illness. We should analyze all the elements of this
drawing, all the chalk strokes in blue, green, rose, ocher, and black
that describe, but one should say rather weave, plot, or provoke this
universal catastrophe: at the same time the vertical movement
of the fall, the detumescence of the phallus when it lets fall the
spectral sperm of its spirit, and the inward agitation or even fer-
mentation of the viscera that produces the internal fart or gas of
spirit, at the center of the feminine belly, at the heart of the breasts
(au sein des seins), which perhaps let fall their holy family milk all
along a divine milky way. It is also a bible of interiorized nourish-
ment and of excremential dejection, a treatise on the alchemy that
transfigures the substance of shit into incorporeal spirit. This clin-
ical catalog of psychopathology derives all man’s illnesses from a
sexual maladroitness of god who, through usurpation and impo-
sition, has become, within himself, his own awkwardness, the
maladroitness of man lacking in spirit. The same drawing, in
the same blow, would have to denounce it, correct it, redress it, but
also expulse it by exorcising it. One should look while listening
to or reading at least the passage that immediately follows the
one I lifted out a moment ago and that, as too often, I must once
again violate by cutting. The text and the drawing engender each
other; one cannot say which one erects or precipitates the other
in its fall. I can do no more than underscore a few words:

rifle root of the electric night

rifle to pierce through the illustory misery, the illustrious history
of belief in god,
when I’m the one who does it,
 Artaud the Moma Z 17

pronounces the soul,

when I ejaculate this yellow-bellied fart.

And I say that my soul is me and that if it pleases me to do

a girl who one day wants to lie down on me
do caca and peepee on me,
I will do her in the face of and against god the spirit of shitty
retention who is always farting on me, spurting out like a bomb
with his
paradise on the walls of my cranial niche, where he has
incrusted his
nest.
The soul must pull the stopper on all the holy substances species
that nourish this ancient orgy of the spirit against my man’s car-
cass on the soil of illness.
For I, man, have suffered from the spirit:
without a soul on this bed couch of my body that can finally
after life believe itself a child on a bed.
Will this soul have eternal rest, against the internal gas of the
spirit of jealousy [gaz interne de l’esprit de la jalousie] from which
men have eructated [éructé] god.
For the restraint [retenue] of prudishness [pudibonderie] is not
mine but that of all those who are immodest in spirit and who imposed
the holy virgin [impudiques d’esprit qui imposèrent la sainte vierge]
on things so as to satisfy themselves on the sly, protected from this
candle idea that lays waste the sex of man in order to supply the
nothingness of spirit [here Artaud underlines the word esprit in this
unheard-of proposition or exposition: to lay waste the sex of man in
order to supply the nothingness of spirit; spirit would thus be a
dressing, an ornament, a supplement of nothingness, but a supple-
ment of non-being as charge, tax, imposition of the tax by the hell-
hound—munus—and munition that comes to corrupt originary
 18 Y Artaud the Moma

immunity; spirit is the being that corrupts originary immunity

thereby defined as non-being; but this non-being is in truth the
essence of spirit, which is but its armed supplement, the rifle or the
munition with which it arms itself (munition dont il se munit)].
This drawing is deliberately botched, thrown on the page like
some scorn for the forms and the lines, so as to scorn the idea
taken up and manage to make it fall (tomber).
The maladroit [maladroite] idea of god deliberately made not to
stand up straight [volontairement mal dressée] on the page but with
a distribution and a blaze of consonant [consonants] colors and
forms that make [fassent] this ill-fashioned thing [malfaçon] live . . .

Upon listening closely to this last sentence, upon rereading yet

again every word, one has to ask oneself: when, in that case, is
there a work, and a work of art? When and where? Where is one
to situate, virtually, for this act of voluntary maladroitness, for
this malfaçon or this mauvais coup, this botched stroke and low
blow, a place of reception and assembly, a subjectile, a church or
museum wall? What happens at the instant the evil is done (le
mal est fait), the satanic evil (“I am Satan,” he said)? What
remains at the instant the evil is done well (le mal est bien fait),
the mal also of maladresse (maladroitness or awkwardness), and
of malfaçon, the mal of the “scorn for the forms and the lines,”
the mal of the destruction of art and its place, or even of its
archive, its cumulative conservation, its reproduction, and its
exhibition? Its virtualization and the museographic management
of its surplus value? Its canonizing idealization or its academic
sublimation? At the instant the evil is done, done well, it sub-
lates its chaos, it keeps itself even in discord, it keeps the trace
of the blow struck in a counterblow or a doubled blow, it thus
saves its dissonance in some “consonance.” This is done, I was
saying, and the evil is done, “at the instant that,” and this takes
 Artaud the Moma Z 19

place in fact in an instant, a blow, an act. But this instant must be

divided or doubled in order to keep the trace of its own blow.
And in this duplicity of the blow destruction is kept, but it is also
kept from pure and simple destruction, evil against evil, evil in
evil: the work, the work of art has already found the support and
the place of virtual reception, already a museum, to safeguard the
memory of their autodestruction. This salvation also means loss,
and this contradiction of the doubled blow is no doubt the
cruelest fate of the cruelty out of which Artaud will have made
his theater. Art is saved or redeemed perhaps from the fall by
what, in Artaud’s words, “makes” “live” the malfaçon itself,
namely, the art of a “distribution and a blaze of consonant colors
and forms that make this ill-fashioned thing live.” It is thus a mat-
ter of causing to live, and live on the mal fait, that which is badly
done and that which does evil or harm, the very thing that signs
the end of art, namely, spirit. It has to go very quickly. The speed
of a precipitation is an essential trait of the operation. The line
must follow the precipitous rhythm of the sketch. But this
absolute speed cannot erase the minimal insistence of the trait
divided in its act by the very doubling of the blow. By its reper-
cussion and by its echoing. A precipitous blow, which is to say in
good Latin-French, head first. The drawing keeps the visible tes-
timony of this precipitation, of this “fashion” that saves the
“ill-fashioned” by keeping it, exactly like a survivor, and a capital
witness of the precipitation. Aim is taken at god’s head and sex.
Artaud describes precisely this witnessing. After having noted the
“distribution” and the “blaze of consonant colors and forms” that
“make this ill-fashioned thing live,” causing it thus to live on, he
insists twice on haste, the “hasty sketch” and the “hasty fashion”:

witness the head at the top like an egg barely indicated and the
beards rays of hair that could have been but a hasty sketch
 20 Y Artaud the Moma

in a more elaborate drawing but I wanted their hasty fashion to

remain at the summit of this red puppet,
like a spot that is going to spread out over the clothes and weigh
down on the piss-sex.

( OC 20:173)

One must do what is necessary, then, for the chance of a

survival; there must be a remaining (restance), a reverberating
remaining of the very thing that does not remain, namely, haste,
the disastrous collapse of impatience that botches everything; it
must “remain,” there must be a witness to the haste and to the
malfaçon; the “hasty fashion” must “remain”; one must make it
live and live on as witness to the divine collapse after the blow is
struck, and the color must run from the egg-head like a yolk that
blushes red in shame, like sperm become piss (thought when it
falls into representation, said Hegel).
Lightning-struck, foudroyé: another reason I say foudroyé is to
describe the traces of a passage, the time, rhythm, and landscape
of a sleepless white night, the earth and sky of the works assem-
bled in this museum. Foudre, lightning, is a word that Artaud him-
self chose, on more than one occasion, and lightning, so as to
speak of what happened when one day began for him a certain
experience of the drawing. Not of drawing in general (he had been
drawing and painting since adolescence with a technical mastery
that is so much in evidence here), but of this drawing that one day,
beginning in 1939, he could no longer dissociate from writing. He
then names lightning twice. In the word foudre, one hears the
explosion of a missile, the deflagration of the breath or the confla-
gration of an incendiary bomb. But one also hears, at a greater or
lesser distance, other words that Artaud regularly associates with
it: close to foudre there is foutre, copulation and sperm, which
 Artaud the Moma Z 21

multiplies the affinities with the word poudre, powder (one of

Artaud’s favorite words for designating gunpowder, as well as
seminal dust, greasepaint or face powder, paint pigment—or that
which is reduced to ashes in destruction by fire), and especially
with the monosyllable fou (mad) and thus with the word mômo,
which means, among other things, something like crackpot. Fou-
dre is not far from foutre; it inflames the living sperm, and this mad
torch is nothing other than the body, the body proper itself: “for
what is the spirit without the body?” asks Artaud in Suppôts et
suppliciations (Henchmen and torturings; OC 14:63). Answer: “A
limp rag of dead foutre.” If the spirit without the body is dead (or
artificial) seminal fluid, as for the body, it is vital sperm, burning
come, hot cannon barrel. And the force of the drawing would be
to ex-pose it.
At the opening of the famous text from April 1947, “Dix ans
que le langage est parti . . .” (Ten years since language left . . . ),
Artaud lets loose the lightning bolt:

Ten years since language left,

since in its place came in
this atmospheric thunder,
this lightning,
in face of the aristocratic pressuration of beings
of all noble beings
of the ass,
cunt, of the dick . . .

“Ten years since language left”: what a declaration! It

announces that language left me, for it has gone and left me with-
out it, abandoned, but also, more secretly, that it left or departed
from me, that it took its departure from me, by me, proceeding
thus from me by the lightning of my drawing. For further down,
 22 Y Artaud the Moma

like a meteoric body detached from it by the lightning itself, the

word fou is associated with mômo: mômo, remember, means mad,
fou. The lightning of the mad man (la foudre du fou) passes by way
of the drawing’s body, more precisely by the body of a “black pen-
cil.” And, as you will hear, the “black pencil,” the drawing body
of the drawing, the ligneous and rigid verticality that strikes the
blows, the “pencil blows,” is a lead as black, black like evil, but
also sometimes as colorful in its wooden coffin as the paper
scorched by flame: I mean the Sorts (Spells) that are waiting for us.
At Rodez, Artaud most often used, as we know, a black graphite
pencil, but also sometimes those waxy, colored crayons that chil-
dren play with. He found the supports for his drawings, that is,
also the targets for his pencil blows, in stationery or typing paper.
The mômo presents himself, therefore, he presents his truth,
the fiery truth of a thunderbolt that follows the flash of light-
ning, and this blow strikes in the night like the blow from a mad-
man’s black pencil:

Ten years since language left . . .

How?
By a blow . . .
antidialectical
of the tongue
by my black pencil pressing
and that’s all.
Which means that I, the madman and the mômo,
maintained 9 years in an insane asylum for passes of
exorcism and
magic and because supposedly I imagined that I had found a
magic and
that was mad,
one must believe that it was true . . . 3
 Artaud the Moma Z 23

Such an “it was true” does not mean “it was real.” No more than
in the untitled drawing from January 1945 that bears at its head,
at the top of itself, the header that then becomes its title: Jamais
réel et toujours vrai . . . (Never real and always true). “Always true,”
then, of a truth without realism, and without naturalism, and with-
out figuration. One could analyze infinitely the symbols projected
and the spells cast in this drawing. I note merely that the capital
height of its sentence without verb (“Never real and always true”)
receives from below the light of an interpretation, at the foot of the
drawing, in the form of an incrimination of art, or even, more pre-
cisely, of the signifier “art,” of this morsel of the name Artaud, art
qui se fait mal, art that is badly done, that does itself harm, that
undoes itself and reverses itself into the maladroitness of a ra-tée,
a misfire, a botched job, the malfaçon of a ratatouille, of a rate
(spleen), or of one of those rats, of those ra syllables that runs in
crowds and teems throughout Artaud’s corpus. On the lower edge
of the drawing, one follows in fact what could well be the explicat-
ing consequence of the “Never real and always true,” namely: “Not
art but some ra-tée of the Sudan and Dahomey.”
“Lightning” comes back again later in “Ten years since language
left . . .” Lightning strikes the drawing. It then carries off with a
single blow (coup) struck what is called a “pencil stroke,” that is, un
coup de crayon, on the paper, a common figure whose physical and
literal energy Artaud always knows how to revive. In the passage
cited earlier, one blow after another, Artaud was already calling for
a “blow . . . of the tongue” (“By a blow . . . antidialectical / of the
tongue / by my black pencil pressing”). Here comes another blow,
no doubt the same blow, but this time divided or multiplied, dou-
bled, repercussed, in the plural: pencil blows, “my pencil blows.”
One cannot understand, I believe, the operation of Artaud’s
graphic cruelty without a thinking experience of the double blow,
without this trace of repercussion that I will try to formalize a little
 24 Y Artaud the Moma

later. The repercussion of electrocution constructs and destroys at

the same time the history of art in its museographic truth. In any
case, the drawing inaugurates by inscribing the charter of a new
Kabbalah that “will today say what” while projecting its excremen-
tal projectiles onto the old Kabbalah, that of tradition, which is to
say, as the very name Kabbalah indicates, onto the very Tradition of
yesterday. And Kabbalah or cabal also connotes, in ordinary lan-
guage, conjuration, plot, conspiracy. What is embarked on in the
drawing is the war of one conjuration against another, the assault
of one spirit, thus of one breath, against another, a pneumatic pol-
emos, one respiration against another, the conflagration between
two inspirations and two conspiracies. And this is the end of Art,
of the history of Art, with a capital A, of Art for Art’s sake, the Art
whose cult we pretend to celebrate or end up celebrating in muse-
ums, even if that is not what they were meant for from the first
blow. I have underscored some words:

and I say then that with language set aside it’s lightning [fou-
dre] that I caused now to come into the human fact of breathing
[respirer], which lightning is sanctioned by my pencil strokes
[coups de crayon] on the paper.
And ever since a certain day in October 1939 I have never writ-
ten without also drawing.
But what I am drawing
are no longer the themes of Art transposed from the imagina-
tion onto the paper, they are no longer affective figures,
they are gestures, a verb, a grammar, an arithmetic, a whole
Kabbalah
and that shits at the other, that shits on the other,
no drawing made on paper is a drawing, the reintegration of a
misguided sensibility,
it is a machine that has breath [souffle].
 Artaud the Moma Z 25

At the end of this famous text from April 1947, which removes
drawing from Art, from the “themes of art” and, at least four
times, makes of graphic lightning an emanation from vociferat-
ing breath (“a breath that gave its fullest,” “it’s been ten years that
with my breath / I breathe hard forms,” “all breaths in the hollow
arcature,” “Not one that is not a breath thrown with all the force
of my lungs, / with all the sifting / of my respiration”), the end of
Art is but the same thing as the end of writing for writing, of the
letter for the letter. This is the last word of the text: “And this
means that it is time for a writer to close up shop, and to leave
the written letter for the letter.” To leave the written letter for
the letter: this can mean two things, precisely here where Artaud
says “And this means.” It can mean, in the first place, the end of
the written letter for the letter (as one says the end of art for art’s
sake, of literature for the sake of literature). It can also mean the
end of the written letter so as to make room for the true letter,
with a view to this letter finally, which would no longer be writ-
ten but in a single shot breathed-drawn, respirated-traced, and
this is the drawing, the character of Artaud the Mômo. The latter,
already at Rodez, claimed to have a drawing know-how that,
through an apparent maladroitness, made plain the abandon-
ment of the “principle of drawing,” the end of the school and of
art so as to retake possession of his body against the obscure
forces of the spirits that were trying to dispossess him. Speaking
no doubt about a drawing in which he represented himself as
king of the Incas, as he does here, Artaud made a claim for the
soul against the spirit, the living soul as a sort of physical or
nervous work of the body and of the hand, of the manner and the
maneuver (main d’œuvre, labor) by means of a sort of fictive
tabula rasa of the history of art, “as if he had learned nothing.”
He was describing, by the same token, at the same blow, all his
“other drawings”:
 26 Y Artaud the Moma

This drawing like all my other drawings is not that of a man who
does not know how to draw, but that of a man who has abandoned the
principle of drawing and who wants to draw at his age, my age, as
if he had learned nothing by principle, by law, or by art, but only by
the experience of work, and I should say not instantaneous but
instant [non instantanée mais instante], I mean immediately
deserved. Deserved in relation to all the forces in time that are
opposed to the manual work, and not only manual but nervous
and physical, of creation.
Which is to say against the taking possession of the soul into
spirit, and its putting-back-into-place in the being of reality.

( OC 20:340; Artaud underlines “deserved”)

Another reason dictated my choice to begin with the colorful

drawing of this question without prior content and addressee:
“And who / today / will say / what?” If I have learned how to look
even a little at the portrait that bears this address without address,
it is thanks to the eyes and the knowledge of my friend Paule
Thévenin, to whom with your permission I dedicate this lecture
so as to honor her memory. We are many who, without her, can-
not conceive the return of Artaud, “The return of Artaud, the
Mômo” today, at MoMA, and the living-on of what must be
called the “corpus” of Saint Antonin. On the word mômo in partic-
ular, Paule Thévenin has written some pages that we will forever
need to reread because they give us (and moreover this is their
title) to hear / see / read.4
Among the hypotheses concerning the choice of the nickname
Mômo during the period when Artaud began to be unable any
longer to write “without also drawing” (1939–1947), I will privilege
here two threads. What I would like to make clear concerning
them, because Paule Thévenin does not say this, is that these two
threads are crossing here, today, in New York, even as they appear
 Artaud the Moma Z 27

to be both contradictory and complementary. What is even more

striking is that between them they cross the two origins of Antonin
Artaud. These two topoi, these two figures of the Mômo are also
two birthplaces of Artaud. The return of Artaud Mômo would
figure at the same time their repetition and a third birth, another
rebirth or renaissance. You will have noticed to what degree birth,
the rebirth of a brand-new corpus, of a body without organs, is the
great concern of all the drawings and portraits exhibited here, from
La maladresse sexuelle de dieu to L’exécration du Père-Mère (The
execration of the Father-Mother), from L’être et ses fœtus (Being
and its foetuses) to L’immaculée conception (The immaculate con-
ception), from La projection du véritable corps (The projection of
the true body) to the numerous self-portraits, which one could
interpret as processes of autoengendering. Each self-portrait is a
regeneration of oneself. Recall the motif of Ci-Gît (Here lies):

Me, Antonin Artaud,

I am my son, my father, my mother, and me;
leveler of the imbecilic periplus where engendering gets entangled,
the papa-mama periplus
and the child;
soot from the grandma’s ass,
much more than from the father-mother.5

From one end to the other of Artaud’s corpus, an immense

and turbulent and blaspheming poetics of generation repudiates,
along with the Christian body and its holy family, the whole his-
tory of art that installs this body of the parasited lunatic in
churches and then transfers them from the churches to the muse-
ums, in the private or state capitals of art’s capital. Now, one of
the possible filiations of Mômo leads us toward Marseille, where
Artaud was born one hundred years ago, alongside the Provençal,
Spanish, or Catalan languages. There, and “especially in
 28 Y Artaud the Moma

Marseille,”6 a swarm of meanings of Mômo buzzes around child-

hood, ingenuousness, naïveté. Mômo is the môme, the kid, the
child, the mioche or brat. And thus the couple or pair moth-
er-child (Mam, mama, mum, mommy, môme, mômo). One can
also recognize here the figure of the fool or madman (mômo) as
village idiot, the innocent, the nutcase, in that semantic zone
where the poet Frédéric Mistral derives momo from the Catalan
moma (a word I wanted to greet in passing here), which has the
sense of currency or money, not far from la momo, commodity as
delicacy, candy. Among the Latin languages, Catalan, as you
know, remains one of the closest to French. Thus, the moma is
money, currency, just as la momo would be the child’s treat to be
bought and consumed. And mômo, the word mômo, retains in
advance the memory of moma; poetically, literally, it mothers and
commemorates and mummifies—with a watchful eye on several
letters that we will hear ring out in a moment in the very design
of the drawing—what moma can, at the risk of cadaverizing it,
preserve in itself, in the maternal matrix, in the very matter of a
mortifying gestation. I will not extend these remarks on the rela-
tions of semantic association or engendering that may affiliate
foolishness with financial capital, and credulity with credit, thus
with the market. In an inseparable way, inscribed on the reverse
side of the same piece, stamped in the angle of the same coin, the
other semantic phylum returns from Marseille (which was a
Greek city) to Smyrna, to the Cyclades, to Greece, to that neo-
Greek polyglottism that Artaud also spoke in his childhood in
the midst of a family that still kept the Greco-Turkish memory
of its origins. Greek is very active in his language, in his glosso-
poiesis and in his drawings (for example, ana, in the upper left
corner of L’exécration du Père-Mère [April 1946]). It often comes
back elsewhere, notably in what I called the vademecumvaderetro-
satanas of La maladresse sexuelle de dieu, where the glossopoetic
Ani links its necessity to the quasi normality of other words,
 Artaud the Moma Z 29

such as “Ani, in Greek aniksa . . . that old anankò‚ of the soul”
(OC 20:171). In Greek, Μψμος is the god of mockery; he illus-
trates terrifying sarcasm with a grimace that we also find in the
mômo buffoon. He is a “spirit (pneuma) full of forces,” says Her-
mes of him. A hundred years ago, this pagan god still made his
appearance in the festivals of southern France. Well, in order to
read and understand something there, in order to approach the
stamp of what remains living and decisive and incisive and mor-
dant and, in a word, cruel in the portraits and drawings from
Artaud’s last ten years, which is to say contemporary, in sum,
with Artaud the Mômo, one would now have to cross these two
familial and semantic genealogies, these two geographies of the
place, that is, of the body of Artaud: on the one hand, the return
of Mômo the child, the innocent, the helpless fool-madman who
comes back to put on trial the machine that detains and destroys
him, body and soul; and this institutional machine is a culture
that is at once social, medical, psychiatric, religious, political,
metaphysical, a police-machine and a state-machine—as well
as an artistic machine (the museum is one of its powers of foun-
dation, conservation, legitimation, canonization, assimilation, a
power both public and private, the capital city at the head of its
capital, the market of a state speculation); but at the same time,
on the other hand, indissociably, the indictment of the innocent
child who bears the grievance of this wounded, assassinated,
mortified, mummified Mômo also strikes the blows; it is the
unleashing of a satanic mockery, that of the god Mômos, of his
blasphemies, insults, assaults, accusations, and merciless sarcasms,
of his incriminations and recriminations. Given and returned, all
these blows can be felt; they still strike in each pencil stroke. A
burst of painful laughter cuts across the unarmed passion of he
who has just been born. A child seeks rebirth after twenty cen-
turies and not just one hundred years of history; he is learning
again and teaches us again a language before language, where
 30 Y Artaud the Moma

and when language left, left from me, vociferating in one-shot

syllables that had never yet been pronounced. Thus a child
glossopoet becomes the inseparable accomplice of a god of irony
who laughs in your face and defies all cultural institutions, and
the history of art, and the discipline of drawing, and the criteria
of proper evaluation, good manners, and the market of art’s crit-
icism, its salons, galleries, foundations, and museums. The
indictment has no limit:

Modern historical life is the price of a tremendous and foul

bewitchment. . . . Act of accusation against this world,
bring to the fore the bewitchments.
Who I am?
I am Antonin Artaud,
but I have always suffered from men,
more exactly from society.

( OC 26:69)

“And who / today / will say / what?” I have just learned some-
thing else about this singular work by following a path opened
by Paule Thévenin in a note to the book that I had the honor
and the good fortune of publishing with her. Written not long
before the death of Artaud, certain words in this Portrait de Jany
de Ruy ( July 2, 1947), were erased one day by Jacques Prevel while
he was noting them down, also on July 2, 1947. I know neither why
nor how it happened that, even as he was noting down the verbal
message, transcribing it separately to set it aside, Prevel destroyed
on the drawing what he was thus archiving elsewhere, in his
own diary.7 Did he indulge in this hijacking, this acte manqué, this
failed but also successful act, accidentally or intentionally? Was
he inspired to do it by some unconscious lucidity? In any case,
the words that were thus attacked have since been reconstituted,
 Artaud the Moma Z 31

which is to say, re-produced, produced once again with the help of

Antonin Artaud, Paule Thévenin, and Jany Seiden de Ruy.8 The
words were thus, through this reproduction, returned to them-
selves, in effect, also prepared for the catalog of an art gallery, the
margins of a collection or a museum, but not for a museum itself.
They were thus rescued from their loss but in their loss itself, saved
in some way by the author, by a spiritual heir, Paule Thévenin, and
by the model of a portrait that remains, all the same, mutilated.
Restored separately, exiled outside the work, these words in fact
are no longer right on the body of the drawing of which they are
a part. The words are saved, like morsels of the body of the work,
but the work itself is not restored. The body or the cadaver of the
words are gathered up, to be sure, but their remains no longer form
one body with the body of which they were once a part. One
wonders what a museum keeps or exhibits when it holds only the
scars of an effacement, the traces of a destruction or dismember-
ment, already a ruin, a cemetery haunted thereafter by decom-
posed cadavers.
Now, as for the erased words of this drawing, which are hence-
forth unreadable, invisible, and inaudible, I would be tempted to
conclude that they are not insignificant in themselves or in their
secret affinity. The first of these words are “I am” ( je suis), the last
“Shit on me” (Chiez sur moi). Between this “I am” and “Shit on
me,” Jacques Prevel had also erased a “je fais,” I do or I make, not
je fais mal, I do badly, je fais le mal, I do evil, the mal of the mal-
façon or the maladresse, but merely je fais (“I am,” “I do . . . ,” “shit
on me”: what a sequence, what a consequence, especially if one
thinks that in French je fais, by itself, can mean “I shit”).
Here now is the integral declaration of this ego sum, ego facio, of
which you see, on this drawing, only the fragmentary remains:

[I am]
still too [young to] have
 32 Y Artaud the Moma

wrinkles. [I make these] children

of poor wrinkles and I send them to do bat-
tle in my body. —Only
I lack energy and this
is obvious; and I am still
terribly romantic
like this drawing that
represents me, in fact, too well,
and I am weak, a weakness.
[Shit on me].

Half-erased, this declaration belongs to the body of the work.

But like a confession, an avowal of weakness that, moreover, begins
by presenting, in this portrait of another woman, a self-portrait:
it betrays me, myself, it awkwardly betrays the truth of my awk-
wardness, it unveils me in my weakness (“this drawing that /
represents me, in fact, too well, / and I am weak, a weakness . . .”).
But Artaud is not content to comment in the margins on
this self-portrait of the other sex: he points it out. Gesture of
pointing, deictic exhibition, stroke of ex-position: we see them
operating, as is often the case, right on the work, in the space of the
“emblematic” subscription or superscription whose analogy and
subversion I have recalled. A bit of finger seems to fold back like
a phantom limb on the subjectile: “this drawing that / represents
me” (above that one reads “Here is a drawing”). A supplemen-
tary complication, this deictic performative, which points with the
index while saying that it shows what it shows, can also be seen
represented in turn, like a report that has been entered into the
record (dont il est pris acte): this visual archive of an act or a blow
says what it does, doing thereby what it says, but it records itself,
with the same blow, in a representation. In French one would say
that the one who draws prend acte de son acte (records or registers
 Artaud the Moma Z 33

his act). For acte also means the archive that keeps a legitimate
and readable trace of what was done, deliberated, and accom-
plished. And especially—fold upon fold, abyssal performance in
the hollow of the work, performative in performative—the deic-
tic of this self-presentation doubles the confession or repentance
of an order given to the spectator-voyeur, to the visitor to the
museum: defecate on me, “Shit on me”; as for me, I make, here
is what I make (children), so you in turn, multiple visitor, anony-
mous voyeur lost in the crowd, get into the act, don’t look at me
with your eyes, now shit, shit on me. “Shit on me” does not mean
merely “take note of my fallen state” or “despise the dejection,
decline, fault or failing, the weakness I have just confessed.” For it
has always been the case that, in numerous texts I have analyzed
elsewhere, Artaud identifies the work with feces, which are chil-
dren that one makes (“I make these children” [ je fais ces enfants]:
fais-ces, fèces, fessée [spanking]). He has thus assimilated defeca-
tion to making-a-work, which is to say as well to the gift, to the
weapon, and to the phallus. To the coup. He even made of a certain
fashion of saying Merde the trait of an address, an awkward, mal-
adroit address of the drawing, a certain fashion of drawing well,
in the maladresse itself, and of addressing well, as directly and
adroitly as possible, the trait of the drawing. A good “fashion” to
keep the capital “witness” of the malfaçon. Even though I had
decided to make every effort to refrain altogether from retracing
the steps of what I may have written in the past, over the last
thirty years, on the subject of Artaud or even of his portraits and
drawings, allow me one brief reminder for just this once (it
will be the last time). Moreover, I will recall simply some lines of
Artaud, and not what I have written about them, lines that I
quoted once before in “Forcener le subjectile” (To unsense the
subjectile).9 They seem to me to respond in a very acute fashion
to this “Shit on me” that we are trying to hear-see or to put to
 34 Y Artaud the Moma

the test in this museum. Three months before the Portrait de Jany
de Ruy, in April 1947, several months before Pour en finir avec le
jugement de dieu, Artaud let another “Merde” (Shit) ring out. He
proferred it on this occasion not far from an apocalyptic “Last
Judgment,” which “alone,” he said, “will be able to decide between
values.” He cried out “Merde” in a text that has since become
famous for anyone interested in Artaud’s graphic art, probably
the most indispensable text along with the catalog for an exhibi-
tion in 1947 (Portraits et dessins par Antonin Artaud ),10 that fun-
damental piece of writing on “the human face,” which should be
studied syllable by syllable and to which I will return briefly in a
moment. The text I am citing now cries out “Merde” to the adroit
drawing, to the art drawing, to the world of art, its conservatory,
its archive, its history, its museography, and finally to this “world
here.” Artaud does not say this “Merde” himself; he says, as you
will hear, that the drawings say it. And this happens in the course
of a scene that does not celebrate a centenary, like today, but ten
times less, an act of birth only ten years old. It was the act of birth
of an absolute drawer, of someone, Artaud Mômo, who no longer
does anything but write while drawing, draw while writing, of
someone for whom the graphein, the zoographein, as the Greeks
used to say, the writing of the living, becomes the absolute
manifestation.
Will it be possible to do what I am trying to do, to say “Merde”?
Will it be possible, either with or without blasphemy, to read and
to cite “Shit,” “Shit to art,” to do it then as must be done, in this
great temple that is a great art museum and above all modern, thus
in a museum that has the sense of history, the very great museum
of one of the greatest metropolises in the new world? Here then
is the coup de théâtre, the theater of cruelty of this “Shit”; the event
is dated.
 Artaud the Moma Z 35

After the incipit (“Ten years since language left”), after the
dating is duplicated a first time (“And ever since a certain day in
October 1939 I have never written without also drawing”), and
then a second time (“I say / that / for the last ten years with my
breath / I breathe out hard, compact / opaque / frantic forms”),
after the calendar of this graphic vow, if I may call it that, after
the anniversary of this oath—to never again write without draw-
ing at the same blow—after this periodization that would offer
us a typological hypothesis with which to visit the exhibition or
organize the reasoned chronology of a catalog, Artaud presents
his drawing notebooks. It is a constellation, he says, thus a celes-
tial light (we are not far from the lightning), which has already
left the world, at least this here world. For it is on this here world
that Artaud’s drawings, from another world, unleash their excre-
ment like bullets and say “Merde”:

Such are in any case the drawings with which I constellate all my
notebooks.

In any case
the whore
oh the whore,
it is not on this side of the world,
it is not in this gesture of the world,
it is not in a gesture of this here world
that I say
that I want and will indicate what I think,
one will see it,
one will feel it,
one will realize it
from my maladroit drawings,
 36 Y Artaud the Moma

but so sly,
and so adroit,
that say SHIT to this here world.

What are they?

What do they mean?

The innate totem of man

The gris-gris to return to man.

Instead of insisting one more time on the sly, twisted address

of the badly done (the well-badly done) or of the declared
maladroitness (“my maladroit drawings, / but so sly, / and so
adroit”), I would like to pause for a moment, after a long detour,
on these gris-gris in the vicinity of which I interrupted my quo-
tation. Gris-gris are generally defined as amulets, cult objects.
They are not meant primarily to represent. Through their form
and sometimes through what they represent, beyond what they
show, they are acts that are destined rather to produce an effect,
to cast a spell, to strike a blow, to affect someone, to heal or kill,
save or condemn. Gris-gris are efficacious works, operations
that, beyond art, make a work. What, then, is the place of the
gris-gris in the work or rather, one should say, in the existence
of Artaud? They occupy a particular place and, at the same time,
they are every place. They seem to cover the field that they open
up. How so?
If, by referring to the calendar that I have just evoked (“Ten
years since language left, / since in its place / came in this atmo-
spheric thunder, / this lightning”), one attempted, at least as a
fiction, to scan the history of the graphic art signed by Artaud,
 Artaud the Moma Z 37

one would distinguish clearly two “periods.” Let us say, first of

all, two times. There would be the first time of the well-ordered
or classic works, those in which is affirmed an admirable tech-
nical mastery, albeit apparently not very inventive. These are the
landscapes in gouache from 1919, the still life, an oil from 1919,
a series of studies, of portraits or self-portraits in charcoal, pen-
cil, or pen and ink, from around 1920–23. This apparently “aca-
demic” period can be prolonged from 1924 to 1935 if one takes
into account certain studies with an architectural or theatrical
aim (for theater costumes or for the sets of the Cenci. The pro-
fessional assurance of this art will never disappear, even in the
second period, the more turbulent and striking one, which we
are going to come back to. Until the end, until 1947, certain
portraits will keep the mark of this skill, which one might in
fact be tempted to term academic if Artaud had not protested,
yes, protested (the word is his) and wanted to cleanse himself of
any suspicion in this regard. Someone must have accused his
portraits and self-portraits of academicism. After the fact (après
coup), in 1947, at the heart of what it would be naive to call the
second period, he revolts once more against this reproach, in fact,
and takes refuge behind the reference to Dubuffet. At stake
already, still, is the great question of the face as human figure:

The human face is provisionally,

I say provisionally,
all that remains of the demand,
of the revolutionary demand for a body that does not
conform and
never has conformed to this face.
And don’t come telling me that my faces are academic.
Is Mr. Jean Dubuffet academic when he paints and when he
 38 Y Artaud the Moma

protests
the nose under sockets
against the oculary academicism of present-day architecture
of the
face called pictural?
My portraits are those that I wanted to represent,
they themselves wanted to be,
it is their destiny that I wanted to represent without
preoccupying myself
with anything other than a certain barbarism, yes, a certain
CRUELTY outside any school, but who could find it again
in the middle of the species?11

“My faces,” “my portraits,” he says, are not “academic faces,”

school studies, in-studio representations of figures that would be
what they are. Artaud wanted, he says, to represent what these
portraits themselves and these heads wanted to be; he wanted
only their secret wanting. The cruel “destiny” of this will to will
no longer belongs either to art or to the history of art, thus to
what a museum can house, classify, exhibit, or expose. We will
ask ourselves what “to expose” means, according to this destiny
of cruelty, and it will be to ex-pose to blows rather than to the
gaze. Likewise, there is no exposition, no representation, no pre-
sentation even or monstration, there is no reference or ferried
gaze without coup férir (without striking a blow). The férance, the
ferrying of the reference, the relaying of the relation comes down
first of all to the violence of striking a blow, which in French we
say with porter un coup, carry a blow, or with the more archaic
coup férir. But it also comes down to the differance of this dou-
bled blow.
For the moment, let us note that this protest against the
reproach of academicism develops especially during the last
 Artaud the Moma Z 39

decade, thus during the second period, even if its premises are to
be found much earlier, deep within what an untroubled history
of art might call the first era, during which, moreover, Artaud
writes a great number of articles on exhibitions. These form a
corpus that deserves systematic study. One might then speak of
the Salons of Artaud, following in a tradition that I will not
venture to identify with that of Diderot or Baudelaire. A theory
of painting is sketched out there through reflections on a great
number of painters whose names I list in no particular order as
they appear in these pages (Van Dongen, Suzanne Valadon,
Matisse, Vallotton, Marquet, Renoir, Gromaire, Courbet, Cézanne,
Manet, Odilon Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Dufy, Picasso, Bra-
que, Foujita, Masson, Modigliani, Balthus, etc.), as well as on
different “schools,” impressionism, cubism (“which was new in
its time . . . it is now necessary to change direction,”12 a phrase
one may read in 1923, written by someone who had already pro-
nounced himself to be postimpressionist and postcubist). Tire-
lessly, Artaud was already putting in question the technical “skill”
of the “doing/making” (du “faire”) and narrative painting, the
“anecdote” (OC 2:182–83); as early as 1921 he praises what the
“character” of a work “places above any technical question” (OC
2:199). We could, moreover, overinvest and generalize this word
character. It would then designate the strike or blow of the gra-
phein, the inscription of the imprint, the glyph (glyphe means
blow), the “hieroglyph” that Artaud makes into one of the mas-
ter-words of cruel writing and that joins writing to drawing, but
also to the human face whose portrait grasps, in a “character,” at
the same time the mask, the figure, and the truth of a persona, the
singularity as well as the type, the violent stamp of the tuptein. In
the code of computers, one might say that Artaud already knew
that writing is first of all what is called today an electroglyph. But
he would have seen in the electricity of our writing machines
 40 Y Artaud the Moma

both an extenuation of living electricity and a violence turned

back against it.
In the course of what I am still calling provisionally, for conve-
nience, the second and last period, Artaud unleashes his defense
against the accusation of academicism. He does it in the hollow
or creux of the face, if I can say that, in the creuset, the crucible,
of its secret, by digging into, that is, en creusant the enigma of
the human face. As evidence, I take the extraordinary text that
Artaud published in the catalog for the exhibition of his graphic
works, which was also held (the date is still the same), in July 1947.
This piece of writing takes up a single large page and now bears
as title its incipit: “Le visage humain . . .” (The human face . . . ).
Because I am unable to devote to it the interminable and abyssal
reading it calls for, allow me to situate a few possible headings
for that reading.
1. I just used the word abyssal. Well, the abyss in the hollow of
the human face, that is what Artaud wants to reveal, to give back,
and to hollow out. To reveal in its truth, to give back and hollow
out at the same time, for this truth is not given; it awaits the
act, the trait, the stamp of the graphein. This has to do with the
fact that “le visage humain,” says Artaud in an admirable formula
that is so difficult to translate, “n’a pas encore trouvé sa face” (has
not yet found its face). He continues: “The human face, such as
it is, is still in search of itself.” In other words, Artaud does not
want man to lose forever the face that he has lost; he wants finally
to give it back to him, he wants to restore to the figure or face of
man its truth. “The human visage has not yet found its face. . . .
It is up to the painter to give it to him . . .” This logic of the given
truth appeals thus to the gift of the face. Its cruel epiphany con-
sists in returning by redeeming, for this gift still belongs to a logic
of restitution (portrait of the trait for trait) as redemptive salvation.
By giving figure to the face or rather by giving a face to the figure
 Artaud the Moma Z 41

or a side to the face, the painter renders and returns the truth,
the truth that is life, by saving from death. Artaud had begun by
saying that “the human visage is an empty force, a field of death”;
a little later he adds:

The human visage bears in fact a kind of perpetual death on its

face
from which it is up to the painter precisely to save it by render-
ing and giving back to it its own traits.

It is indeed in the hollow, in the crucible of the abyss that this

veri-fication operates. It goes in search of itself in the generative
and fertile cavity of a crucible, which presents first of all its neg-
ative figure: the hole, the bottomlessness of the abyss, the vault,
the tomb, the place of death, or the crypt. The portraitist seeks to
decrypt a truth, a truth to be rendered, returned, and given, to be
constituted by restituting it, to be given in return even as it pro-
duces this truth for the first time: in the holes, the faults, or the
cracks. For the first time in the hollow of these gaping holes. For
the first time, in the first place, and in this first blow, there is no
more, there ought to be no more room for an opposition, or even
for a distinction between constituting and restituting, giving and
giving back. The void of the orifice, chaos, khaein, the abyssal,
gaping hole of the face with the opening of all its holes, of its
mouth of truth, of its hollowed out eyes: that is the secret of this
nondistinction that is unthinkable before the living force of the
graphic trait and the blows it strikes. The word creuset appears
here, moreover, before the double occurrence of its near anagram
le secret. Elsewhere, glossing La machine de l ’être or Dessin à
regarder de traviole (Drawing to be looked at sideways), Artaud
speaks of the “la tombe creuset secrète de l’homme” (the tomb
secret crucible of man; OC 19:259–60). Artaud’s lexicon—which
 42 Y Artaud the Moma

I am hastily selecting and cutting up in a rather barbaric fashion

that destroys its syntax—then insists on the holes, voids, cavities,
caves, on all the orifices of the face:

The human visage is an empty force. . . . The human visage

such as it is is still in search of itself with two eyes, a nose, a mouth,
and the two auricular cavities that respond to the holes of the
sockets like the four openings of the vault of approaching death.

Later the text will name once again those hollow openings that
are “the arching vaults of the eyelids” and the “cylindrical tunnel
of the two mural cavities of the ears,” or yet again, “an empty eye,
/ turned back toward the inside.”
2. If the truth of the traits restitutes as much as it gives, if it
reveals and makes explicit as much as it invents what is not yet
there, except as the hollow crypt of a vault of the body, this is
enough to break with those great figures in the history of art that
are, on the one hand, the naturalist realism of figurative painting
and, on the other, abstract painting. Artaud claims to break with
this history of art. He remonstrates successively against the one
and the other of these figures of the human figure. He rejects
once more the reproach of realist academicism, since the human
visage has not yet found its face:

it is absurd to reproach as academic a painter who, given the late-

ness of the hour, goes on stubbornly still reproducing the traits of
the human face as they are; for as they are they have still not
found the form they indicate and designate; and do more than
sketch . . .

But, symmetrically, Artaud launches his invectives against that

other academicism that is abstraction. He opposes cruelty with
 Artaud the Moma Z 43

its true secret of death to the surface secret of “nonfigurative

painting.” And the argument of his indictment, as you will hear,
takes as its target the history of art, the whole history of art as
history of the portrait:

For the thousands and thousands of years in fact that the

human face has been speaking and breathing
one still has the impression that it has not yet begun to say
what it is and what it knows.
And I know of no painter in the history of art, from Holbein
to Ingres, who has succeeded in making it, this face of man, speak.
The portraits of Holbein or Ingres are thick walls.

What they are lacking, in sum, is the lack formed by the abys-
sal holes and the vaults of the gaze.
I know of only one exception to the counterhistory that Artaud
is telling himself in this way and that he launches, like a missile
of war, against the whole of art history. In this filiation there
would be, more or less, only one work, there would be only one
avowed figure of a legitimate and legitimating ancestor who, as
Dubuffet did a moment ago, offers his backing and support. It is
La tête de Van Gogh au chapeau mou (The head of Van Gogh with
soft hat) that

renders null and void all the attempts at abstract paintings that
might be done after him, until the end of all eternities . . . [In other
words, La tête de Van Gogh destroys or neutralizes in advance all
an-evental posthistory, all the après-coup that any sublating succes-
sion might claim to guarantee him, for example, in other schools
such as abstraction.] The head of Van Gogh .  .  . completely
exhausts all the most specious secrets of the abstract world in
which nonfigurative painting can indulge itself,
 4 4 Y Artaud the Moma

that is why, in the portraits I have drawn,

I have avoided above all leaving out the nose, the mouth, the
eyes, the ears, or the hair, but I have sought to make the face that
was talking to me tell
the secret
of an old human history that passed for dead in the heads of
Ingres or Holbein.

3. Once again, everything reverberates in the coup. In the explo-

sion of a blow. The force of the blow, in seeking its place in a
cavity, will always be a force of perforating percussion. One will
not see the face of Artaud unless one hears the blow reverberate.
I am saying “reverberate” or “resonate” so as to insinuate my argu-
ment, namely, that the blow is a double or duplicated blow that is
its own echo, insisting and remaining and surviving in this way
(like the “fashion” we were talking about a moment ago, which
permits the destructive malfaçon to “remain”). That the unique
and instantaneous blow is originally a duplicated, reverberating,
echoing blow is what permits destruction to save the possibility
of what it ruins: for example art and the museum. For lack of the
time necessary for a minute demonstration, allow me simply to
let you hear the reverberation of the blows in “The human face . . .”
Like the implosion of so many others, whether or not I have cited
them, their noise is consonant with that of lightning, firearms,
rifle shots, rockets, or charcoal, the fusées or fusain, which carry
this force of a phallic head thrown against a parietal surface, a
material support, a subjectile that will very often take on the
maternal but also paternal figure of the Christian spirit, of the
holy family, and of the father-mother. Listen to the shock waves
of these battleground conflagrations on a single page and the
pounding of the bombardment and the explosion of a rocket
and the cannon shot.
 Artaud the Moma Z 45

a. In search of their form, “the traits of the human face . . .

from morning to night, in the midst of ten thousand dreams,
pound as in the crucible of a passionate palpitation . . .”
b. “Only Van Gogh was able to draw from the human head a
portrait that was the explosive rocket of the beating of a shat-
tered heart. / His own.”
c. “For this avid butcher’s face [it is still a question of La tête
de Van Gogh], projected like a cannon shot onto the most
extreme surface of the canvas, / and that suddenly, at one blow,
sees itself arrested/ by an empty eye, / turned back toward the
inside . . . ”
You have just noticed the counterblow of the blow that, in
one blow, comes to arrest another and thus both to multiply it
and divide it on the surface of the canvas. It is the implacable
and cruel logic of this double blow, of this blow duplicated as
counterblow,13 that seems to me to intensify the cruelty, to make
it cruel by itself and for itself—and, by the same token, du même
coup, to destine it to make a work, a work that is archivable
because iterable, in the museum and in the history of art, in
the Christian family, its law, its capital, its state, all of which the
work attacks and pursues with its hounding traits. But for there
to be iterability of the duplicated blow, and re-percussion of
the perforating percussion, there must be the singular event of
the blow in its indisputable occurrence. And in the most didactic
self-presentation of his graphic work, in its self-manifestation,
Artaud never dissociates the act and the blow, the act of giving
and the act of giving blows, the gift of blows and the gift of the
truth, in other words, of the very manifestation of the truth, of
its self-presentation from the source (sponte sua) through the
“spontaneity of the trait” drawn or the blow struck by the one
who signs Artaud, sealing thus the destruction of the concept of
the work and thereby of the museum, the agony of an art that,
 46 Y Artaud the Moma

nevertheless, at the instant of its death, will perhaps survive its

own apocalypse:

I have moreover definitively broken with art, style, or talent in

all the drawings one will see here. I mean to say woe to whoever
might consider them as works of art, works of aesthetic simulation
of reality.
Not one of them is properly speaking a work.
All are sketches, I mean blows of a sounding rod or a buttstock
struck in all directions of chance, possibility, luck, or destiny.
I have not sought to refine my traits or my effects,
but to manifest in them kinds of patent linear truths [I under-
score this manifestation of the truth according to lines or lineages],
whose worth is as much in the words, the written phrases as in the
graphism and the perspective of the traits.
It is thus that several drawings combine poems and portraits,
written interjections and plastic evocations of elements, materials,
persons, men, or animals.
So one must accept these drawings in the barbarity and disor-
der of their graphism, “which has never been preoccupied with
art,” but with the sincerity and spontaneity of the trait.14

Perhaps you still remember that I had promised to return to

the “gris-gris,” to what Artaud himself calls, in the cited passage,
“Gris-gris to return to man.” What is the time of these gris-gris in
view of the return to man? What fate [sort] can we find for these
Sorts (Spells)? What is their history and in what way do these
bearers of blows also, and with the same blow, bear the question
of the blow? The insistence of the doubled blow now leads us to
complicate, in truth to disqualify, the concept of a history of art,
thus of what founds this foundation that is a museum, namely,
 Artaud the Moma Z 47

the concepts of art and of the work that are indissociable from
the museum. One must also therefore dispute the rigor of a peri-
odization in the graphic work of Artaud. In fact, another period
or time, the third time if you like, would have come along first
to blur the distinction between the two sequences I evoked a
moment ago: first the time of disciplined training, during the
1920s and 1930s, which is to say the school exercise, the period of
relative conventionality, of quasi realism in which is evidenced
the maturity of a tested technique, and then the time of insurrec-
tion, the creative mutation, the seismic upheaval, which, after the
electric lightning strike of 1939, after language has “left,” and espe-
cially from 1945 to 1948, the year of his death, would have given
birth to a powerful, ingenious, and abundant graphic progeny; the
latter, in fact, will increase by more than a factor of ten the earlier
corpus by placing itself under the sign of the Mômo and of feigned
or sarcastic awkwardness. This other time, the third one, but in
chronological truth the second, would also come to wedge itself
between the two others and ruin the very principle of a succession
or a historic calendar of the works. This supplementary time
would thus be neither a historical time nor properly speaking a
third estate of Artaud’s revolution. If it was a third, a terstis (tes-
tis), it would be the capital witness of what happened before and
what will still happen after, namely, the graphic act as blow, the
event of a performative perforation that seeks to produce effects
beyond what it destroys, transgresses, pierces, namely the sup-
port, the work, the wall of the institution, the policed hospitality
of the hospital or the museum. From 1937 to 1939, in the suspen-
sion of this intermediary epoch between the two hypothetical
sequences, we know that Artaud made many of what he himself
called Sorts. These require an infinite analysis infinitely adjusted
to the singularity of each one. Unable to meet that demand here,
 48 Y Artaud the Moma

I will note certain of their common traits, beginning precisely

with singularity.
For in the first place each of them is not only dated, like most
of the other drawings, but constitutes a unique event whose rela-
tion to the date is in principle irreplaceable. It is with reference to
what happened at one blow, on such and such a day (for exam-
ple, the visit of Roger Blin to Ville-Évrard on May 21, 1939), that
the Sort is transmitted, like a dated missive, to such and such an
addressee, who is also unique and apostrophized by the Sort. This
unicity of the reference to the event and the destination makes
of the Sort, in principle, a singular gesture, a weapon with a single
shot, the commotion of a single context. It is not first of all, in
principle, a work of art destined to be exhibited or preserved in
the conservatory of a museum, if one leaves aside for the moment
remaining [restance] and iterability, the duplicated blow and the
good “fashion” of the ill-fashioned [malfaçon], the making [ fac-
ture] of the well-badly-made that I was speaking of earlier—and
that complicates everything.
Second, these Sorts are not essentially artistic representations
destined for the gaze. They are meant to change the world and
to produce psychurgical or magical effects there on real things and
people, not on virtual visitors. Not necessarily on the addressee
in the circumstance, for example Roger Blin, who is here the guard-
ian or mediator of threats addressed to others.
Third, these promises or threats addressed to persons, person-
ages, or “characters,” assume a form that is both discursive and
physical. Discursive through sentences such as

I send a Sort to the First person who dares

to touch you. I will crush to a pulp
his little false-strutting-cock snoot.
I will whip his behind [ fesserai] in front of 100,000 people!
 Artaud the Moma Z 49

This threatening promise was followed by a pictural evaluation

that incriminates the very voice of the painter. When a painter is
bad, it is his voice that is to blame:

HIS PAINTING WHICH NEVER HAD ANYTHING VERY

STRIKING ABOUT IT HAS BECOME
DEFINITIVELY BAD. HE HAS AN OVERLY UGLY
VOICE
HE IS THE ANTICHRIST.

This address in language always accompanies a gestural inter-

vention, an operation of the hand, or even of a firearm, a sort of
lightning that attacks the very support of the Sort, miming or
preparing blows striking the addressee. These blows consist in
making holes, perforating, piercing, and above all burning the
subjectile. These struck and duplicated blows are, moreover,
called by their name (piercing and burning perforation) and the
support of the work occupies the place of a target. The subjectile
is the subject aimed at, for example in the Sort entrusted to Blin:

All those who

have gotten together, to prevent me
from taking some
HEROIN
all those who have
laid hands on Anne Man-
son for that reason
on Sunday
May 21 1939, I will
have them pierced alive
in a public square in
Paris and I will
 50 Y Artaud the Moma

have their marrow

perforated and burned.
I am in an Insane
Asylum but this
Madman’s dream will be
realized and it will be
realized by Me.
Antonin Artaud15

Fourth, these Sorts must not be acts of witchcraft but, on the

contrary, exorcisms, rejoinders to a malevolent action, conjura-
tions meant to undo a spell, counterconjurations, antidotes to
the spectral, to the mystical or initiating process, the constant
battle of a polymorphous and satanic pervert for new Enlight-
enments. Artaud writes at least two times that the Sort “breaks
any spell.”
Fifth, and finally, the counterconjuration, the counterinitia-
tion, the efficacity of the spell cast by the Sort is not only real, it
not only burns through any aesthetic simulation, it must be
immediate. But this immediacy must last, and this is what exposes
it to its institutional drift, this is what destines it despite itself to
remain and to alienate itself in a museum: bearing death in life,
unable to tolerate any relation, any delay, any differance, any
translating mediation, this immediacy must be current, nonvir-
tual, eternal. It will last until the end of time. Artaud writes this
at least two times. To a woman he writes:

You will live dead

you will not stop
passing away and descending I cast you
a Force of Death.
 Artaud the Moma Z 51

And this Sort

will not be brought back [rapporté].
It will not be
postponed [reporté].

Then to a man:

And this Sort will not

be brought back.
It will not be
postponed.
The efficacity of its action
is immediate and
and eternal.
And it breaks any
spell.

For the reasons I have said, this eternity, this enduring of the
duplicated blow exposes the spell to the museographic archive,
but the latter, which Artaud feared, did not prevent him, precisely,
from denouncing the Museum as the malevolent agent, as a con-
juration that had to be in advance counterattacked and counter-
conjured. In one of these last Sorts (the very last one, right after
the declaration of war in September 1939, was addressed to Hitler,
held to be an “initiate”), Artaud explicitly accuses the Museum
of witchcraft. This is perhaps even the only time he names the
Museum, which I suggest provisionally until an inventory is done,
and he does so in order to point to it as the force of Evil (Mal) and
the privileged adversary. This accusation is made when he ironi-
cally addresses the Sort to the man of the Museum, to the gallery
of collectors and curators. It is the act of a cultivated Mômos,
 52 Y Artaud the Moma

a more satanic and sarcastic blow than ever. Artaud assaults and
insults the “connoisseur of spells and other magical curiosities” who
would also like to collect the Sorts for his museum. Here is what
can be deciphered on the recto of this Sort from May 16, 1939:

Sir,
Knowing you to be a great connoisseur of
SPELLS and other magical curiosities I send you this SPELL
which
constitutes a MAJOR
EVIL-DOING CONJURATION
AGAINST ALL ILL-INTENTIONED
BEWITCHERS.
It is not part of the
Museum of Magus Sorcerers and AL-
CHEMISTS.
Antonin Artaud

There, in sum and at the end of this announced long detour,

is what is said and done as well by those words that Jacques Prevel
confessed to having erased. Artaud’s mimed and contradictory
confession (“and I am weak, a weakness. / [Shit on me]”) calls up in
turn the confession of a misdeed committed by the picture’s first
spectator, Jacques Prevel, who would, first of all, have attempted
to intervene on the work, to lay hands on it, and to retouch its
form and meaning, to countersign it in some way. Now, it pleases
me to remark here a singular fact, a magical dramaturgy, a coin-
cidence, both calculable and by chance, of dates, subjects, and
acts. Today, as I was saying, we are July 2, 1947, the date of the
Portrait de Jany de Ruy, date as well on which Prevel transcribes,
erases, and in some way steals the words that we have just restored
but that remain unreadable on the picture. Well, several months
 Artaud the Moma Z 53

earlier, Artaud had done two portraits of the same Prevel, on

April 26 and May 11, 1947, the one full-face and the other in
profile. He was doing more and more portraits at this time, less
than a year before his death. Now, what does one read on the first
of these two portraits, the one that Artaud will later entitle, on a
list, Jacques Prevel forçat ( Jacques Prevel convict)? One discovers
there a kind of accusation or malediction, a sentence that at the
same time seems to put the blame in advance on Prevel for the
Sin of which he will prove guilty and confirms that for Artaud
every work, and especially every portrait, signs a long-distance
blow. This operation of the opus seeks to be efficacious and at
work on the subject itself; it punctures and burns the canvas so
as to reach the model as well as the spectator, so as to leave the
mark of a contusion, in their eye and on their body: in a word
and first of all in their face. As I suggested a moment ago, the
intentional reference, the relation, address, or designation never
happens without ferrying a blow [sans coup férir]. And the blow
is posted first to the head, to the posture of the head in the por-
trait. So there were two portraits of Jacques Prevel, one in profile
and the other full-face. On the one that shows the subject full-
face, a sudden apparition of Marie in the heart of the name:

If Jacques Marie Prevel could only know the Sin

that crushes him and I, who do not believe in Sin, I say the
Sin placed on him Jacques Prevel crushes,
let Jacques Marie Prevel not commit the
Sin that his whole face meditates [overwritten on
“premeditates”],
that in him Marie premeditates against Jacques Prevel.

One of the multiple readings of this graphic injunction (“let

Jacques Marie Prevel not commit the / Sin” that Marie
 54 Y Artaud the Moma

“premeditates against” him in him, that is, right in the middle of

his name and his head and his face) is that Marie is at fault: the
sin is first of all hers. The act of the portrait, this sort of action
drawing, Mômo’s act, Mômo’s art, the counterblow of the trait
must foment a counterconjuration; it must exorcise the Holy
Spirit as well as the Virgin born of the Immaculate Conception
who comes to poison Jacques’s body. As always in the drawings
and portraits from this period, as I have tried to show elsewhere,
at stake is the history of sexual difference, of its Christian appro-
priation or perversion—inasmuch as that history is tied to per-
version and to the museo-christographic appropriation, the
museo-eucharistic transsubstantiation. Along the left border of
the same portrait, satanic madness is named, the temptation
twice mentioned at the heart of the One, of the Androgyne, and
of the couple of sexual difference. All of this is figured doubly: in
a figure and in a face, one word per line:

The Androgyne / broken / down / took / back / the one / and /

tempted / it / with / man / but / it’s / that he / tempted / it / with /
woman / at / the / same / time / and / Satan / the / madman / was /
everywhere.

But most of the words in the self-portrait of the other woman

( Jany de Ruy) remain legible, in particular the apparently insignif-
icant sentence with which it all began, here, today: “And who /
today / will say / what?” It is signed “Saint Antonin,” sealing
thereby the amusement, the irony of the god Mômos, the mockery
of historico-academico-museal self-canonization. Of course, say-
ing almost nothing, this signature announces nearly everything,
singularly “the whole of the other” (le tout de l’autre). And as
opposed to the fallen humility that will follow and precipitate,
apparently, the falling off of the drawing, Saint Antonin goes to
 Artaud the Moma Z 55

the summit of hubris. The index of a first deictic (“here is a draw-

ing”) plays at going beyond the peak of the masterwork and the
head of the master of masters, Leonardo da Vinci in person:

Here is a
drawing
that
goes beyond
and way
beyond
Leonardo
da Vinci
but it is not
above all by
the drawing by the
whole of the other [le tout de l’autre]

and on the facing side, along the bank of blue:

And who
today
will say
what?
Saint Antonin.

Here perhaps is an inspired response to the suspended question,

an amused retort to the question of the museum, a declaration
signed by a drawer-painter-poet-actor-thinker who canonizes
himself, Mômo’s act, Momact in expectation of an art museum,
of a Momart, of a Momartaud. By canonically signing his assump-
tion or ascension, “Saint Antonin” with the same blow raises him-
self through drawing above the master of masters, Leonardo da
 56 Y Artaud the Moma

Vinci, even as he denies doing it with the drawing, and even

with a Work of Art signed Artaud.
Overtaken by surprise and drawn tight by the twisting of this
gesture, the affirmative force of this denial takes form and makes
a work. To say there is only denial in the good-badly-done of
this malfaçon, as in the whole of Artaud’s oeuvre, is neither to
diagnose nor to denigrate; it is to put the structure of denial into
question and en abîme. For perhaps one should ask (and thus
begin to perceive) what happens when the ironic reaffirmation
of a hyperbolic denial of denial crosses the limit: when doing so
it makes a work (fait œuvre)—and one that remains. Especially
when it puts itself to work in the corpus of a unique operation,
the necessary chance of a blow, the pulsation of a pulse, the com-
pulsive impulse that tries to remove itself from the history of
literary, graphic, or pictorial works. This work is not exhausted in
a discourse. As you see here, it overruns this discourse, which it
inscribes within itself; it assumes form as a body in a single but
duplicated blow; it gives itself its own body one single and unique
time in an event that is both irreplaceable and serial, divided
or multiplied in its insistence on reconstituting the support by
destroying it. The event, at the moment of signing, recognizes
no soothing status for itself, no assured stability: neither as draw-
ing, be it a drawing by da Vinci, nor as work of art in the tradi-
tion of a history of art or of a filiation of masterworks, and still
less in the cult or the culture of a museographic canonization.
That is what I wanted to suggest here today.
“Today,” he writes in 1947. That day in July 1947, where were
we? It was another day, in bygone days, another today.
Where are we today? The day of today? This evening? We are
within the walls of a MoMA. What is a MoMA? What does
museum of modern Art mean? A Museum of Modern Art? In
this very place, who would take place? To say what?
 Artaud the Moma Z 57

Here, this canonizing institution, this place of sacralizing legit-

imation of modern times, this pyramid of father-maternal and
speculative commemomarketmummification, we call it, then,
MoMA, M-O-M-A.
OA/AO, AntOnin ArtAUD, ARTO, ARTAU, he, Antonin
Artaud, the name of the one who sometimes signed himself Saint
Antonin and who signed all the works exhibited this evening at
the MoMA, Artaud, itself, this predestined name that carries
and carries within it like an unborn child the art that it never-
theless attacked with heavy hammer blows (des coups de marteau)
and other missiles or projectiles of war, he had more than one
fate in store for this name bequeathed by the pair of his father-
mother and spelled it in many fashions. Pollakos legomenon, as his
Greek ancestors might have said, this name is pronounced and
written in more than one way. Sometimes Artau (A-r-t-a-u),
sometimes Arto (A-r-t-o). One day he called himself, and it was
more than a nickname, Artaud le Mômo, or in what was one of his
last texts, in 1947, Artaud-Mômo. These two names then came
to form a single one around a hyphen, a little like the pair of the
father-mother in the writing-painting L’exécration du Père-Mère
(1946).
One will understand nothing of Artaud’s visual work if one
does not hear his voice, if one does not attune oneself to the tempo
of his letters and the rhythm of his words beyond coded lan-
guage, beyond its grammar and its instituted semantics. Inversely,
and this is the whole aporia, one will understand nothing of this
transgression of coded language, of what sets out from language
by separating from it, if one does not set out from the language it
separates from, here the Greco-Latin sedimentations in French
with which his glossolalias are still consonant in the disadjoining
of their dissonance. One must therefore, and beginning more
than ten years ago, take leave from and beginning with language.
 58 Y Artaud the Moma

That is why I wanted first of all to let reverberate some of those

into-detonations before beginning.
But also, by the same hypothesis, one will gain no access to
Artaud’s drawings and portraits if one does not read all its traits
according to the secret grammar of this hyphen or trait d’union,
of this trait of union and its double. For there is one single but
double hyphen: on the one hand, the one that solders, articulates,
couples without other copula the pair of the two names father
and mother, which Artaud writes so often, especially at the end,
as a single word, father-mother, but also, on the other hand, the
hyphen Artaud-Mômo.
What is one doing when one forces one’s name? And when
one forges it otherwise, letter by letter, at the bottom of a crucible
overflowing with vowels to be regurgitated? You have noticed that
the consonants RT in his name are untouchable, intact, immune,
like, moreover, the syllable ART. ART does not move. As in
Momart, in sum. Art resembles a word that is whole, safe, intan-
gible, integral. But an insignificant word, the body of a word emp-
tied of its legitimate meaning. For as soon as the word Art takes
on its common meaning again, as soon as it again becomes a word
one traverses on the way toward an accredited concept, art—the
art of fine arts, the art of Churches and Museums and Markets—
then the bearer of the name, Artaud, is not just content to denounce
it, to hurl invective at it; he strikes it with hammer blows. He
strikes it to death.
Before pursuing this reflection on what the literal seismic
tremors within the signature Artaud import into the work of his
called “visual,” allow me to open a parenthesis on this parenthe-
sis that Artaud wants both to open and to close—regarding art
and the history of art. The history of art is a parenthesis put into
parentheses, the epoch of an epoch, and even a parental parenthe-
sis. The innumberable protests against art and against the work
 Artaud the Moma Z 59

as work of art would allow us to see Artaud as a contemporary of

Duchamp if so many differences did not make this a shocking
analogy. Among many other dissimilarities between these two
great figures of the century, there would be, not a continent (for
there is also a good America for Artaud, precolonial America),
but the United States of America and everything that is colonized,
capitalized, canonized, capitanonized there in museographic
speculation. The blasphemous imprecation, the interjection on
appeal, the inflamed accusation are aimed sometimes against this
thing called Art, sometimes against the Work as Work of Art,
sometimes against History as history and Holy history, the Chris-
tian history of art. A powerful discursive writing runs through-
out Artaud’s drawings and portraits, but we could support what
I have just said about the three assaults of insults (against art, the
work of art, the history of art) by evoking once again the only
catalog text that Artaud himself wrote in 1947 for the first exhi-
bition of his Portraits et Dessins. This war against the history of
works of art is conducted, as we’ve read, in the name of a think-
ing, or one should say rather an experience, of the face. It is in the
name of the face that Artaud declares war, in the name of all the
faces that one must learn to see right here, in the name of a face
to come, of a “human visage” that has not yet found its “face”:
“Which means that the human visage has not yet found its
face.” When Artaud leaves and separates himself (“I have more-
over definitively broken with art, style, or talent in all the drawings
one may see here . . .”), this assertion is not a calm theoretical or
autobiographical declaration; it does not merely relate the event
of a break with the art of fine arts, with concern for beautiful form,
for style, for arrangement, for aesthetics linked to know-how, to
skill, to formal training, to the technical experience or experi-
mentation of a talent. No, this assertion is not a description or a
theoretical observation; it is a declaration of war, the trait, the
 60 Y Artaud the Moma

flaming arrow, the portrait of a vociferation, the drawing of a cry

of conjuring malediction that, as all of Artaud’s drawings have
always done in a certain way, threatens to strike a blow, in truth,
strikes it already and casts a spell. The blow exerts an immediate
magical action against those who would think otherwise. By
means of an oath signed right on the work, an oath that makes a
work, a pledge that makes a work, this conjuring operation con-
sists in calling up revenants or ghosts, in convoking them by
dismissing them, within oneself and outside oneself. In the same
ex-pulsing impulse, the same compulsion whose pulse comes to
push at the same time, in a rhythmic pulsation, toward the out-
side and toward the inside. An avowed, incarnated denial pushed
to the extreme, ready to destroy everything, including the dust
and the powder, exorcisms, conjurations against conjurations: to
cause the latter to come by expelling the former. It is less a matter
of convincing than of worrying, affecting, transforming the aes-
thete’s body, of changing these transient guests who, having
come as visitors or voyeurs into a museum, would claim to be
mere spectators. Woe to these contemplators and consumers of
images. Woe to them, says Artaud, woe to those who are inter-
ested only in art, in beautiful fictive representation:

I have moreover definitively broken with art, style, or talent in all

the drawings one will see here. I mean to say woe to whoever might
consider them as works of art, works of aesthetic simulation of
reality.

Those he dooms to woe and misfortune, those onto whom he

calls down a sort of countercurse, are his incorporated doubles,
his others, with all the hellish fiends he called parasites, golems,
specters, vampires, angels, and spirits from a “fucking rubbish
heap of a beyond” (au-delà de foutaise) (OC 12:48, 197–98).16 The
 Artaud the Moma Z 61

fucking rubbish heap of the beyond, thus of the spirit, the fuck-
ing rubbish heap of the “perisprit” of the father who circles around
with his good-tasting sperm, never escapes the lightning bolt
mockery of the Mômos who knows how to play everything for a
fool (se foutre de tout)—which is to say, to deny, or, I would prefer
to say, dis-avow persecution.
In playing with the spelling of his name, Artaud was also doing
still other things. In permutating the vowels, the vocabulary, and
thus the voices of the ones and the others, he was drawing while
he wrote, he was interweaving the play of the phonemes with
the lines of the trait, between the words, syllables, and things.
Elsewhere I tried to follow the necessity and the force of this
gesture, in particular around the syllable RA or AR, which one
finds again in Artaud but also, here, in dira: “Et qui/aujourd’hui/
dira/quoi?” “And who / today / will say / what?”).
The turbulence of the proper name agitates only the play of
the final vowels, A and O, at the end of the family name. To be
sure, the vocal couple AO remains in place (ArtO, ArtAU), while
the visible spelling of the second syllable, with O or AU, becomes
one time AU all by itself without D, another time O without A,
another time TOT (precisely so as to designate “powder,” cannon
powder, I suppose, or gunpowder, poudre like foudre, as well as
seminal dust or the germinal pulverization that reengenders
the world, from out of the primeval volcano, the lava soup at the
moment of life’s creation, then the mutation that gave birth to
the unique man: “some powder of ARTO, / some powder of
ARTOT, / some powder of Artaud / to redo the creation”). But AO
is never inverted into OA, the way Mômo seems to be feminized
or maternized into Moma. Paule Thévenin has insisted on the
impulse to masculinize or phallicize the proper name by replacing
AU(D) by O, which is, she says, “more affirmative” and “more male”
than “the a sound,” which is “stretched out” and “more insipid.”
 62 Y Artaud the Moma

She writes this just after citing a passage from August 1947
where the “gouffre Arto,” the “Arto gulf,” “innate son of God on
earth had no other boast on his lips than to bugger all of male
creation,” in opposition to Jesus Christ of whom he writes, “the
only courage he managed to show / in his life was to get himself
sodomized to death, / while sodomizing others very little, / except
in dreams and from afar.” This is another figure of the sexual
maladroitness of god, another manner in which to designate the
false virginity of jesuschristianism, the holy spirit or the trinity,
the father-mother-virgin son, as the enemy, the other, or the dou-
ble to be conjured away, the bad witchcraft associated with the
Museum. In a very fine text that I have just read, Werner Hamacher
demonstrates that, for Benjamin as well as for Heidegger—whose
ontology, he argues and as I have long suspected in another way,
is marked by a disavowed Christianity—one must even speak of
an ontology of the Virgin Mary, of a “Christian meterology.”17 The
Museum, he argues, remains a thing of the mother; I would say
that it holds the place of the mother, the place (thus the trope or
the figure) of the mother, in the place of the mother. Even in its
dematernizing, decontexutalizing, defunctionalizing function,
beyond the Benjaminian opposition between ritual cult value and
exhibition value, it is heir to what Hamacher calls a “metaphor
of the mother,” its meterpher. Might one not find a supplemen-
tary indication of this, I asked myself, in the appellation Moma?
The museum that bears this name, and, par excellence, the museum
that sports its initials, would thus be the matriarchal paradigm of
a familial genealogy that has become res publica. But can’t one say
as much of “Metropolitan”? Modern or classical, every museum
would thus be metropolitan—therefore also as maternal as the
city or the polis, the state, capital, or the capital city that are always
safeguarded, concentrated, accumulated there, that specularly
and speculatively watch each other there. There would be much
to say in order to situate Artaud’s gesture in this regard, as well
 Artaud the Moma Z 63

as about what distinguishes the movements analyzed by

Hamacher as concerns Heidegger (who is moreover named by
Artaud, whether he read him or not),18 but also about Benjamin,
Hawthorne, Proust, or Valéry. One of the differences would per-
haps have to do with the fact that Artaud’s execration is not
aimed solely at the museum’s witchcraft as Christian maternity
and immaculate conception. It is also aimed at the paternity of
the father in the pair of the father-mother. We must never forget
that the blasphemy “I shit on the Christian name” is addressed
to the Holy Father in the Adresse au Pape (Address to the pope)
that in 1946 Artaud wanted to make the preface, the in-your-face
frontispiece of his complete works (OC 1:13). In the jesuschristian-
ism that inspires our history of art and the spirit of our houses of
worship, which have been disaffected or reaffected as museums,
the execration execrates, in the first place, the holy spirit, the trin-
itary mediation of the holy family and the father-mother couple,
as a maladroit, dephallicized coupling of two spirits and two
glorious bodies. The trait of his drawing, when it strikes a blow,
aims at the hyphen or trait of union of the father-mother, of the
pair that holds these two together as one (uph’en, hyphen). And
before this spiritual couple, before even Mary, the blow is aimed
at the Immaculate Conception that castrated man, the male rather
than the woman. Around 1943, the unsigned and undated draw-
ing that bears this title, L’immaculée conception, shows once again
a phallic cannon, equipped this time with testicles, in the center,
and along its edges one can read:

the immaculate conception

was the assassination of the principle
of MAN who is a cannon mounted on wheels.

One can always ask oneself what happens—life or death, one

and the other—when a body puts itself to work, into a work,
 64 Y Artaud the Moma

then when, letting itself be identified, it sees itself classified, cel-

ebrated, or mummified as work of art, then saved, immunized,
safeguarded, embalmed, accumulated, capitalized or virtualized,
exposed, exhibited in what we will continue to call, for a little
while longer, a museum.
But one can also ask oneself who is coming and what is com-
ing, what is happening to a museum when it thinks it is housing
or even exhibiting Antonin Artaud. And when it allows, this eve-
ning, even the reproduced and virtualized voice of Antonin Artaud
to reverberate within it.
A terrifying enoblement of Saint Antonin. The quasi can-
onization that lays in wait for him here, in this great march of
the symbolic market, from Paris to New York, from capital to
capital, metropole to metropole—after the pomp of Pompidou,
MoMA—is perhaps the most formidable ordeal for the specter,
for the “infant revenant” named Antonin Artaud.
But let us hang on to one hope. Where there is not the father
and the mother, the name of the father and the name of the mother,
there is le father-mother. Artaud takes it to be masculine, as if it
were still a man, or else neuter, like a mechanical apparatus, a pre-
phallic instrument whose indifference would claim to be older
and more powerful than sexual difference. Moreover, doesn’t he
say as much in a very enigmatic fashion?

Well I am the father-mother

neither father nor mother,
neither man nor woman,

I have always been there,

always been body,
always been man.

( OC 14:60)
 Artaud the Moma Z 65

Now, by housing today a picture of Artaud-Mômo’s titled

L’exécration du Père-Mère (April 1946), MoMA has become preg-
nant in an untimely way with a suicide grenade whose detonator
has been generously but also very ingenuously entrusted to me.
Naturally, I will not pull the pin, not right away, because the time
of these invisible and unforseeable explosions must remain anach-
ronistic. As I suggested earlier, the doubling of the blow struck
against the support and against the wall of the Museum, the reper-
cussive iterability of the blow in general destines to the remain-
ing of the Museum—compulsively, inevitably, fatally—whatever
claimed to put it in a bad way through maladroitness and the
address of the maladroit, the badly well done, the good fashion
of the ill-fashioned. A museum still keeps the trace of the blows
it receives. It keeps it and keeps itself from them, is beware of
them, like the truth (keeps itself from) the truth. A coup against the
state thus becomes once again a simple coup d’état, the replace-
ment of one state by another. It is nothing more than the substi-
tution of one metropole, one capital or capital city, for another.
Like that of the museum and all it carries with it, the Artaud
explosion has been underway for a century, as we know. It is a
chain reaction whose anniversary we are celebrating today: Artaud
would be exactly one hundred years old today, for he was born
(as was my father) one day in September 1896, September 4 to be
exact (like one of my sons). The drawing L’exécration du Père-Mère,
in other words of the Museum, also bears the title of a magnifi-
cently elaborated text that dates from 1946. This text is contem-
porary with “Ci-gît” and “La Culture indienne” (Indian culture).
Like “L’histoire vécue d’Artaud-Mômo,” “Tête à Tête” (The lived
history of Artaud-Mômo, Tête à Tête), all of these texts would
require a slow, careful, inflamed, vocalized reading, preceded
by subtle and audacious protocols of interpretation. One Mon-
day in January 1947, Artaud gave the nickname “Tête à Tête” to
a representation at the Vieux Colombier theater. The metonymy
 66 Y Artaud the Moma

of this title, “Tête à Tête,” could orient but also disrupt all the
methodological protocols in the world. It is made, badly well
made, to send them astray among the operated permutations, the
grieving and persecuted perforations, the perversions of a poly-
morphous impulse that, with each blow struck, forces one to
become what one is no more, sometimes there where one was
not yet, incorporating one’s other at the moment of expelling it,
ex-posing it to the outside while interiorizing it, calling thus in
the name of the other and while calling to the other, while inter-
jecting an appeal against oneself—and all the way up to god. The
mourning for this god, the incorporating ex-impulsion whose cost
and blows (le coût et les coups) are borne by the lightning of these
drawings, ruined by the powder of these colors: these no longer
pertain to a psychology. Unless we conceive a psychology of god
and likewise a psyche of Artaud Mômo, whom we would then
listen to and call to appear as a witness:

Over and above the psychology of Antonin Artaud, there is

the psychology of god, the master of masters,
and you are not the master,
you do not know what has to be done.
Well, this psychology happens in this body of mine, me,
Antonin Artaud . . .

Or still earlier:

Over and above the psychology of Antonin Artaud, there is

the psychology of another
who lives, drinks, eat, sleeps, thinks, and dreams in my body.
I do not live in a council of heads,
I do not think in a cenacle of spirits.
 Artaud the Moma Z 67

These heads and spirits want to expel him from his own body, right
here, here again, at MoMA. Prick up your ears, listen to Mômo
listening to these heads and these spirits, on the same page:

What are you doing there, Antonin Artaud?

Yes, what are you doing there? You are bothering us.
And finally get out of your body, it’s for us to take your place,
you’ve
held it for too long . . .

( OC 14:189, 7 1)

Unable to venture into it, unable to lead you into it here, I will
do no more than outline a task and formulate a warning: without
the experience of these texts, without meditation on these pro-
tocols, without recasting everything from top to bottom, in one’s
own body as well as in the body of the other, using hammer blows
but also the finesse of the most virtual lasers of a thinking to
come, without rethinking the boundless question of the relations
between symptom and truth, folly and fire, art and lightning,
foudre and poudre, without this senseless and incensed revolution
of self, one cannot engage oneself body and soul in the experi-
ence of the drawings that are here passing through, hung up like
flayed animals (accrochés comme des écorchés) on these walls. If one
does not run these risks, then at most one can indulge in some
aesthetic tourism—and take a walk like a hurried connoisseur or
a sleepwalking collector in the distinguished galleries of a museum
that, for its part, and for this we must pay tribute to its curators,
did manage to expose itself to all these wagers. But without court-
ing these dangers, one would accede to neither the alpha nor omega
of this event, to the doubled blow of what is held in reserve here,
 68 Y Artaud the Moma

or even to the question of knowing whether one must begin or

end with the alpha or the omega, with A or with O. Especially
if one wants indeed to wonder who is calling whom and how
Artaud is called when someone addresses himself with an abrupt
apostrophe in his tête-à-tête, wondering not “And who / today /
will say / what?” but:

Well, what do you yourself say

yes, you,
ARTAUD
what do you say, you?
you, about all that?
ME?

( OC 14:20)

This doubled Artaud was interrogating a kind of ghost of him-

self, already, in a text from 1946 titled Interjections. It often hap-
pened, as we know, that he designated or drew Artaud as another
and that he treated his name like a homonym. Apostrophizing
himself with brief syllables, according to a cruelly calculated
prosody of interjections, he then interposed himself, interjected
himself, if I can say that, between himself and himself, so as to
appeal desperately from himself to himself, in the sense in which
one interjects an appeal after a judgment, which ought not to be
the last. To be done—therefore—with judgment. He was evoking
in these moments the violation of a tomb, which is what an art
of cruelty must be, an anti-art, this “body of the old Artaud /
buried / then unburied / by himself / outside eternities” (OC 14:42);
“In face of all this what remains of the former Artaud? / Some
notes” (OC 14:23). Or in still another example, one among so many,
he opposed the false Christ who fled from Golgotha to the
 Artaud the Moma Z 69

“revolting death of the authentic tortured one on Golgotha (who

was called Artaud like myself, and I do believe it was me)” (OC
14:43). Elsewhere, while in one notebook from 1946 one could read:

oma
noma
hustling
oneself
primitive onomatopoeia . . .
this onomatopoeia of the head,
which I do not slip furtively into me
but grab off the last roof . . .

on the facing page, as if in tête-à-tête, there was the interpellating

auto-hetero-apostrophe:

Artaud!
How so Artaud?
I had told myself never again to talk to myself,
never.

( OC 24:386–87)

At a certain point these interjections were dictated. As if

Artaud had not written but received them—which is what proph-
ets do, they say. The interjections began with glossolalias, a kind
of writing in language—as they say the prophets used to speak
sometimes:

maloussi toumi
tapapouts hermafrot
emajouts pamafrot
 70 Y Artaud the Moma

toupi pissarot
rapajouts erkampfti

It is not the crushing of the language but the hazardous pul-

verization [powder once again] of the body by ignoramuses. . . .
no other orgy of spirits explains the constitution of things. . . . It’s
the farting of erotic gases from the place where it falls dead.

( OC 14:11)

A O, O A are not only vowels, thus fundamental voices. They

are not only letters. They are interjections. I have never under-
stood that one could love a museum. But also—this is a contradic-
tion as unavoidable and as spectral as everything that is speaking
here before us—I have never understood that one could love
anything other than the grief-stricken Place, the taking-place,
the event as event, already, of a future memory, the kept trace of
doubled blows, a Museum, a Library, a Sepulchre, a Cemetery, a
Sanctuary, a Temple, a Church, a Pyramid, a hieratic Archive, a
Hierarchive that gives one as much to hear as to see.
What is a Museum, there where at the moment we think
we are?
Moreover, is it possible, forever, to be ever in a museum that
would be only a museum? Is beingness possible, that is, “êtreté”
according to another of Artaud’s neologisms, beingness in a
museum? I am provisionally abandoning this immense question,
but we are already lost in it because it is larger than we are. This
question is an abyss that today I have the urge to nickname, quot-
ing once again, the “Arto gulf ” (A-r-t-o).
To substitute for that question another, which is more acute
and literally more literal: what happens in a museum, in a museum
of modern Art, when one vowel is replaced by another? When O
 Artaud the Moma Z 7 1

is revocalized as A in the interjected vociferation of a signa-

ture? When Momo becomes Moma? Or Momart? Perhaps the
moment has then come to prepare for a second return of Artaud-
Mômo.
Artaud-Mômo . . . Although in a drawing he called himself
Saint Antonin, one day he also called himself, at least he recalled
that he had been called Saint Tarto, T-a-r-t-o (OC 26:73), replac-
ing thereby the a (a-u-d) that followed art by an o. Another per-
secuting permutation, here/there, there/here: O/A, fort/da, da/
fort, Artaud.

I have been suffering for some months. I am suffering, yet I take

pleasure in an obsession that I vaguely hoped to be rid of today:
incessantly I hear him blaming me. Taking me to court and
putting me on trial. Accuser and plaintiff, but always drawing,
always in the process of drawing his lines, he would be indulg-
ing himself right here in what might be called action-drawing.
Against me and against you as well. But for you it’s something
else, another story. Incessantly I project this scene and hear the
voice of Artaud. I see nothing, I see no one, but I hear him.
He cries out at me.
And time shifts into reverse. As if all my ritual visits to MoMA,
for decades now, had been destined to the somewhat distracted
inspection of these gallery places in view of preparing a solemn
visitation, here, on a strange day, on the occasion of an anniver-
sary. Not the visitation or visible apparition of Antonin Artaud
in a temple of the visual arts; not the assumption of the revenant
Artaud into the heaven of the New World or the great sperm bank
of painting; not the abduction or kidnapping of Saint Artaud in
this house of worship of modern art. No, rather the return of
Artaud-Mômo, the specter of his voice whose body, by sacred
 72 Y Artaud the Moma

mission or commission, it would be my job to play at guarding

for a moment, the bodyguard, right here, of a voice from beyond-
the-grave and more alive than ever, as if I had been sent to occupy
an impossible place on the American front by my friend Paule
Thévenin (she from whom I would have sought advice and who
would have said to me, from her very fresh grave, as she did one
day in 1966, I will never forget, on the eve of a lecture on Artaud
in Parma, during a university theater festival: “Jacques, go ahead,
I cannot go myself, someone must respond to the invitation, I
would rather it be you, one never knows what might happen with
these professors he detested”;19 this time, she would have added,
“especially over there, in America, where so many hippies and
beatniks have also grabbed onto Artaud so they can indulge in a
mimetic and identificatory gesticulation, some of them going so
far, in their incredible anthology, as to attribute to him portraits
of Gina Lollabrigida by a Czech neurotic! You know what the
Americas were for him, for there is more than one, even in North
America.”20 “What is more,” she would have perhaps gone on to
say, if I let her or made her speak, “as for you, you often go to
America, you know it better than I do. Didn’t you give your
first American lecture in Baltimore, the very year of your lecture
on Artaud in Parma? And didn’t you go, on that occasion, to visit
the ghost of Poe in his own house?” That’s true, I would have
said to her, and with these words I would have reminded her of
a few pages in the “L’histoire vécue d’Artaud-Mômo.” Written
for the lecture at the Vieux Colombier, they situate once again, in
a somewhat dreamlike geography, America, Baltimore, and Edgar
Poe. America is not “big brother” but the “father-mother” of the
“present world.” I select from this “vision” only a few lines, but
once again it is to invite you to reread it all:

Conscience, conscience is easily said, conscience, as for me I

have never figured out very well from which side to take hold of
 Artaud the Moma Z 73

that there cat, for the very good reason that it doesn’t have one. . . .
I’m pursued by a vision. I am in Baltimore on the bank of the
Hudson, I haven’t got a cent, I’m starving, drunk with rage against
America I would like to checkmate it.
For it is America that for me now has become conscience.
Not mine, not that of a steer, a soul, a spirit, a body, an elephant,
no,
the conscience of the present world, much more so than mod-
ern Soviet Russia, I think that it is truly America that holds this
conscience, filtered, passed through the sieve and the sifter, the
conscience of the present world,
which one?
that of the outside and the inside,
of the bottom, the background, the face,
of the surface of repression
or of that little hardened cyst on the gum of the inside,
for what are Americans?
Emigrants condemned by one world and who went and pitched
their tent elsewhere. . . .
they believed in their humanity,
the father-mother, the family, society, no god, no institutions
of principle, no genesis, no atavistic cosmos, the atavism of the
grandparents outside the world that holds you within,
in short all of democracy,
the commandment of the last to come,
the people, against things, god, and life,
I don’t know whether a single authentic Puritan will recognize
himself in this picture,
it is nonetheless the case that it was the mood of the first insur-
gents in America who were far, ultra-far from finding a people at
their level,
today American conscience always wants the family, wants
very much the society of families, and science to replace god. . . .
 74 Y Artaud the Moma

Stirring these ideas about, on the banks of the Hudson, I felt

myself reach the final limits of an impossible suffocation.
It is nevertheless you who suicided Edgar Poe because he did
not conform to your idea of public freedoms, and man is his mas-
ter but you were never his.

( OC 26:94–95)

The bodyguard of Artaud’s voice—which I am not and do

not wish to be but which I have perhaps acted for once—sees
nothing but he lends an ear. Within earshot, I hear Artaud in his
own tone launching invective, cursing, mocking or denouncing,
blaspheming, swearing—and counterswearing, conjuring. Ful-
minating, thundering. Against everything: America, the United
States of America, Art, the Museum, Modernity, MoMA. Espe-
cially MoMA in which Artaud the Mômo would have right
away identified the malevolent figure of the great expropriator
and the expert in curiosities of witchcraft, another “Museum of
Magus Sorcerers and AL- / CHEMISTS.” Right here today, I
imagine, the eruption would have been volcanic; he would have
yelled at you without consideration, he would have assaulted us
with invective, he would perhaps have thrown imprecations in
our face, while inventing them on the fly, unique and inimitable,
unreproducible imprecations that would have been formed or
deformed and meant for this place and this time, here, today,
cruel glossopoetic interjections. Yes, let us keep this word inter-
jections, because it at least passes between our two languages, in
order to say how Artaud-Mômo would have attempted in his turn
to interdict this manifestation, this exposition, this exhibition.
I impose on this word interjection a brief stasis so as to arrest
two of its three meanings. I free it first of all—this is the contract
I made with myself—from everything that leads it back toward
 Artaud the Moma Z 75

the semantic family of the jet, the jetty, ejaculation, the projec-
tion, the projectile—or the frenzied subjectile. Even though inter-
jection has the meaning of a word or a piece of word, namely, the
syllable or cry that one jettisons so as to shout in exclamation
while interrupting the sense or the sentence or the other, even
though one may be tempted to term interjections all of Artaud’s
poems, which come from no identifiable language and seem to
send waves through his whole poetic oeuvre and all his drawings,
let us direct the derivation of the word toward that which, in the
language of the law, designates in the course of an action, that
is, a lawsuit, the procedure of the appeal interjected when the
injury and the injustice risk being authorized, then stabilized,
and finally legitimated by an earlier judgment. One then inter-
jects an appeal to put an end to the ill-judged thing, with a view
toward rising up against the judgment of all judges, those of the
Court, the Churches, the State, the Family, or Society, against
the criterion of all those who take an oath and judge, all those who
swear and conjure, who criticize, evaluate, diagnose: doctors, espe-
cially psychiatrists, art critics, literary critics, moralists and priests,
professors, all secretly warranted by some judgment of god with
which the final interjection would like to have done. Through
the counterdemonstration of a prosecutor’s-defense attorney’s
final argument and of a counterinitiate’s counterconjuration on
appeal, Artaud-Mômo, Artaud the madman-child, Mômo the
kid (le môme), would have with his own voice and his whole body
protested so as to interrupt, interpose himself, interject himself
in appeal against so many indictments: for another himself whose
blows and wounds, whose electrocuted body and barely cauter-
ized scars we are keeping here. It so happens, precisely in Interjec-
tions (as always, a thoroughly elaborated text in the very launching
of its irrepressible jet), that Artaud replaced the word coup by
the word corps (body) twice in a row, as if it were more or less the
 76 Y Artaud the Moma

same thing, a synonym and almost a homonym (OC 14:12, 251n12).

Elsewhere he lets them double each other and reverberate in
each other:

OF THE BODY,
no fear,
no impressions,
OF THE BODY,
OF THE BLOWS,
OF THE BLOWS,
of individuality . . .

( OC 14:162–63)

[DU CORPS,
pas de peur,
pas d’impressions,
DU CORPS,
DES COUPS,
DES COUPS,
de l’individualité . . . ]

I had to begin by listening, by playing for you so you could

hear in his own language and according to his voice the merci-
less complaints of Antonin Artaud, these grievances and these
imprecations. These interjections. First of all because never before,
when finding myself faced with drawings or paintings, although
unable to face them, never have I heard so many voices, never have
I felt myself called, yelled at, touched, provoked, torn apart by
the incisive and lacerating acuteness of a broadside of interjec-
tions so justly adjusted to their addressee. As if, first of all, they
were addressing me so as to conduct my trial. Never, for me at
 Artaud the Moma Z 77

least, will the paper support of a work of visual art, as you say here,
have been perforated, never will it have been consumed by the
inflamed signature of such an incontestable voice.
Poor Artaud who said one day:

No.
I did not know what I would suffer.
And now enough and for all time.
You will judge no more.

( OC 26:34)

Poor Artaud. What is happening to him! He will have been

spared nothing, this Mômo. Nothing. Not even the survival of
his specter, not even the most equivocal, and cruelly ambiguous,
the most vain and most anachronistic revenge.
 AF TERWORD
Kaira M. Cabañas

B
y the time of his lecture on the exhibition of Antonin
Artaud’s drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in
October 1996, Jacques Derrida had published a few essays
on Artaud, the “La parole soufflée” (1965) and “The Theater of
Cruelty and the Closure of Representation” (1966).1 But it is with
“To Unsense the Subjectile” (1986) that Derrida first engages
Artaud’s drawings and portraits, offering a meditation on the
“coming-to-be” of Artaud’s untranslatable concept of the subjec-
tile: as that which underlies both language and art, as sup-
port and surface, as above and below, and as something that is
not representable.2 Derrida describes Artaud’s continual bodily
struggle with language, his writing-drawing (written drawings),
as well as his resistance to describing works of art. In fact, Artaud
preferred to call his visual work “documents.” Echoing Artaud,
Derrida affirms, “We won’t be describing any paintings,” for to
do so would be to circumscribe their effects within the realm of
representation that Artaud continually raged against.3 Artaud the
Moma shares the earlier text’s meditation on art and subjectivity,
drawing and writing, and similarly offers an extended analysis of
Artaud’s portraits and drawings, a probing account of an admit-
tedly challenging corpus.
 80 Y K air a M. Cabañas

Beyond what Artaud the Moma provides as a model for thinking

the relation between writing and drawing and the performative
force of Artaud’s work, the lecture also serves as an important
historical record, one that summons the challenge that Artaud
posed to Derrida and, through him, to the museum and to art
history. Hence the most significant difference between Artaud
the Moma and the earlier “To Unsense the Subjectile” is Derrida’s
consideration of the institutional frame: what it meant for the
Museum of Modern Art to exhibit Artaud’s drawings and for
him to speak of the drawings in that context in 1996.4 As Derrida
makes clear, the “Moma” in the work’s title evokes both the
museum and Artaud’s return to Paris as “Mômo” in 1946 after
nine years of internment in various asylums throughout France.
Derrida reminds us that at different moments Artaud referred to
himself as Satan, as the Antichrist, as le Mômo, and as Artaud-
Mômo. With the multiplicity of the figure that he traces, Derrida
stages a challenge to the modernist museum’s premium on orig-
inality and singularity. Insofar as Derrida introduces the ques-
tion of the museum frame, he also tasks himself with describing
the singularity of Artaud’s coup, or blow, as the means by which—
through violent marks, literal burns on the support, and what he
called “deliberately botched” drawings—he waged against repro-
duction and all institutional appropriations, be it the family or
the museum. The force of Artaud’s language derives not from the
successful fulfillment of conventions but from a dogged attempt
to embody language in gesture, to harness graphic traces toward
performative ends. Derrida resuscitates the cruel singularity of
Artaud’s coup to in turn “cruelly expose, I mean exhibit this
[MoMA] exhibition.” That the work’s blow was not exhausted
in the act and paradoxically survives as traces on a support that
can be on display leads Derrida to declare that “this salvation
also means loss” and how this loss is “no doubt the cruelest fate
of the cruelty out of which Artaud will have made his theater.”
 Afterword Z 81

It is the contradiction between the singularity of the blow

and its double status as act and trace that drives much of the
lecture. Derrida’s account of Artaud’s redoubled blow also derives
further impact from the historical and biographical fact that
Gaston Ferdière, Artaud’s psychiatrist, administered electro-
shock therapy to him. But Ferdière was also an advocate of his
patients’ art: Ferdière collected their work, exhibited it, and also
loaned it to surrealist exhibitions, and even claimed himself to be
the inventor of art therapy. By 1946 he had assembled a notable
collection and tried to persuade Artaud to include his drawings
in the Exposition d’œuvres de malades mentaux (Exhibition of
works by the mentally ill) at the Centre psychiatrique Sainte-
Anne, which included works culled from his collection. Although
he was under Ferdière’s care at the time, Artaud’s drawings were
not exhibited, even though it was precisely in the clinical context
that Artaud returned to drawing.5
Upon Artaud’s release from the psychiatric asylum in Rodez
and return to Paris in May 1946, artist Jean Dubuffet voluntarily
presided over the Société des Amis d’Antonin Artaud. The soci-
ety sponsored a series of events that framed Artaud’s return to
Parisian social life, including the exhibition of Artaud’s drawings
at the Galerie Pierre in 1947 (the only exhibition of his drawings
during his lifetime; many of which were included in the 1996
MoMA exhibition). Dubuffet rejected not only the association
of Artaud’s work with psychopathological studies, and thus the
exhibition taking place at Sainte-Anne, but also the association
of Artaud’s work with his collection of Art Brut, of which some
of the objects had been made by psychiatric patients. He writes:
“I find Antonin Artaud very cultured, not at all Art Brut.”6 And
while Dubuffet echoed Artaud’s refusal to have his drawings
inscribed within a psychiatric context, as Denis Hollier explains,
such a stance “did not prevent reviewers and critics from mention-
ing Artaud’s stay in mental institutions every time they referred
 82 Y K air a M. Cabañas

to him for years to come.”7 The year of his exhibition, Artaud

also entered the debate on the relation between art and madness
with the publication of his slim volume Van Gogh le suicidé de la
société (Van Gogh: The man suicided by society, 1947), a vitriolic
critique of psychiatric practice that also offers some of the most
precise formal and materialist readings of Vincent van Gogh’s
paintings. Artaud describes how society invented psychiatry
“to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior
lucidities” and poses the question “what is a genuine lunatic?” To
which he responds “a man whom society has not wanted to
heed and whom it has wanted to keep from uttering unbear-
able truths.” He affirms that it is not “conformisms of manners
and morals that Van Gogh’s painting attacks but those of insti-
tutions themselves.”8
Yet if Van Gogh attacked institutions, it was not by means of
what his paintings represent but rather how he paints. For Artaud:
“Van Gogh will prove to have been the most utter painter of all
painters, the only one who did not want to go beyond painting
as the strict means of his work and the strict frame of his means”;
“A painter, nothing but a painter, Van Gogh took hold of the
means of pure painting and he did not go beyond them”; “this
painter who is only a painter, and who is more of a painter than
the other painters, as if he were a man in whom the material,
the paint, has a place of prime importance”; “this painter who is
nothing but a painter is also the one painter of all the painters
born who makes us most forget that we are dealing with painting.”9
It is a text in which Artaud, as in the conclusion to his censored
radio program Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu (To Have
Done with the Judgment of God, 1948), also inscribes his own sub-
jectivity and historical circumstances: “I will never again, without
committing a crime, tolerate hearing anyone say to me: ‘Monsieur
Artaud, you’re raving,’ as has so often happened to me.”10
 Afterword Z 83

By the time of his final interview on February 28, 1948, Artaud

confessed, “I have been haunted for so long, haunt-ed by a kind
of writing that is not the norm. I would like to write outside of
grammar, to find a means of expression beyond words. And I
occasionally believe that I am very close to that expression . . .
but everything pulls me back to the norm.”11 Artaud continually
struggled against the appropriation of his speech, even when the
voice of the body, his body as a ghost, continually returns through
his recorded voice in Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu. It is
Artaud’s recorded voice that can be heard when one listens to the
recording of Derrida’s lecture in MoMA’s archive; it was played
at the lecture’s beginning and end. Listening to the lecture at a
more than a twenty-year temporal remove, one notes how Artaud
the Moma’s tour de force arrives at the lecture’s conclusion. Der-
rida conjures a scene, one in which he imagines being haunted
by Artaud’s specter when writing the lecture. He also describes
how he could not stop thinking about Artaud listening to what
he was going to say at the museum: “Right here today, I imagine,
the eruption would have been volcanic; he would have yelled at
you without consideration, he would have assaulted us with invec-
tive, he would perhaps have thrown imprecations in our face.”
Derrida places Artaud’s specter at the scene of writing, but also,
through the recording, at the scene of his lecture at MoMA and
his address to the audience.
The stakes of this redoubled spectrality are further put in relief
when one considers how Artaud, when publishing Van Gogh le
suicidé de la société, engaged in a near complete identification with
the painter so as to portray Van Gogh’s practice independent of
his clinical biography but also inscribe therein his own relation
to art, society, and psychiatry. In contrast, Derrida’s engagement
with Artaud is marked by an admiration, but also a profound
disidentification. As if in mirrored inversion to the Artaud–Van
 84 Y K air a M. Cabañas

Gogh association, Derrida describes his relation with Artaud as

one of a “reasoned detestation,” an “essential antipathy,” granting
Artaud the status of his “privileged enemy.” Yet Derrida’s antip-
athy, which he confesses he had harbored for over thirty years,
also entails an alliance. He explains that before blaming Artaud
for his metaphysical rage one must: “lay blame on a machination,
on the social, medical, psychiatric, judicial, ideological machine, on
the machine of the police . . . on a philosophical-political net-
work that allied itself with more obscure forces so as to reduce
this living lightning to a body that was bruised, tortured, rent,
drugged, and above all electrocuted by a nameless suffering, an
unnamable passion to which no other resource remained than to
rename and reinvent language.”
Almost forty years after their debate on madness began, Der-
rida’s ethical turn to the machinations of a philosophical-politi-
cal network echoes the earlier work of his other “enemy”: Michel
Foucault. Much ink has been spilled on the exchange between
Derrida and Foucault around the latter’s publication of The His-
tory of Madness (1961).12 In this context, I would like to recall,
albeit briefly, that, at the time, the primary issue for Derrida was
not that madness was expulsed during the Classical Age, but
that madness is always already internal to reason. For Derrida,
Foucault isolated madness while nonetheless claiming to make
it speak for itself. In “Cogito and the History of Madness” Der-
rida affirms how nothing can escape this language of reason that
Foucault aimed to put on trial. He observes how such a trial
would be impossible given how “the articulation [of ] the pro-
ceedings and the verdict unceasingly reiterate the crime.”13 That
is, Foucault repeats the initial act of separation his book aims to
trace. He silences the silences he hopes to reveal.
What I would like to draw attention to here, to the degree
that it is a passage that finds resonance in Artaud the Moma, is
 Afterword Z 85

how when speaking of the work of art Foucault holds at bay an

artist’s madness to instead speak of a historic reversal inaugu-
rated by the work of figures such as Vincent van Gogh and
Antonin Artaud. Foucault writes, “Henceforth and through the
mediation of madness, it is the world that becomes guilty . . . in
relation to the œuvre: it is now arraigned by the œuvre, con-
strained to speak its language, and obliged to take part in a pro-
cess of recognition and reparation, to find an explanation for this
unreason, and explain itself before it.”14 Here painting reveals
neither the truth of madness nor the truth of reason but serves
as a medium through which to challenge reason’s silencing of
madness. It follows that such paintings put us on trial.
To counter the silence of MoMA’s galleries and the visual
language of its display, Derrida allied himself with Artaud, his
written drawings, and literally channeled his speech. In the
course of the lecture, Artaud appears as a kind of conflagration,
as a “dangerous, mortal, exceptional lightning” that seeks to
engage “a history of art whose concept he will have sought to
attack and virtually destroy.” But, for Derrida, Artaud’s relentless
struggle against representation, against masterpieces, against
artistic and all filiations is indissociable from the philosophical-
political network that reduced his force to a mere sign to be
classified and archived. Derrida’s lecture extends from the his-
torical philosophical-political network to the contemporary
“crime” committed against Artaud by the art-institutional frame.
He holds the museum’s expropriations accountable; it mum-
mifies and classifies, assimilates Artaud’s work to its language
and categories, consequently taming the work’s performative
force. To be sure, Derrida accounts for the singularity of the blow,
all the while attentive to its paradoxical survival, a survival upon
which its taming in the space of the museum unwittingly
depends.
 86 Y K air a M. Cabañas

When faced with such works, such blows, Derrida implicitly

asks what kind of viewers Artaud’s drawings call upon us to be.
It is not an innocent question, and it is a question with particular
critical purchase today, for which we owe a debt to Artaud, to
Derrida, as well as to their ghosts. While Artaud’s work may
have been denied status as Art Brut, the relevance of Derrida’s
lecture from the perspective of art history and criticism could be
extended, I argue, beyond Artaud and to the recent trend to
include modern psychiatric patients’ work in global art biennials.
Often the inclusion of outsider art is read as a progressive move
within the modern and/or contemporary art institution, and in
the early 2010s one witnesses how the art of “madness,” “out-
sider,” and “self-taught,” became the “new” in the contemporary
global circuit and included in exhibitions that turned to beauty,
the poetic, and imagination as unifying themes. In these contexts
the work of outsider artists, many of them individuals who had
experienced psychic suffering and created their work in the con-
text of an asylum, are legitimated within the contemporary art
system. Yet this legitimation, which is also an assimilation of the
work to the language of art history and its formal categories and
thus a silencing of the work’s original meanings and values, occurs
at the expense of what we might learn from the specificity of the
work’s contemporaneity vis-à-vis the historicity of the psychiat-
ric institution—that is, the very modern philosophical-political
network that aimed to separate psychiatric patients and their
madness from the world.15 In the face of the social, commercial,
ideological, and global curatorial network that has expanded to
uncritically incorporate such work, and in which “madness”
appears as the system’s final frontier, perhaps we should revisit
Artaud’s query, which was nestled at the border of the face
depicted in Portrait of Jany de Ruy (1947) and with which Derri-
da’s Artaud the Moma begins: “And who / today will say / what?”
 NOTES

Preface
1. The present translation is published without illustrations. The refer-
ences for the reproduced works are to two sources: Jacques Derrida and
Paule Thévenin, Antonin Artaud: Dessins et portraits (Paris: Gallimard/
Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1986); and Margit Rowell, ed., Antonin
Artaud: Works on Paper (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996).

Artaud the Moma

1. Antonin Artaud, Œuvres complètes, 14 (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 86.
Henceforth references to this edition will be given in parentheses in the
text as OC followed by volume and page numbers.
2. See Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Reli-
gion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Jacques
Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002),
40–101.
3. Antonin Artaud, “Dix ans que le langage est parti,” in Luna-Park 5
(Brussels, 1979).
4. Paule Thévenin, “Entendre/voir/lire,” in Antonin Artaud, ce désespéré qui
nous parle (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 238.
5. “Here lies” (“Ci-Gît”), trans. Clayton Eshleman and Bernard Bador, in
Watchfiends and Rack Screams [Suppôts et suppliciations] (Boston: Exact
Change, 1995), 193 (translation modified).
 88 Y Artaud the Moma

6. Thévenin, “Entendre/voir/lire,” 238.

7. A part of this diary was published with the title En compagnie d’Antonin
Artaud (Paris: Flammarion, 1974).
8. See Paule Thévenin’s note, in Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin,
Artaud: Dessins et portraits (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 266.
9. See Jacques Derrida, “Forcener le subjectile,” ibid.
10. Portraits et dessins par Antonin Artaud (Paris: Galérie Pierre, 1947).
11. June 1947, manuscript version copyright © Gallimard, quoted in
Antonin Artaud: Dessins (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987), 44.
12. OC, which assembles all these texts, 212.
13. The “counterblow,” merely a “counterblow” is, moreover, how Artaud
defines his “feelings” in an extraordinary passage of L’histoire vécue
d’Artaud-Mômo that one would have to analyze word for word: “My
feelings are merely the counterblow of an old clash of bones, an organic
tearing, / moreover I know nothing about it and I no longer want to
know it, / I want to know absolutely nothing any longer, / I feel pain
from everything and I’ve had enough, / and I think that thinking must
disappear.” The following page protests (therefore) against the very
frequent suspicion of mysticism, and does so in the name of the being-
present of what is (present) but as “present nothingness.” The “Shit to
that” that punctuates the declaration of war takes on its full meaning
of “shit to ontology” as “shit to mysticism”: “I who do not believe in
the spirit . . . and who do not believe in consciousness . . . I who want the
body to live without haste, without end . . . I’m supposedly a mystic?
Shit / to that. / Finally I cannot be a mystic because I believe only in what
is and not in what will be . . . and I have never considered the future, / but
the immediate and present nothingness, / my present body . . . beating,
annihilating, and creating in the present nothingness” (OC 2:40–41).
14. “Le visage humain” (end of June 1947), in Antonin Artaud: Dessins, 50
(emphases added).
15. On this episode and its probable context, see OC 14:137.
The translation of this and subsequent transcriptions of the Sorts
do not attempt to represent the destruction of parts of words.—Trans.
16. For example, but it would be necessary to read and reread the whole
dossier of Artaud the Mômo, up to the haunting as denial of haunting
(the “this is not just” of the denial) and the sarcasms against the archivist-
collector-amateur of sperm: “If I wake up every morning with a fright-
ful smell of come around me, it’s not because I’ve been succubused all
 Afterword Z 89

night by golems, specters, vampires, angels, and spirits from the fucking
rubbish heap of a beyond, but because men from this

world and not from the other give each other the signal in their
‘perisprit’
rubbing of their full balls on the canal of their well-rubbed and
well-grabbed
anus,
so as to pump out my life.
Your sperm is very good, a cop at the Dôme said to me one day in the
tone of a dilettant taster . . . ”

17. Werner Hamacher, “Expositions of the Mother: A Quick Stroll

Through Various Museums,” in Thomas Keenan, ed., The End(s) of the
Museum (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1996).
18. He names Heidegger in this passage: “this unheard-of problem: it is
Arthur Adamov, the same one, who posed it for the first time. On another
level than Dostoievsky, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and above them
all, from a distance, that lady, newly come before Jesus-Christ, / two
thousand years before Jesus-Christ, that is called illness . . . ” (October
10, 1946, OC 24:65).
19. These belong to the “sect of the innumerable necrophages that fill
churches, police stations, army barracks, prisons, hospitals, university
faculties, laboratories, and insane asylums, / priests, rabbis, brahmins,
imams, lamas, bonzes, popes, pastors, cops, doctors, professors, and sci-
entists, / and now the sacrosanct institutions, the sacrosanct laws . . . ”
This long indictment (that must be read in extenso) rejects—or reduces
thus to the same conspiracy, to its single principle—every other theory,
every other politics, every other other knowledge, that of Freudian psy-
choanalysis in particular (OC 2:33 ff.).
20. See Antonin Artaud, Anthology, ed. Jack Hirschman (San Francisco:
City Lights, 1965), 102–4.

Afterword
1. See “La parole soufflée” (1965) and “The Theater of Cruelty and the
Closure of Representation” (1966), in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan
Bass, 2d ed. (London: Routledge, 2001), 212–45, and 292–316. The MoMA
 90 Y Afterword

archival record dates the lecture Thursday, October 10, 1996. Derrida
dates it October 16, 1996.
2. Jacques Derrida, “Forcener le subjectile,” in Paule Thévenin and Jacques
Derrida, Antonin Artaud: Dessins et portraits (Paris: Gaillimard, 1986),
55–108; “To Unsense the Subjectile,” in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud,
trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 60–157.
3. “To Unsense the Subjectile,” 71.
4. Derrida returns to the subject of his lecture in interview in 2001. See
Évelyne Grossman, Entretien avec Jacques Derrida, “Artaud, oui . . . ,”
Europe 873–74 ( January–February 2002): 23–38.
5. See the discussion in Denis Hollier, “The Artaud Case. Part 2: The
Case History,” in Specters of Artaud: Language and the Arts in the 1950s,
ed. Kaira M. Cabañas (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofía, 2012), 236; and Sylvère Lotringer, “Who Is Doctor Ferdière,” in
his Mad Like Artaud, trans. Joanna Spinks (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015
[2003]), 129–30.
6. Jean Dubuffet to Roger Caloni, September 27, 1968, reproduced in
Artaud et l’asile 2: Le cabinet du docteur Ferdière, ed. Laurent Danchin
(Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Séguier, 1996), 115 (my translation).
7. Hollier, “The Artaud Case,” 236. Hollier’s statement also applies to the
reviews of the MoMA exhibition. See, for example, Donald Kuspit,
“‘Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper’ (insane artist),” Artforum Interna-
tional 35, no. 5 ( January 1997): 80+.
8. Antonin Artaud, “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society” (1947), in
The Trembling Lamb: Antonin Artaud, Carl Solomon, LeRoi Jones (New
York: 1959), 2–4 (translation modified).
9. Ibid., 15–17.
10. Ibid., 22 (emphasis added).
11. Jean Desternes, “Dernière visite à Antonin Artaud,” in Le Figaro lit-
téraire, March 13, 1948, 3.
12. Michel Foucault, The History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and
Jean Khalfa (New York: Routledge, 2006 [1961]). To Derrida’s “Cogito
and the History of Madness” (1963), Foucault responded with “My
Body, This Paper, This Fire” (1972), reproduced in The History of Mad-
ness, 550–74. Derrida responded in turn with “‘To Do Justice to Freud’:
The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis” (1992), published
on the occasion of a volume to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary
 Afterword Z 91

of Foucault’s work. Published in English in Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2

(Winter 1994): 227–66. For a critical engagement with the Foucault-
Derrida debate on madness, see, for example, Shoshana Felman, “Mad-
ness and Philosophy or Literature’s Reason,” in Yale French Studies, no.
52, Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy (1975): 206–28;
and Roy Boyne, Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason (New
York: Routledge, 1990).
13. Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” 41–42.
14. Foucault, The History of Madness, 537.
15. Psychiatric patients’ work was exhibited in the specific cases of the
Eleventh Lyon Biennial (2011), the Thirtieth Bienal de São Paulo (2012),
and the Fifty-fifth Venice Biennale (2013). This global turn to outsider art
and the art of modern psychiatric patients also often perpetuates an
anachronistic approach to the psychiatric institution that does not address
changes in psychiatric practice. For example, The Encyclopedic Palace (the
Fifty-fifth Venice Biennale) upheld an ahistoricized notion of inner vision
and at the same time failed to account for critiques of psychiatric author-
ity. In the biennial host country, such an evasion seemed particularly
glaring given the central role of Italian Franco Basaglia in the antipsy-
chiatric and deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
I take up this subject in chapter 5 of my forthcoming book, “Learning
from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art.”
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kaira M. Cabañas

M
arguerite Derrida and Éditions Galilée graciously
agreed to this English translation of the French
Artaud le Moma (2003). Peggy Kamuf, Derrida’s
trusted translator, deserves special credit for her careful work
on this volume. What is more, Kamuf was no stranger to the text:
she translated the original lecture and was present when Jacques
Derrida delivered it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
in 1996. At Columbia University Press, I would like to thank
publisher Wendy Lochner for her enthusiasm and backing of
the project, as well as the Press’s excellent editorial staff. I am
further grateful to two anonymous reviewers who supported the
translation.
Artaud the Moma and my work as editor benefited from sub-
vention support from the University of Florida College of the Arts
and Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman
Endowment). With regard to my afterword, Jesús Fuenmayor,
Rachel Silveri, and graduate students in my Critical/Clinical/
Curatorial seminar at the University of Florida provided feed-
back on an early version, while Peggy Kamuf, Denis Hollier, and
an anonymous reader for Éditions Galilée endorsed its final
form. Finally, I must single out art historian Branden W. Joseph
 94 Y K air a M. Cabañas

for first drawing my attention to Derrida’s lecture on Artaud’s

drawings and to its unpublished status in English. Thank you,
Branden, for encouraging me to pursue this publication and for
giving me an opportunity to bring back another specter.
 Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, eds., The Don Giovanni Moment:
Essays on the Legacy of an Opera

Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on

Theodor W. Adorno

Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, edited by Santiago Zabala,

translated by Luca D’Isanto

John T. Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language

Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions

Richard Eldridge, Life, Literature, and Modernity

Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty

Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the

History of Aesthetic Theory

Christoph Menke, Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to

Beckett, translated by James Phillips

György Lukács, Soul and Form, translated by Anna Bostock and

edited by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis with an
introduction by Judith Butler

Joseph Margolis, The Cultural Space of the Arts and the

Infelicities of Reductionism

Herbert Molderings, Art as Experiment: Duchamp and the

Aesthetics of Chance, Creativity, and Convention

Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from

Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond

Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory

Ewa Păonowska Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in

Modern Thought and Aesthetics

Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media,

translated by Carsten Strathausen

Michael Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art

Stefan Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the
Masses from Revolution to Fascism

Elaine P. Miller, Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and

Art in Depressed Times
 Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an
Aesthetic of Radical Contemporaneity

John Roberts, Photography and Its Violations

Hermann Kappelhoff, The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism

Cecilia Sjöholm, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things

Owen Hulatt, Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and

Aesthetic Truth: Texture and Performance

James A. Steintrager, The Autonomy of Pleasure:

Libertines, License, and Sexual Revolution