Culture and Cruelty in Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Artaud by Max Statkiewicz

Author:Max Statkiewicz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LEXINGTON BOOKS

Chapter 3

Purification of Cruelty in Antonin Artaud

“Artaud kept himself as close as possible to the limit: the possibility and impossibility of pure theater.”1 Jacques Derrida celebrated thus the work of Antonin Artaud. Artaud was also the one who actually opposed culture, or civilization, to cruelty. The former, currently in crisis, needs the latter in order to not only maintain itself, but to progress and blossom, to draw from it the force of life: “What is most important, it seems to me is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger.”2 Hunger, desire, or cruelty, the primal forces of life (cruor—blood) should play a crucial role in the f/act of culture. As Derrida writes, quoting Artaud: “Le théâtre de la cruauté n’est pas une représentation. C’est la vie elle-même en ce qu’elle a d’irreprésentable. La vie est l’origine non représentable de la représentation. “J’ai donc dit ‘cruauté’ comme j’aurais dit ‘vie’.”3 Hunger and cruelty should unite what was artificially disjoint. Artaud’s critique of modern Western culture is as harsh as that of Nietzsche’s. In most general terms, it is characterized by “a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation.”4 This culture is that of indifferent spectatorship (Aristotle’s theatēs—spectator, quintessence of the theoretical man, Artaud’s “pipping Tom”—voyeur). Words acquired a separate status, an ideological, rhetorical force, independent of their magical involvement with things. Artaud has a primary physical abhorrence of Western culture, which he associates with the white color of the skin: “we (Europeans) give off an odor as white as gathering of pus in an infected wound. As iron can be heated until it turns white, so it can be said that everything excessive is white; for Asians white has become the mark of extreme decomposition.”5 White is also the color of indifference, of white-washing the colors of life. The characterization of our culture is that of indifference. “To our disinterested and inert idea of art an authentic culture opposes a violently egoistic and magical, i.e., interested idea.”6 Authentic culture, that is, “culture-in-action” rejects indifference, and on the contrary, promotes difference: “This difference or determination as such is also cruelty.”7 “Cruelty is nothing but determination as such, that precise point at which the determined maintains its essential relation with the undetermined, that rigorous abstract line fed by chiaroscuro.”8 Difference determines the singularity of being, its uniqueness in respect to other beings. It does not consider difference from the outside, as it were, formally, transcendentally, at a certain distance. It is this comfortable distance from reality that Artaud suspects of destroying our culture. As Nietzsche, Artaud rejects the “systematic” culture, the “systems of thought,” “their number and contradictions characterize our old French and European culture: but where can it be shown that life, our life, has ever been affected by these systems?”9 The answer to this

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