MAD LIKE ARTAUD

Sylvere Lotringer

SYLVERE LOTRINGER

MAD LIKE ARTAUD

TRANSLATED

BY

JOANNA SPINKS

Fous d'Artaud
by Sylvere Lotringer
2003 , Sens&: Tonka

Translated by Joanna Spinks as

Mad Like Artaud
First Edition
Minneapolis 2 0 1 5 , Univocal Publishing
Published by Univocal
1 2 3 North 3rd Street, #202
Minneapolis, MN 5540 1
N o part of this book may b e reproduced o r transmitted i n any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any other information storage or retrieval system ,
without prior permission in writing from the publisher or owner.
Thanks to Hubert Tonka , Jordan Levinson ,
Jonathan Thomas, and Jon Thrower
Designed &: Printed by Jason Wagner
Distributed by the University of Minnesota Press
ISBN 978 1 93756 1 4 1 3
Library of Congress Control Number 2 0 1 5937 1 70

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I.

The Artaud Affair

Was Artaud Christian?

(Intro fiction)

II.

To Have Done With All judgment

I Talked About God With Antonin Artaud
I Talked With God About Antonin Artaud
(Interview with Jacques Latremoliere)

31

III. Clinical Cruelty

Who ls Doctor Ferdiere?
The Good Soul of Rodez
(Interview with Gaston Ferdiere)

127

IV.

197

All Paranoiacs

False Witnesses
(Interview with Paule Thevenin)
v.

Epilogue

Quiet Days in Ivry

(Fictional Interview with Antonin Artaud)

209

Not just anyone can go mad.

-Jacques Lacan

I. TH E ARTAUD AFFAIR

WAS ARTAUD CHRISTIAN?

No, he was Jewish, but the secret was well kept. There was always,
admittedly, something embarrassing about being a Jew in France,
especially for someone like Artaud who was raised in the Roman
Ca tholic Apos t o l i c t radi tion. Unfo r t u n a t e ly, the ge n e a l ogy
established by Paule Thevenin removes any trace of doubt: aside from
a few distant ancestors of French origin, Artaud was infact of Maltese,
Armenian, Levantine, and Greek blood-a mixed blood if there ever
was one; so he was a Jew, and a Christian in the bargain. 1
Artauds case was far from unique, especially during that interwar
period when the assimilation of French Jews often drove them into the
hands of the Church. The most fervent Christians, the only ones worthy
of the name, were recruited among the Jewish bourgeoisie. The wartime
conversion of Cardinal Lustiger of Paris, among others, con.firms this.
Celine saw this, and accused the Pope, and even God, of being Jewish.
Without getting too sidetracked with this, it is common knowledge that
Max Jacob was also actively recruiting in favor of the Church, which
didn't save him from dying in a concentration camp like Celines other
favorite target, Robert Desnos. Artaud owes his life to Desnos, since it
was he, we now know, who arranged Artauds passage to the free zone
and his transfer to Rodez in 1943. In light of the abuses that Artaud
could have experienced as a Jew, one might even consider that he was
quite lucky to be transferred to the Rodez asylum, where he was merely
1. Paule Thevenin, Antonin Artaud, ce Desespere qui vous parle, (Paris, Seuil, 1 993).

11

subjected to fifty electroshock comas, only got one fractured vertebra,

and spent a mere two months in bed recovering.
To get an idea of the kind of treatment Artaud would have
experienced if he'd been locked up in an actual camp, it suffices to read
the accounts of Primo Levi or of Robert Antelme, both of whom were
deported in 1943 and only spared extermination by the Nazis because
slave labor was becoming scarce.
Many Jewish families who assimilated early on, like that of Simone
Weil, covered their suspicious ancestry with a respectable agnosticism.
This was not the case with Artaud's parents who, having come from
the East and having remained faithful to the occult traditions of the
Marranos after their expulsion from Spain in 1492, professed a slightly
ostentatious, rigid Catholicism. How else could one explain the enormous
crucifix they put in young Antonins room, or their insistence on sending
him to high school at Sacre-Coeur in Marseille, run by the Marists?
It wasn't until fairly late, after he'd finished high school, that Artaud
was given his initiation into the truth about the family saga. Without
a doubt, like Simone Weil, he had until then naively believed, having read
it in Balzac and in a certain number of other French classics, that '']ew"
was just another word for usurer. One way or another, Artaud had
become well-versed in the Scriptures and sufficiently experienced in
matters offaith to hold the Jews collectively responsible for the murder
of Christ. How could he accept that he was one of the people that he had
been taught, for good reasons, to despise?
His reaction was violent. Thomas Maeder, Artauds biographer,
no tes that his personality underwent a radical transformation.
"He destroyed his writings and distributed his library, which he had
built up with great care, among his friends. He became extremely
pious and decided to become a priest, and for a while a professor
from the Sacre-Coeur used to come around to counsel him. The
previously expressive adolescent withdrew into himself, spending
whole days in his room praying fervently with his rosary beads. "2
It was at this time that Artaud began having health issues. He suffered
from horrible spells of vertigo and complained of intolerable
facial neuralgias. He was sent to multiple clinics and health resorts,
and spent the First World War-as he would spend the second-in
neuropsychiatric establishments.

2 . Thomas Maeder, Antonin Artaud, (Paris , Pion 19 78) , p. 30-3 1.

12

For Simone Weil the shock wasn't as harsh, at least at the time.
This revelation would mark her as well for the rest of her days, which
were luckily numbered. Although raised in the Jewish tradition, her
parents were self-proclaimed free thinkers and never hid anything from
her except their Jewish ancestry. This affirmation, relayed by Simone
Petrement, Weil'.s friend and biographer, is rather hard to believe
since the Jewish tradition was quite alive in her grandparents: Weil'.s
maternal grandfather still wrote poetry in Hebrew, and her maternal
grandmother went regularly to synagogue; she also came every week
to make sure that the couple was keeping strictly kosher. So one can
only marvel at Weil'.s surprise; in any case it shows how powerful her
family'.s denial was. The young philosopher apparently didn't know she
was Jewish until she was about eighteen years old, just like Antonin
Artaud. It was at that time that Weil also began to complain of
sev ere headaches. She refused all physical contact; she dreamt only of
sacrifi ce and purity. According to the fallowing anecdotes from Simone
Petrement, the slightest allusion to Weil'.s origins upset her, as was
the case when Petrement'.s father once made the innocent faux pas of
calling the young Weil "Ms. Levy. " Strangely enough, Petrement claims
to regret having asked her the meaning of the word "Yid, " which young
royalists would yell in the street. The embarrassment was reciprocal.
Pushing the ambient denial to its ultimate conclusions, Simone Weil
became, if not an anti-Semite like Celine, at least an enemy of Hebrews,
and above all, of herself. Luckily, her migraines ended up making life
impossible for her.
Isaac Deutscher writes somewhere about those last non-Jewish Jews
who "lived in the margins and interstices of their respective nations,
each being of the society without belonging to it. " Artaud was no more
an ordinary believer than Weil. He was neither Christian nor anti
Christian, but worse: a Jew who couldn't bear to call himself a Jew (he
used plenty of other names instead). Artaud and Weil were Gnostic
Jews, who turned their inability to believe into a way of challenging
the Christian God to exist. At Rodez this would lead Father Julien to
complain about Artaud'.s excessive zeal during confession; he avoided
Artaud like the plague and even quit holding weekly Mass at the
asylum, until Artaud abruptly renounced his faith in September 1944.
Dr. Bercher, with whom Weil used to discuss theology at the start of
the war, saw her thirst for purity with the same suspicion, detecting
in it the source of all sacrilege. Artaud and Weil were the kinds of
13

believers the Church could never tolerate, for they never ceased
to reject its legitimacy in the name of a Jewish proto-Christianity
whose existence the Church would prefer to forget. But the panicked
syncretism Artaud and Weil clung to could only have been a furious
denial of their own roots-and a simultaneous attack on Christianity.
"I will preach the return to Christ in the catacombs, which will be the
return of Christianity in the catacombs, " Artaud wrote in 1937. He then
added, "The apparent Catholicism will be demolished by idolatry and
the present Pope condemned to death as a traitor and a Simoniac. "3
Weil also resisted this "church patriotism" which had replaced the love
of God with "totalitarian religion. "
And she meant this li terally. In a revealing passage from
Waiting for God, Weil goes so far as to suggest that a "strong
exhilaration experienced as a member of the mystical Body of Christ"
could all too easily resemble fascism: "But today many other mystical
bodies, without Christ as their head, " she wrote, "instill in their members
intoxicating feelings of the same nature. '"' Weil considered Hitlerism, if
not a religion, at least an ersatz faith. "That was even, " she added,
"one of the main reasons for its strength. " Georges Bataille-who at
age eighteen had also dreamed of becoming a priest-was of the same
opinion. He immediately recognized in fascism the first serious rival
of the Christian religion-and he would remain fascinated by it for
a long time. As for Artaud, he never doubted that war-all wars
were religious in essence. "For me this isn't war, it is the apocalypse" he
declared in 1939. (Celine would express this in his own way, saying the
war was the Jews' fault. He wasn't the only one to think so.) In a famous
letter from 1943, Artaud would herald the coming of the Antichrist in
Hitler. He was greatly reproached for this, as if such delusions were his
alone. But was not the entire world implicated, starting with the French
people themselves? As early as 1939, Artaud was already mocking the
French "insiders " who were willing to give Paris up to the Fuhrer. Was
the stale old (and racist) figurehead Marshal Petain preferable to the
sword of the Antichrist?
It was often said that Artaud never experienced the war, that he was
cut offfrom the world, isolated in his own madness; doubly irresponsible.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Artaud experienced the
camps. The paradox is that he experienced them not as a Jew, but as a
3. Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres completes VII, (Paris, Gallimard , 1 982), p. 2 1 8.
4 . Simone Weil, Attente de Dieu, (La Colombe , Vieux-Colombier, 1 9 50) , p. 49.

14

madman. The diffe rence is not negligible, but it's not as insignificant as
one might think at first glance. Like so many other patients locked up
in psychiatric hospitals during the German occupation, Artaud went
through what Dr. Max Fafant called "soft extermination. "5 This dark
chapter in the history of French psychiatry wasn't dug up until half a
century later, only to be covered up again-it must have cast too harsh
a light on the internment conditions of mental patients under the Vichy
regime, which Artaud had the privilege of experiencing.
After his expulsion from Ireland, Artaud was transferred to the
psychiatric hospital of Sottesville-les-Rouen in October 1937, committed
to Sainte-Anne in Paris in April 1938, and finally transported in
a straitjacket to the psychiatric hospital at Ville-Evrard in the Paris
suburbs in February 1939. He remained confined there exactly four
years, until his providential transfer to Rodez in February 1943.
Providential, because, as Marthe Robert put it, Ville-Evrard turned out
to basically be a "charnel-house. " Patients, withering from starvation,
dropped like flies there.
Artaud didn't suffer too much during his first ten months at Ville
Evrard, but Maeder points out that the situation radically changed
after the mobilization of the hospital personnel; Artaud then found
himself in an overcrowded dormitory where the sick had to sleep on
the floor. With the public administration having eliminated all support
for psychiatric hospitals (they maintained it for other hospitals), food
supplies diminished rapidly. The psychiatric hospital at Ville-Evrard
had to "provide for its needs on its own during a period where nobody
was eating their fill. Given the circumstances, " Maeder continues,
"the administration managed extremely well, and only a mere fifteen or
twenty patients actually died from starvation. "
Those in charge in fact played dumb. The conditions of patients
there weren't much better than those in the extermination camps. Upon
entering, the patients ' heads were completely shaved, and usually their
pubic hair as well; they were then scrubbed down, and dressed in a sort
of thick canvas sack and given a pair of galoshes to wear. The patients
didn't have access to the institution's parks or gardens. They could be
seen turning in circles in the courtyard and under the Occupation their
situation quickly became frightening.
Danielle Sabourin-Sivadon, whose father was head doctor at
Ville-Evrard, later gave this firsthand account: "I must have arrived at
5. Max Lafont , rExtermination douce , (Lyon, l'Arepi, 1 9 8 1 ).

15

Vi!le-Evrard in forty-three. I was five years old. My father's sister

came back from Ravensbruck in total physical distress; they spoke
together at length and I know that for him it was quite a blow to
realize that in fact he was basically running a concentration camp
there, since nothing resembled a camp more than Ville-Evrard:
super-secure locked pavilions packed with people; recessed walls;
metal gates; barbed wire. In those days semiological separations
were in vogue. The disturbed ones in 6, the dangerous in 4, the
chronically ill in 5, the workers in 1, or something like that .. .
so the people involved really got a tasted of what the concentration camps
were like. All these things were really, really heavy for my father-that
they removed people's wedding rings, and just called people by their
names without ever saying 'Mister or Miss. "'6
Doctor Bonafe was even more specific: "It was at Vi!le-Evrard that
we discovered a pathology that became frequently discussed after the
survivors were freed Nazi concentration camps. Major weight loss,
with or without recurrences of latent tuberculosis, infections setting off
violent attacks of consumption raging through weakened organisms '
impaired immune systems; cases of major edema, where you could see
the skeletal bodies bloat up with water and then 'emptying' themselves
through incredible bouts of diarrhea. When we made our morning
'inspections' the dormitories stunk of corpses. "
It took a long time for anything to come to light about this quasi
concentration-camp world. This is partly due to the fact that many
documents from this time, including Artaud's writings, were destroyed
during the war. But there are other reasons for this silence. By
essentially throwing a veil over it, the indiffe rence and passivity of the
administrations running the psychiatric institutions of France was only
prolonged, who according to Edouard Herriot (who later experienced
them himself), viewed the patients as no more than "rejects. "
This was an attitude largely shared by the German medical corps.
It is known that in 1939, as part of a campaign promoting "the duty of
mental health, " Hitler secretly authorized a select number of German
doctors to practice a particular form of euthanasia targeting "life
unworthy of life. " The idea wasn't new, and it had attracted widespread
and fervent support in Europe and the United States (particularly
against the black community) since the end of the 191h century. It was
only in the time leading up to World War II, and the Nazi example,
6. Recherches, n . 3 1 , February 1 978.

16

that this enthusiasm for eugenics somewhat subsided. This doctrine can
be seen and is openly formulated in Man, The Unknown, a famous
work by Dr. Alexis Carrel, the Nobel Prize winner for medicine in
1912. The fact that Celine himself was a medical hygienist and had
also corresponded with Carrel is not unrelated to the inspiration
behind his pamphlets. Under the Nazi regime, the sterilization and
extermination of social "degenerates, " "defective" people, "parasites"
and the mentally ill, beginning with children and the elderly, gave a
completely new meaning to the term "racial hygiene. "7 It was, after
all, in German psychiatric hospitals under the control of the SS that
the methods of gassing and cremation eventually used in the death
camps were first tried out, in 1940. It would thus be diffic ult to say that
Artaud was untouched by the black plague that ravaged Europe. On the
contrary, he had, in so many words, a front row seat. This huge theatre
where an inhuman reality was being invented wasn't Artaud'.s, but it
had also been conceived to save a culture that had falien prey to "the
most extreme decomposition . . . . "
Hadn't Artaud foreseen in "The Theatre and the Plague" that the
disease could be spread remotely, and not merely by simple contact? And
he wasn't only speaking about the radio that Hitler used to fanaticize
crowds. After all, what were all of A rtaud's deliriums-like those
dreams of the viceroy of Sardinia-if not the emanations of that same
plague; the liberation of images of a spiritual sickness discharging itself
into the world with epidemic force? "Did the war, famine and epidemics
I predicted in May, 1933," Artaud wrote to jean Paulhan in 1946, "not
appear before the Theatre of Cruelty? How strange that no one accepted
Antonin Artaud's ideas or Antonin Artaud'.s invectives against evil and
its filth, but war, famine and camps are accepted, because they are now
a fact. "8 The patients of Ville-Evrard were not unaware of the danger
to which they were exposed. Maeder suggests they read newspapers
and were aware that the Germans had massacred the mentally ill in
Poland, which they had just invaded. "One night Artaud approached
Ms. Barrat (the intern at Vil!e-Evrard) and asked her, 'Are we going to
be killed?' But she didn't know." In fact, after one half-hearted search of
the hospital, the Germans never came back. The French psychiatrists
would finish the job. Their inertia in times of emergency shows how
7. In this regard, see: Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis,
(Cambridge, Mass , Harvard University Press, 1 988) .
8. Artaud, Oeuvres completes XI, p. 2 5 3 .

17

little value was placed on human life in the hospitals where Artaud was
confined until Dr. Ferdiere admitted him to Rodez.
The tone of various speeches made at the time provides an idea
of how blind the medical gaze had become. In a scholarly conjerence
held in 1943, doctors Jacques Vie and Pierre Marty had no problem
talking about "the resurgence of dietary instincts caused by starvation. "
They marveled at the emergence of appetite: they noted that madmen,
depressed patients and hypochondriacs had all begun to eat with no
diffi culty. "Since 1941, we've no longer had to practice artificial feeding. "
They then revealed the veritable existence of "hunger syndrome": "All
activity revolved around acquiringfood . . . lazy, weak, crazy, previously
idle women wanted to take on shifts in the workshop just to get a little
bite. " Patients kept an eye out for passing food; they stole food fram
neighbors. "Respect for property has vanished . . . . Certain greedy
patients have to be confined to their rooms. " Noting a suppression of
repugnance, the doctors concluded imperturbably that this phenomenon
"verifies the law of declining demand among animals, formulated by
Katz. " They mention that certain patients rummaged through garbage
devouring raw vegetable peels, and many ate dandelions, clover,
or buckhorn, chewing slowly to prolong the experience. One woman
even ate fabric. "Everything gets eaten, " opined another patient. The
psychiatrists of that time studied the emotional reactions-acrimony,
obsession, melancholy, anxiety-and the mad thought patterns like
hallucinating shipments offood, or delusions of influence ("they want
to eat my brain with oil and vinegar . . . ") that emerged. Another doctor
witnessed patients eating their own fingers.
All this should give you a better sense of the topics debated at the
convention of psychiatry in Montpellier in 1942, where the opening
speech was entitled "On the Physiology of Taste. " There were discussions
about anorexia, about how exceptionally sensitive psychopaths were to
food deficiencies, and about edemas, without mentioning that edemas
are caused by a lack of certain nutrients. The conclusion of Dean Giraud,
discussing the connection between "this apparently mysterious illness"
and food rations, was unreal: "many mental patients, " he averred,
"are in need of considerable food rations, of a larger amount than sane
subjects. As for whether they should be systematically overfed, that's
another question. "9
9. Max Lafont, op. cit. , p. 141- 1 42 .

18

Infact, as Dr. Lafant's thesis clearly demonstrate, the official rations

did not provide the vital minimum. The vast majority of psychiatric
establishments-even those in rural areas or with agricultural fields
they could have made use of-did not actually make the slightest effort
to compensate for the lack offood. The French population found a way
to supplement their food supplies. While malnourished, no Frenchmen
died of hunger during the Occupation-exceptforforty thousand mental
patients who presented the same symptoms-emaciation, cachexia,
intestinal hemo rrhaging, comatose stupor; pale complexion, weak
pulse, lifeless stare, paralysis of the jaw, contraction of the upper limbs
reminiscent of decerebration-as people who were deported to the
camps. We can also add Simone Weil to this list, who while in London,
imposed upon herself the same ration that was officially granted to the
French people under occupation, and managed to die in August 1943
''from starvation and pulmonary tuberculosis, " according to the English
police report.
"Excuse me, sirs, for lowering the level of your expert and always
interesting discussions by talking to you about issues that under
normal circumstances would seem quite secondary, since it's simply a
question of the bed-rest and diet of our patients, " Dr. Frantz Adam said
courageously to his colleagues in 1941. And I would not have pointed
out this phenomenon myself, which is hardly of great intellectual
distinction, had it not contributed to destroying the myth of Artaud
alienated in his madness, and by his persecution in Rodez.
Artaud arrived at Rodez on February 11, 1943. He was, in his own
words, like a "living corpse. " He was given a cell and plenty offood; Dr.
Gaston Ferdiere personally provided his patients with the necessities
of life from local farmers. Artaud's food-related litanies stopped
significantly at that point, and he asked his mother to stop sending
packages. This was when he thanked Dr. Ferdie re for taking him in,
and "getting me back on a diet fit for a human being, rather than for
a ravenous beast, martyred and poisoned, the way I had been kept for
jive years and four months in French mental institutions. "10 Artaud was
no longer an anonymous patient exhibiting "symptoms of delirium with
a paranoid structure. " His reputation as a poet preceded him at Rodez
and there he would be treated with a respect unknown by the farmers
who primarily populated the asylum.

10. Artaud , Oeuvres completes X, p. 12.

19

He was no less susceptible to all sorts of delirious ideas,

which had continuously justified his internment in an asylum.
Dr. Ferdiere, a poet himself, seems not to have doubted for an instant
that his symptoms were of a pathologic nature and not a poetic one, as if
the two didn't flow from the same source. So Artaud reverted to the God
of his childhood and exhibited a religious fanaticism that worried even
an ardent believer like Ferdiere intern, Dr. Jacques Latremoliere. The
report written by the latter noted that Artaud, a former drug addict,
was "suffering from chronic hallucinatory psychosis, with profuse
polymorphous delusions (dual personality, bizarre metaphysical system:
'I redeem humanity by accepting to suffer under the empire of demons';
renunciation of human reproduction due to the impurity of the genitals;
hypochondriac ideation with multiple influences, progressing over the
years. " Artaud declared that he had died at Ville-Evrard in August 1939
"from pain and suffering"; that another man named Antonin Nalpas
had taken possession of his body, and that from that point on he had
been caught up in a horrifi c battle between Heaven and Hell, where the
fate of the world depended on its outcome. He constantly complained of
a horrible curse cast upon him by 'Jewish henchmen of the Antichrist. "11
Even though, at the beginning, Artaud felt that he had found "a
true friend" in Dr. Ferdiere, he remained interned, and thus subject
to psychiatric power. To be sure, his material situation had improved
considerably. He was allowed to wander the gardens of the asylum; he
could even go around town in the company of his young poet friends
from Rodez. But he still wasn't considered cured. Four months later,
after gaining ten pounds, Artaud started receiving shock treatment.
Massive doses were applied. The poorly controlled convulsions
caused spinal compression. "But the intensity of the persistent delusions, "
continued Dr. Latremoliere report, "and the positive effects of the first
three treatments, which clearly diminished the subject bizarre reactions
and theatrics in terms of his hallucinations, encouraged us to repeat
them, with a new series of twelve electroshock treatments administered
between October 25 and November 22, 1943. "12 This series of
treatments, administered in spite of Artaud prayers and exhortations,
became the subject of furious debate in the Parisian literary world.
The descriptions Artaud gives are striking indeed: "Electroshock, Mr.
Latremoliere, " he wrote on January 6, 1945, "reduces me to despair, it
1 1 . Ibid, p. 58.
1 2 . Artaud, Oeuvres completes XI, p. 1 3 .

20

tak es away my memory, dulls my mind and my heart, it turns me into

someone who is absent and knows himself to be absent, and sees himself
ch asing after his own beingfor weeks, like a dead man next to the living
man he no longer is. "13 And yet, this barbaric procedure seems to have
succeeded in noticeably improving Artaud'.s condition. "The patient can
now lead a normal life in the asylum and engage in intellectual work,
which he'd been incapable of doing prior to the shock treatment, " the
report concludes. Artaud returned to his body; he went back to writing,
and to protesting.
People will endlessly argue about whether or not Dr. Ferdiere was
right in administering electroshock therapy to Artaud. Myths take on
a l ife of their own, next to which reason is powerless. It'.s undeniable
that Artaud suffered; but no, he also had to be crucified, and there had
to be a Judas that could be held responsible. Artaud'.s paranoia, his
mystical delusions and the real grief of the "confined poet" took care
of the rest. But that'.s not the real question. The fact remains that there
simply weren't other treatments at the time. The pharmacopoeia was
still unknown; psychiatrists generally just "parked" their patients at
the hospital until they turned into "asylum rot. " Artaud recognized it
himself in a 1943 letter to Anne Manson: "Yet I spent three revolting
years in Ville-Evrard, was shipped without rhyme or reason from the
frenetic ward (6) to the epileptic ward (4) , from the epileptic ward to the
senile ward (2), and from senile to the undesirables ward (5). And my
soul was scandalized there, to the point of horror, because the attending
physicians were dishonest men. "14 It may be to Dr. Ferdiere'.s credit that
he continued to treat his patients, rather than what is euphemistically
referred to as "maintaining" or "observing" them. It would be unfair to
reproach him for not having consulted Artaud or for not having taken
his prayers and exhortations into consideration; in fact it would have
been surprising if he had done the opposite. Ferdiere was the head
doctor, and Artaud the mama. Clearly, Ferdiere didn't simply use the
shocks to punish or intimidate his patient. But myths don't go into such
details, and being a living myth, Artaud certainly knew that.
In Balvet'.s famous "Appeal" of 1942, which was a prelude to
the postwar spread of French ins titutional psychothe rapy,
Dr. Balvet complained, on the contrary, of the slow progress of
French psychiatry. There was not one effective treatment method,
13. Artaud, Oeuvres completes XI, p. 1 3 .
1 4 . Artaud, Oeuvres completes X , p . 1 58 .

21

he pointed out, that had a French name. Shock therapy had been
introduced in France only three years prior and was still practically
unknown in most asylums. One can't hold it against Dr. Ferdiere
that he was more experimental as a psychiatrist than he was as a
poet, or for testing a method on Artaud that Artaud himself had
attempted to practice, with less success, on the stage.
Artaud did experience hunger, but at Ville-Evrard, not at Rodez. And
not the kind of hunger you get from missing a meal, but that deep hunger
"that torments you every day, " which Primo Levi and Robert Antelme
meticulously chronicled. The Lager, 15 writes Levi, "is none other than
hunger itself: we ourselves are hunger; hunger that has become man. "16
There is practically no trace of such an inhuman ordeal in Artaud'.s
writing, and I would have had to contact external witnesses to evoke it
in all its expansiveness. It is no less real. Maeder cites an unpublished
letter from Artaud to his mother dated March 23, 1942: " . . . a desperate
letter and depicted my lamentable state and asked for urgent help. I'm
fading from despair, from weakness, from fatigue, from malnutrition,
and most of all from the poor treatment. In truth Euphrasie, I'm no
more than a dead man walking who wants to survive himself, and I'm
living infear of death. I wrote to ask for your help in easing this hellish
suffering of mine and I see from your letters that you haven't at all
understood the horror, since it's been over a week since I received a
package or an extra morsel . . "17 The silence of critics regarding this
period of acute hunger is far more troubling than, say, misplaced
controversies.
Artaud spent the entire war institutionalized and returned to Paris
in 1946 as a deportee-toothless, with an emaciated face and a vacant
stare. He would affirm it himself: "I would not have approached you
about your deportation to Germany in 1942, " he wrote to Pierre Bousquet
before his departure from Rodez, "if circumstances hadn't found me
like you-in a state of deportation . . . . I come to you as someone who has
suffered extensively and, dare I say, meticulously. Meticulously, meaning
I considered myself obligated, as you did, not to forget any part
of the agony of my deportation because being deported, I was also a
prisoner . . "18
. .

15 .
16 .
17 .
18.

Lager is a German word that can mean "camp."

Primo Levi, Si c'est un homme, Pocket, 1988.
Maeder, op. cit., p . 2 2 7 .
Artaud, Oeuvres completes XI, p. 268-9 .

22

A rtaud a l w ays avoided exp l i c i t ly acknowledging his

questionable origins. The fact that he identified his fate with those
of the deportees was nevertheless a type of admission. There is
no other admission to be found in his work, apart from a quick
allusion in a letter sent to Anne Manson from Ireland in September
193 7: " . . . for there is a secret in my Life and in my Birth, Anne . . . . "19 It
wasn't good to reveal the whole truth, even in pre-war France. After all,
an explicitly racist pamphlet such as Celine's Trifles for a Massacre,
published in December 1937, created no scandal. Andre Gide, while
attacked nominally, saw it as nothing more than . . . a trifl e. (It was
in fact "those French dickheads " and not their Jewish persecutors
who, in the title, were threatened with extermination.) Artaud was no
less Jewish, and Celine was not mistaken about it. Celine's account is
what it is, coming from a biased witness with a loaded past. But some
obs essions can be useful: Artaud himself experienced this in the land of
the Tarahumaras. Anti-Semitic obsessions can be particularly useful,
and I am going to make use of them myself, to demonstrate some truths
that Artaud preferred to keep under wraps.
Celine had a flair for sniffing out, especially among Jews,
'Jakery, phoniness, vile and hollow rap that impresses upon the
masses. "20 It wouldn't have taken him long to recognize in Artaud
the failed little Jewish actor, always ready to launch into a tirade.
Him? Deported? He was just hiding out among the loonies . . .
a hold-out until the final hour . . . just a "hike playing the madman, "
and to top it all off he did it on the backs of his little friends . . . .
Celine wasn't the type to trust much in a race that, 'for fourteen
centuries, hasn't stopped scheming, jumping for joy at every cholera
epidemic, from typhus to thirty-six massacres, shitting blood as he runs
away from all the steppes and pogroms . . . . " And Artaud, otherwise
known as Chile, as Nalpassioglou, as Nalpas . . . who wasn't even gassed
as he should have been; he never stopped annoying everyone with his
yapping hysterics . . . . "I'm sick . . . . " Look at me suffer. The heaviest
amount of suffering in the history of literature, wrote Susan Sontag.
Well absolutely, if you go by weight.
"Castrated from direct emotion" as he was, Artaud . . . . All Jews
are. . . . Not like those cuckold idiot Aryans, following the rhythms of
the natural elements-at least those who aren't brain damaged from
1 9. Artaud, Oeuvres completes VII, p. 2 1 8.
20. LE Celine , Bagatelles pour un massacre, (Paris, ed. Denoel, 1 937), p. 1 3 7 .

23

alcohol abuse. . . . Incapable of any immediate, spontaneous reaction,

those Jews. . . . It's all in their heads, even migraines . . . . And the
endless sniveling of Simone Weil . . . and what about poor me and my
headaches . . . "these were no illusory troubles . . . skull and temples both
in such a dreadful state . . . " however much he pretended to be the enemy of
clear ideas, systems, signs, and all that, Artaud just daydreamed along
in total abstraction . . . . Beginning with his first book, ''The Umbilicus
of Limbo"!-he confessed everything: "My life had become a series of
reasoned arguments, but arguments just running in place, arguments
going nowhere, that were inside me like possible 'schemes ' that my
will couldn't manage to get hold of "21 Artaud was in the clouds; all in
suspension . . . "castrated even in my slightest impulses! . . . " a robot, a
"walking automaton, " in short a]ew, by his own admission, even.
So was Celine wrong to denounce the Jews? "They talk instead of
feeling . . . they argue before feeling. In the strict sense of the word they
don't really feel anything at all. Like the Africans and Asiatics, their
nervous systems are made of zinc, atavistically speaking. . . . " Artaud's
empty, pompous predictions, his hollow lyricism about "beautiful
nature, " his claptrap about magic and trances-what was all that if
not "a total inversion of the aesthetic instincts" of the simple natives ?
Of course, would Celine-a Nordic man, a Celt of pure race-have
needed to torture his gray matter or destroy his anatomy in order to
feel some small trifl e? Sure, it was fine for a swindler, a plagiarist like
Artaud . . . "the Jew, a born con-man, is not a sensitive being. He
only keeps up appearances by perpetually putting on a silly act,
a sham, imitations, parodies, poses . . . . " just a negroid Jew, that
Artaud-always "tiring himself out making grimaces, making a big
fuss, imitating-just like niggers, like all monkeys do. "22
Moreover, "all our theatre Jews do, both here and elsewhere,
is to go around putting out cheap knock-offs, plundering and
reselling all the folklore and classics of the countries they ruin. "
Dirty tricks and drivel . . . "black magic under the skin" . . .
with electric brooms! The greatest Jewish art must have been
Surrealism, that "cadaster of our emotional decline, " "Robotic
art . . . for robotized aboriginals . . . . "
So Celine hadn't waited for the war to say what he thought about the
hunted Jews . . . . "Oh, the lamentable little tale about the persecuted Jew,
2 1. Artaud , fOmbilic des Limbes, (Paris, Poesie/Gallimard , 1 968) , p. 1 8 2 .
2 2 . Celine , op. cit. , p . 69.

24

the Jewish jeremiad . . . ''23 and in 1938 to boot: "what a phenomenal phony
the great martyr of the Jew race. . . . That's their humongous alibi. . . . I can't
get it out of my head that they've been looking for their persecutions!. . . ''2"
And even if Artaud hadn't gone loohingfor them, he certainly knew how
to reap the benefits . . . . Ah, the murdered poet. . . . Van Gogh, Gerard de
Nerval, Edgar Poe-oh, what next?
It started out bad with the first Christians, and it continued with
the Jews, "always busy overdoing everything, ranting, and plotting
other crucifixions for our poor flesh. . . . Other outlandish massacres,
rotting away! Insatiable! Always p rofiteering, voyeurs ! Cowards!
Fraudulents! Unrestrained . . . that's their life! . . . that's their reason
for existence! They're crucifiers. Well, that's all there is to say about
the Jews, I think. "25 Ah, well-you can be as anticlerical as you want,
but you can't spit on the one valuable thing the Church ever invented:
anti-Semitism . . . .
Artaud was in a good position to know it too-he was a bigger
bigot than anyone. He could claim all he liked that he couldn't care less
about the Jews, that he'd never set foot in a synagogue, that he had no
particular sympathy at all for the Jewish religion, that he didn't even
know what the word 'jew" meant-in the same way that Simone Weil,
moreover, had written to Xavier Vallat, commissionerfor Jewish Affairs,
in October 1941, putting the decrees in contradiction with one another
in an utterly Jewish, sophistical style. And even if we assume that both
Antonin and Simone were Jews when it came to matters of race, they
were the last to admit it. It was in 1942, at the time of the roundup
at Vel d'Hiv, that Weil called the Hebrews exterminators for having
massacred the inhabitants of the Promised Land two thousand years
prior on orders from God . . . . And from London in 1943, without even
blinking, she envisioned "preventing the contagion, " by absorbing the
Jewish minority into the body of the nation by means of intermarriage;
otherwise, she added, "preventive measures will have to be taken against
those who would refuse. "26 Artaud himself also lashed out, in discussing
Kafka, against the "intolerable hike mentality. " Before departing for
Ireland, he had even gone so far as to threaten Lise Deharme, born
Lise Hirtz, his benefactor, that he'd "stick a red hot iron cross up her
23. Ibid, p. 1 3 3 .
2 4 . Ibid, p . 72- 73.
2 5 . Ibid, p. 324.
26. Cited by Simone Petrement, La Vie d e Simone Weil, (Paris, Ubrairie Anheme Fayard, 1976).

25

stinking Jew cunt" for having mocked the pagan gods he was into at the
time. 27
So, wasn't that good enough for you, Mr. Celine? No, Celine didn't
see that any of that changed a thing. . . . He played both sides endlessly
that Artaud of yours-a non-Christian Jew . . . a non-Jewish Christian . . .
a non-Jewish Jew . . . a non-Christian Christian . . . and now I've really
put one over on you! Oh, yes, he secretly wanted to suffer his torments.
He made a theatre out of his own life! His insistence on describing his
misfortunes, meticulous, mama-maniacal. . . . He played it safe, the old
Artaud. A persecuted Jew on the side of the camps and a Christian
martyr on the other side . . . . What, you want me to say it? "They're the
ones who are persecuting us . . . . We're the victims of the martyrs! . . . "
God must certainly have a bit of a sadistic side to encourage this
kind of sport. After all, in the Christian tradition doesn't your suffering
and humiliation make you one of the chosen? Weil had understood this
well, as she reproached the early Christians for having gone joyously to
their own sacrifi ces and deaths: "Misfortune, " she wrote, "is one of the
marvels of the divine technique. It's a simple and ingenious device that
introduces into the soul of afinite creature the immensity of power, blind,
brutal, and cold . . . . The man to whom such a thing occurs has no part to
play in the whole operation. He struggles in vain like a butterfly pinned
alive in a scrapbook. But he can continue to want to love, even through
all the horror. "28 This unbearable experience is what Artaud called
cruelty, which is absolute submission to necessity, cosmic severity, "in
the gnostic sense of the whirlwind of life that devours the darkness . . . .
The hidden God, when he creates, obeys the cruel necessity of creation
imposed upon him, and he is incapable of not creating. . . . Death is
cruelty, the resurrection is cruelty, the transfiguration is cruelty . . . . "29 It
was in the horror and despair that the retreat of God brought about, in
that condition of waiting and suspense where you just have to continue
loving in a vacuum, that you'd experience the absolute affliction that
will be crowned with resplendent divine mercy.
Reflections about affliction have a disproportionate prominence
in the work of Simone Weil. She saw something "special, specific,
irreducible" about the simple suffering that, like Artaud, she constantly
experienced in her body. For her, affliction was an event that uproots the
27. Weil, rEnracinement, Paris, Folio/Essais, 1949, p. 285.
28. Weil, Attente de Dieu, p. 9 7 .
2 9 . Artaud , Oeuvres completes I V, p . 122 - 124.

26

soul and leaves the indelible mark of slavery upon it. "The social factor,"
she emphasized, "is essential. There is no real affliction when there is
not in some way or other a social failure, or the apprehension of such
a failure. "30 Artaud, it seems, followed this program down to the letter,
persisting in shouldering an all the more exemplary fate, so much so
that he never stopped complaining about it.
Artaud'.s numerous descriptions of his suffering were indeed
"so extreme and pitiful, " says Susan Sontag, "that readers, utterly
submerged in it, could be tempted to keep their distance, reminding
themselves that after all, Artaud was crazy. " Crazy, yes-but crazy
ab out God, to the point where he even wished to rival him. In Waiting
for God, even as she was declaring herself to be a rotten instrument,
a piece of trash, a failed object, Weil heralded the coming of a new
sanc tity, which the times called for. This was, she wrote, "the first thing
to ash for now, a request to live each and every day, at every moment,
like a starving child always ashing for bread. The world needs saints
with genius like a plague-stricken city needs doctors. And where there is
need, there is an obligation. "31
Without a doubt, Artaud also fel t this obligation to be a
fundam ental need, a hunger that shouldn 't be satisfied "as
part of vulgar diges tive concerns, " because it is "above all the
need to live and believe in what makes us live, and to believe
that there is something that makes us live. "32 Simone Weil herself
refrained from claiming this new sanctity, whose eruption was an
invention, both because of her "considerable imperfection, " and
her own exhaus tion, and nevertheless, in the u rgency of her
demand for it, and her embarrassed denials, one can perceive the
glimmer of the near-impersonal certainty of a person who knew herself
to be the bearer of thoughts that "if all were kept in proportion, and the
order of things preserved, [are] almost analogous to a new revelation
of the universe and human destiny. " It happened that Artaud equally
hesitated to affirm the mission that he clearly felt himself to be the
bearer of: ''I'm not Christ, because I am not at all like him as a man, but
Christ is not someone other than me either, and thats because I am not
what I am. "33 It was at those moments that Artaud remembered that he
was crazy, and that he could affirm whatever he wanted simultaneously
30.
31.
32.
33.

Weil, Attente de Dieu, p. 83.

Weil, Ibid p. 67.
Artaud, Oeuvres completes IV. p. 11.
Artaud, Oeuvres completes XV. p. 185 .

27

without fear of contradicting himself: "It is I, I, Antonin Artaud, present

here now, who suffered the torture on the cross at Golgotha"34 or even to
proclaim the return of 'Judas Iscariot himself in the olive grove . . . now
named Doctor Ferdiere . . . . "35 I know who Jesus Christ was, he said: "he
was me. "
Artaud wasn't crazy. He was a]ew. Like]esus Christ.

34. Ibid, p. 285.

35. Artaud, Oeuvres completes XVI, p. 1 46.

28

I I. TO HAVE DONE
WITH
ALL JUD GMENT

I TALKED ABOUT Goo

WITH ANTON IN ARTAUD

A half-century after his death, Antonin Artaud remains at the

center of a heated debate . Pitted against each other, firstly, are his
psychiatrists at the Rodez hospital, where he remained for most
of World War II; second, the friends and self-proclaimed disciples
he acquired after his return to Paris in 1 946; and finally his family
members , mainly his mother and sister. More recently his nephew
stirred up the issue again , suing Paule Thevenin, Artaud's lifelong
editor, and those responsible for the publication of his works .
The disagreement between Artaud's family and his friends
old and new-concerns a number of questions, the main one
being his attitude toward religion. Raised Roman Catholic in
Marseille by a deeply religious family from Smyrna, young Artaud
dreamed of becoming a priest. Around that time in 1914, he began
experiencing severe nervous problems, "a kind of moral spasm,
violent anxiety, physical vertigo" which , he said, caused him to
weep, tremble and cry out in despair. In the years that followed,
his condition required numerous stays at neuro-psychiatric clinics,
which do not seem to have done him much good . In fact, his
health deteriorated after the doctors administered arsenic to him, a
treatment to cure hereditary syphilis-a common diagnosis at the
time (which was perhaps well founded in Artaud's case) despite
his repeated protests to the contrary. He continued taking arsenic
for the rest of his life. His illness, at least, protected him from the
33

slaughterhouses of World War I, in the same way his madness

would later spare him direct involvement in World War II. And in
1 919, Artaud was prescribed laudanum for the first time to ease
his suffering during a stay at a Swiss clinic where he would remain
for a year. The treatment made him dependent for the rest of his
life upon various opiates such as laudanum, morphine, cocaine
and heroin. His suffering was neither imaginary nor histrionic, as
it is sometimes portrayed (he was an actor) ; nor did it result from
his spiritual crisis alone, although there's no doubt that his fervent
episode, along with the radical transformation it required of his
body, reactivated physical symptoms that remained dormant since
the acute meningitis he contracted at the age of five.
The pendular movements which marked Artaud's attitude
toward religion throughout his life, as well as the blasphemous
and violently anti-Christian sentiment of a number of his writings,
scattered confusion among his most recent friends after he
returned to Paris. Relying on his new convictions, they ceaselessly
affronted his family; particularly his mother, Euphrasie Artaud, born
Nalpas, as well as his sister, Marie-Ange Malaussena. It is true
that his thundering indictment of God and the Christian age have
no equivalent in occidental culture ; not even in Nietzsche's work,
which marked Artaud so profoundly. But it is equally undeniable
that he fully returned to Christianity during his 1937 trip to Ireland
and that he acted as a Christian convert before violently denying
it again in 1 945 . The fact that he had, at that time, rejected all
the religious texts he wrote in the wake of his conversion
"a horrible spell," as he put it, "that made me fo rge t my own
nature"-does not j ustify the efforts deployed after the war by
his friends and Surrealist epigones who strived to prevent their
publication by declaring the texts offensive to the memory of the
poet. He must have been inhabited by a profound religiosity, a
fanatical religiosity to go as far in his adherence to a faith as he
did in his later repudiation . To make matters worse, the religious
funeral held for Artaud by his sister went directly against the
wishes of his friends, and did not help ease tensions.
The fate of Artauds drawings and notebooks was another bone of
contention between his friends and family and remains so to this
day. Marie-Ange Malaussena accused his friends of cleaning out his
room in the Ivry clinic where he died in March 1 948. And it's true.
34

Paule Thevenin, who Artaud designated as the official executrix

of his writings-which the family completely contests-and who
consequently became the occult artisan of the publication of
Gallimard's edition of CEuvres completes, affirms that it was Artaud
himself who personally asked her to secure all his papers before
his death for fear that his family might become overzealous and
des troy them. His sister has another opinion: 'The very day of
Artaud's death ," she wrote in 1959 with accents borrowed, shall
we say, from her little brother, "an immense cabal was mounted
against his family with the sole purpose of intimidating them.
For criminal acts had been committed. His room had been
completely raided. Everything he owned-manuscripts, notes,
drawings , books, correspondences-everything was gone before
we arrived . . . since then, individuals seeking profit from their
theft have succeeded, with certain complicities , in infiltrating
everywhere , and we have had to intervene . More than twenty legal
proceedings are currently underway. That's the Antonin Artaud
affair. "
The vigorous remarks of Artauds sister somewhat overstepped
the bounds of legal language : "To get at the poets family," she
exploded, "his 'fair-weather friends' freely used dirty, stinking,
deadly tactics. " According to the medical authorities' diagnosis ,
Artaud suffered from "chronic hallucinatory psychosis , with profuse
polymorphous delusions . . . from multiple sources . " These same
words could summarize the "affair" in its entirety.36 As is often the
case , this paranoid outburst wasn't totally devoid of reason. The
devotion of Artaud's friends , along with the continuing growth
of his mythic stature as the last poete maudit, was becoming j ust
as obstinate and inflexible in the effort to protect Artaud from
religion as his family was to reinstate it.
But the "Artaud affair" doesn't end there . It erupted again only a
few years ago when one of the precious notebooks Artaud carried
around in his pocket wherever he went disappeared-swiped like
a holy relic from the main exhibition devoted to the poet at the
Centre Pompidou in Paris . It continued when Artauds nephew
sued Paule Thevenin (who died shortly thereafter) for having
supposedly falsified the manuscripts. The publication of the last
36. Marie-Ange Malaussena, "1'.Affaire Artaud: ce qu'il faut savoir," in La Tour de Feu,
n. 1 3 6, revised and completed edition, December 1 9 7 7 .

35

writings (twenty-six volumes published so far) was postponed

while waiting for the outcome of the litigations .
The affairs of Artaud and God are only two aspects of the
dispute raging between his friends and family. The psychiatrists,
too , were uncontrollably caught up in the storm. Because they
treated Artaud , they very quickly found themselves engaged by
the belligerents and also reacted with energy and vehemence .
Both of them being provincial, they soon received decided
support from an equally provincial j ournal , La Tour de Feu,
edited by Pierre Bouj u t , who devoted two sizeable issues to
Artaud and the "affair. " He took the side of the psychiatrists,
and on certain issues sided with the family and against Artaud's
Parisian friends and admirers who opposed the despised country
bumpkins to the literary clique of the capital, whether they were
Lettrists, Surrealists , barroom Maoists (like those of the journal
Tel Que!) , in short, the cultural elite . And the dispute remains
embittered.
Artaud himself added fuel to the fire after his return from Paris
in 1946, by openly accusing Dr. Gaston Ferdiere, head doctor at
the Pereyre psychiatric hospital at Rodez , o f having unj ustly
subjected him to an overdose of electroshock. Until the end of
his days , Ferdiere would be the obj ect of ferocious attacks from
those who agglutinated like flies around the Artaud myth . First
it was two insulting lampoons published by the first generation
of postwar neo-Surrealists , Isidore Isou and his Lettrist group .37
The Lettrists went so far as to harass Ferdiere directly by calling
up in the middle of the night to insult him. The psychiatrist was
perfectly j ustified in reminding his accusers that it wasn't he who
committed Artaud to the institution , and that he actually saved
Artaud from the Ville-Evrard hospital on the insistence of their
mutual friend , poet Robert Desnos. Desnos paid Artaud a visit at
Ville-Evrard after he hadn't seen him for five years and found him
terribly changed. He was "totally delirious, speaking like Saint
Jerome and didn't want to leave because he'd be separated from
the magic forces working for him . . . . " With a piercing premonition ,
Desnos added, "Artaud will definitely consider me a persecutor! "38
37. Isidore !sou, An!onin Artaud, !orture par les psychiatres; Maurice Lemaitre ,
Qui est le Docteur Ferditre, (Paris, Lettrists editions, 1 970).
38. Letter from Desnos to Ferdiere , La Tour de Feu, op. cit. , p. 2 7 .

36

F erdiere's abrupt defense did not help calm his aggressors . He

con tinued to rub them the wrong way, invoking crude ly the laws
an d customs that "society has assemble d for its own defense , for
its legi timate defense ," affirming in an even more aggravating way
that th ere was "delirium, chronic delirium, " and that this delirium
ren dered Artaud "violently antisocial , a threat to public order and
sa fety. " In fact, Artaud's innumerable eccentricities and habits
the way in which he "noisily devoured food, dropping scraps all
over the tablecloth, belched , spat on the floor, and before the end
of the meal , got on his knees to chant,"39 or his habit of always
spitting (in order to exorcise the demons or temptations of the
flesh) when walking past the pregnant wife of Ferdiere's intern,
Dr. Latremoliere-as rare as these eccentricities were , didn't
deserve such a severe condemnation , and most definitely did
not endanger anyone, least of all Artaud himself. Whats more ,
as Artaud remarked j udiciously to Ferdiere , these practices were
all part of his training as an actor, for which he'd been celebrated
in the theatre. Ferdiere never attempted to disarm his enemies .
For example , he observed that the day the poet arrived at his
house, having been invited for dinner, Ferdiere's wife "certainly
deserved some credit for welcoming Artaud with open arms and
for allowing herself to be kissed hello by this repulsive individual . "
Furthermore , the psychiatrist adopted a rigid legal line o f defense :
he forbade the publication of Artaud's Letters from Rodez by
invoking a law from 1838 concerning the protection of the rights
and assets of mental patients . A strange argument from someone
who claimed to believe in anarchy, and who, the first time I visited
him, picked me up at Fontainebleau station exhibiting an issue
of Le Canard Encha'ine, an iconoclastic and satirical weekly paper.
Ferdiere's insistence on protecting Artauds rights only fed the
rumor, started again later by Artaud himself, accusing Ferdiere,
a failed poet, of being j ealous of Artauds genius. After his release
from Rodez and his placement in an open clinic in the Parisian
suburb of Ivry, Ferdiere did not hesitate to blame his patient's
death in Paris on those disciples , or fair-weather dealers who had
supplied him drugs .
But Ferdiere also dug into the family, calling it "posthumous . "
He accused them of neglecting the sick Artaud during the war,
39. Ibid, p. 2 7 .

37

of never thinking to send him food, and finally, when he was

allowed to freely walk the city streets of Rodez, poorly dressed in
a mismatched sailor's uniform, of not having provided him with
decent clothing. "Most of all, it seems to me his sister could have
found the time to come see him during those three years and
three months . . . . " He finally added: "Above all, I blame Artauds
family for having underestimated his work while he was alive
and misunderstood his genius"-an accusation also frequently
directed at Ferdiere himself. From then on, all that touched
Artaud's life, as well as his work and his legacy-whether relating
to his drug supply, the treatments received in various hospitals
(he claimed to have been poisoned), the reality of his madness
(which he continuously denied), his cause of death (cancer or
laudanum overdose), the fate of his manuscripts (saved, altered or
stolen) and even the editing of his writing-became material for
controversies so violent that instead of hastily taking sides I will
rather address the phenomenon itself. How, then, can one explain
such furious debates, such passionate commitment, such infinite
bitterness which shows absolutely no sign of drying up?
Could it simply be, as Paule Thevenin suggested to me one day
commenting on the aberrant behavior of Artaud's psychiatrists,
parents, friends, disciples, "clones," and all the veterans of the
wars fought over him (but who are still primed to jump back
into the fray), all the rapacious collectors of his relics-that all
these people with a more or less distant connection to Artaud are
themselves paranoiacs? Or is there another phenomenon at play,
far broader: a typical reaction on the part of society, that he himself
may have sparked by his exceptional career? Because there's a
kind of a myth that has emerged around Artaud ; something he
seems to have painfully given birth to as a result of his refusal of
any compromise, a myth to which only times as extreme as ours,
with their apocalyptic ideologies and myths spreading like a plague
across populations and continents, could give such a powerful
meaning. For having summoned upon himself the powers of fate,
the apprentice sorcerer Artaud ended up being eaten alive by them.
Ferdiere's intern Dr. Jacques Latremoliere (who plays the main
role here) was provincial in comparison to Ferdiere himself, who
rubbed shoulders with the Surrealists while studying medicine in
Paris was a very close friend of Robert Desnos, and was considered
38

a free thinker. Latremoliere was very pious and married young; he

chose to remain in the region and train as a general practitioner
to feed his rapidly growing family. Like Artaud, he was inclined
to question the future of humanity in apocalyptic terms , and he
was still just as preoccupied with God when I met him in 1983
as he was when he met Artaud for the first time in 1943 . Be that
as it may, there was something unreal about our conversation, as
if it were frozen in time , or rather you could say it picked up
other conversations he'd had exactly where they'd left off forty
years ago . Georges Bataille once wrote, as a provocation, that if
God really existed, he'd be a pig. In speaking with Latremoliere, I
un de rstood that God does exist , and he's a psychiatrist.
Though Latremoliere remained unwavering in his faith ,
Artaud constantly vacillated between religious fanaticism and
a fanatical rej ection of religion. At the time of his fateful trip to
Ireland in 193 7, Artaud made a sudden return to Catholicism and
experienced a new mental shipwreck. His forced repatriation into
France followed by his internment in a long series of psychiatric
institutions-from Sotteville-les-Rouen, near Le Havre , to Sainte
Anne in Paris, and from Ville-Evrard to Rodez in the southern region
of France-was his fate for nine years. Sainte-Anne hospital
located, as if on purpose , between the Latin Quarter and La
Sante prison-functioned more as a counseling or consultation
center than as a typical psychiatric institution. The patients who
were admitted generally stayed there a few months for observation
and diagnosis before leaving for their final destination. Among
those who examined the mad poet was a certain brilliant specialist
in paranoid psychosis who sometimes used to hang around with
the Surrealists , named Dr. Jacques Lacan. His verdict was harsh:
the patient was irreparably "locked" in his delirium. It now appears
clear that Desnos consulted Lacan before visiting his friend. Desnos'
judgment of Artaud as being "firmly established in his fantasy and
difficult to treat" as well as his warning regarding the possibility
that Artaud might end up treating him "as his persecutor," are
direct echoes of the psychoanalysts diagnosis. Lacan added: "this
man will never write again. " That Desnos insisted on having him
taken to a more welcoming institution is even more remarkable.
For Desnos, Artaud, even mad, remained above all a great writer.
In fact, he would go on to write texts that would fill twenty-five
39

volumes of his CEuvres completes . Almost a year later, in February

1939, Artaud was removed from Sainte-Anne and dragged to the
Ville-Evrard hospital in Neuilly-sur-Marne. He was restrained in a
straitjacket for resisting the transfer, complaining that he had already
moved around too frequently at Sainte-Anne, where he disturbed
other patients with his nocturnal psalmodies . His accompanying
diagnostic was forbidding: "Paranoid delirium; persecution
complex with a fear of poisoning; multiple personality disorder;
repeated relapses of addiction; graphomania . " The patient never
did stop writing, but it was apparently complete gibberish.
It was just before World War II started the living conditions
at Ville-Evrard were deteriorating rapidly. Lots of doctors were
leaving for the front, including those who had a personal interest
in Artaud's case . Later, other staff members were forced into the
Compulsory Work Service in Germany. Even before France was
occupied, word spread that all residents of psychiatric institutions
in Poland had been exterminated. The patients were terrorized.
The existence of such institutions was barely tolerated by the
occupier, and the Vichy government reduced their public finances
to a minimum. Artaud couldn't hope for help from his old
Surrealist friends, the maj ority of which had to flee or hide . It was
the worst time to find oneself in a French psychiatric hospital. In
1940, a first wave of famine killed patients . Bit by bit, a lack of food
worthy of death camps settled in, with its tableau of emaciated
bodies, swollen j oints and ballooned bellies. Entire psychiatric
hospitals were completely depopulated.
"It was a real chamel-house," said Marthe Robert, who visited
Artaud at that time . (In 1946 it was Robert , along with playwright
Arthur Adamov, who succeeded in finally getting Artaud released
from Rodez. ) The situation at Ville-Evrard was rapidly becoming
intolerable . "This atrocious feeling of hunger has not left me
since 1940," Artaud later wrote (letter from July 1 2 , 1943) . The
German occupiers requisitioned Villej uif Hospital and moved
all its occupants to Ville-Evrard . In 1943 , alarmed by the decline
in Artaud's health, Robert Desnos and Paul E luard managed to
get him transferred to the free zone via Chezal-Benoit, a hospital
conveniently located on the demarcation line . Desnos put the
poet into the care of his friend at Rodez , Dr. Gaston Ferdiere , who
was the former director of Chezal-Benoit and organized Artaud's
40

passage into the free zone . There is no doubt that this operation
saved Artauds life .
Upon his arrival a t Rodez i n February 1 943 , Artaud was i n the
grips of religious exaltation, which explains the sudden interest of
Dr. Jacques Latremoliere , who was as devout as he was . It must
be said that, aside from Dr. Ferdiere-a militant atheist-he really
had no one else to talk to . The establishment was mainly made up
of uncouth farmers from Aveyron. Furthermore , Artaud had been
preceded by his nefarious reputation as a Parisian poet, actor, and
director. It didn't take long for the illustrious patient to detect "a
true and great Christian" in Latremoliere ; a man who , he claimed
at first, he had known for a long time , and who he recognized
on Earth "and in Heaven , to be a man of good will , one of the
Angels that Jesus Christ designated to watch over the Sacred"
(letter from April 5, 1 94 3) . Ferdiere found himself being similarly
celebrated-his inspired mission to rescue Artaud had come from
"Heaven, where ," Artaud wrote , "you yourself in fact come from"
(letter from February 1 2 , 1 943) .
These pious courtesies were obviously due , at least in part,
to the desire to be well received by those he wished to make his
new friends. After six horrible years in asylums , how could Artaud
ignore the fact that however friendly psychiatrists attempt to be
or appear, they remain, above all , psychiatrists. It is they who
determined his fate . just like Kafka's chimpanzee (in "A Report
to an Academy") that became human because it was the only
way to avoid spending his whole life in a cage, Artaud wanted
nothing more at that time than to "find a way out . " It didn't
take him long to size up each of these men and figure out how
to rub them the right way. Besides, he had always demonstrated
an unsettling gift for entering peoples' minds and making them
his own. That was his ticket to knowledge-at least to self
knowledge-if that makes any sense for a man who had so little
possession of himself. If he'd succeeded in capturing in his web
such giants as Paolo Uccello or Heliogabalus , what problem could
he have in probing Ferdieres mind with his hairy fingers? Right
away he perceived in Ferdiere a "strange kindred spirit," to the
point where , he wrote to his mother, "if you heard him speak, it
would seem that you could often mistake him for me" (letter from
December 27, 1 943) . Psyching the doctor out, Artaud was careful
41

in all his letters to allude to his Surrealist past, to highlight their

shared interest in the "marvelous"-a very pale reflection of his
own supercharged imagination-and to remind Ferdiere that
he'd been friends with Andre Breton. Unlike the author of Nadja,
Ferdiere never poeticized madness, and he never retreated when
confronted with it. Artaud also claimed to see a bit of himself
in Latremoliere ; he pointed out their shared health problems, he
maintained an atmosphere of complicity, a strong sort of man-ro
man understanding, and imagined that as a fell ow Christian, the
young doctor was confused about his sexuality, as Artaud himself
never ceased to be. "I know you were sick," he wrote to him
shortly after his arrival at Rodez, "and that you suffered a great
deal ; not so much from your physical health problems as from
another illness which is similar to the one that tortures me here , or
in any case they have the same cause . And I do not want to speak
about it in a simple letter; it would require a long conversation
away from here , man-to-man , and between friends. But this evil
has to do with the scandal of the horrible plot I've fallen victim
to , and with which you're familiar, because in the secret of your
soul and your conscience you have also suffered horribly from
it" (letter from March 25, 1 943) . Here Artaud was alluding to the
erotic aggression he claimed to experience each night from the
"hordes of demons" sucking away at his substance . Against his
will , no doubt.
Latremoliere saw through this game , and through Artaud
habit, he noted, "to plunge us into his own history, even if it
meant taking us back a thousand years . " At least that's what the
doctor implied in the only article he published on the subject,
"I Talked About God With Antonin Artaud." He seems to have
never considered Artaud's interest in him as sincere . "My physical
problems were not very important to him," he notes sourly;
"above all he wanted me to go through the same torture as him,
which touched upon the 'scandal of the horrible plot he'd fallen
victim to . . . . ' I always thought that all we were to him was a chance
to exorcise his demons onto others, since he couldn't get rid of
them on his own. "40 But Latremoliere was forgetting that it was
precisely what psychiatrists are supposed to do . He was obviously
blaming his patient for not seeing him for what he was. Artaud
40. La Tour de Feu , 1 36 , p. 87.

42

exhibited, Latremoliere wrote in his article, "the classic case o f

delirium of interpretation with ego hypertrophy, generating ideas
of pe rsecution, not to mention the hallucinations. [ . . ] His terribly
self-centered reasoning, in the final analysis, had him covering up
pe tty personal needs in grand , dizzying ideas . " But , paradoxically,
this doctor exhibited to a certain extent the same type of egocentric
symp toms that he stigmatized in his patient.
The two men-the psychiatrist with his fixed ideas and his
illu minated patient-must have made a sacred pair. I can see them
walking back and forth in the hospital courtyard (which has since
been demolished to make room for a girls high school) , j ust as I
walked the gravel paths with Denis-Paul Bouloc, a local poet who
knew Artaud at the time . I can still hear the crunching of their
steps on the gravel and their shrill voices. What could they have
been discussing if not God?
The psychiatrist and his patient were troubled by the problem of
Sex and Virginity, which Artaud considered the stickiest Christian
dogma; one of the "most profound mysteries of the Catholic
Religion, our Religion . " In the poet's eyes , human sexuality
wasn't simply a sin, for which you could always be forgiven through
sacraments , but Evil incarnate. It was inconceivable to him that
God wished to create humans whose flesh had to macerate for
nine months "among sperm and excrement" (letter to Latremoliere
from April 29, 1943) . In the beginning, he supposed, humans
were created sexless and without intestines, and that food, once
absorbed by the stomach , was eliminated by lumbar evaporation.
Sexuality could be reduced to an unfortunate accident of nature.
God's intention was for Man to remain eternally pure and angelic .
And yet, it was writ in their finitude that they would betray the
infinite Divine . With the orgasm and with guts , Satan imposed his
own biology on the human organism in order to keep it in a state
of abj ection. It was therefore the duty of good Christians such as
themselves to restore through abstinence the immaculate state that
they had received from God. On this point, as with everything,
Artaud'.s position was absolute. And the recommended remedy was
no less radical: complete chastity even in marriage . He couldn't
believe that this young married Catholic who was his psychiatrist
did not share his horror of sexuality. Latremoliere asserted in vain
that human love and divine love were one and the same , and
.

43

that God's love created a debt that we could settle only by loving
Him and other men . Artaud j ust shrugged his shoulders : sexual
marriage was not Christian, period. In fact, the doctor was hardly
in a position to pledge his allegiance against the sacred horror of
sexuality: his wife was pregnant up to her ears , and it wouldn't
be the last time. Needless to say, Artaud could never forgive
him entirely. And he didn't fail to make complicated gestures of
exorcism each time he crossed paths with Latremoliere's wife in
the hospital cloister, saluting her as she approached before spitting
behind her back to protect himself from vile demons .
"Our opinions differ on a couple of points ," the doctor finally
admitted. A strange conclusion for a psychiatrist: did he really
expect to share the exact same opinion on everything with his
delusional patient? Latremoliere seemed to often consider-he
was completely rational when it came to the irrational
that madness was a simple matter of opinion. ls it really the
psychiatrists task to convince a supposedly mentally ill person that
his conception of complete abstinence was in contradiction with
the Christian orthodoxy? Artaud made the most of the doctor's
naivety to reverse the roles : "When I hear you say that complete
chastity is sacrilegious and that the church and all the great mystics
advocate procreation through sex and filthy copulation, I wonder
whether I myself am dealing with someone delirious (letter from
July 1 9 , 1 943) . "
The young psychiatrist inextricably mixed preaching and
therapy. Father Julien, the hospital chaplain , took a better
approach. It didn't take him long to see that Artaud's exceptional
zeal-his insistence , for example , on confessing three times a
week-was part of his delirium. The priest even came to suspect
that the impatience and zeal to receive sacraments by his patient
was a side effect of his intoxication. Artaud's fervor seemed so
obsessive he compulsively watched the chapel to detect the priest's
coming and going that the good Father decided not to set foot in
the hospital during the week.
So it's not really surprising that he too saw Latremoliere's
evangelic zeal as a tad crazy. How else could we explain his
insistence on inflicting his "theological dissertations" about Divine
Love upon a raving maniac? But Artaud never stopped raising the
stakes. His letters to Latremoliere adopted the demeanor of severe
44

sermons on Evil in orgasm, spiced up with references to John of

Patmos, who dreamed of maintaining the separation of the sexes
through fire , and to the pre-Adamic visions of perpetual virginity
th at haunted Saint Hildegard.
Latremoliere later on recognized that his situation at the time
was "complex and delicate ." By all appearances , Artaud resembled
an authentic Christian to such an extent that the doctor admitted he
felt obliged to "embrace every aspect of his Christianity as much as
possible-those I considered valid and those that hurt me . " In his
relationship with Artaud, he had to assume three simultaneous , but
incompatible , positions: as a psychiatrist, he had the responsibility
of assessing, to use Foucault's term, the degree of "dangerousness"
of the patient for society; as a doctor, it seemed that his duty was
to bring his patient back to normal; and as a Christian, to treat him
with compassion. His religious convictions required that he follow
his patient (who was his brother in Christianity) "to the extreme
limits of fraternal friendship . "41 But with Artaud there were no
limits to speak of, not even "extreme" ones. Nevertheless, there
was one that his brother in Christ was absolutely not ready to
cross : bringing him opium, heroin or morphine . All his life Artaud
tried to tap his doctors for opiates or other drugs. He claimed
this was the only way they would successfully treat his organism
"soiled with repulsive abj ections. " But it didn't often work; under
this transparent pretext, the lack was too glaring. "Without this
medication energizing my being, my soul will be progressively
more scandalized by sin," Artaud threatened in his very first letter
to Latremoliere (March 25 , 1943) . Did he really believe his pious
doctor would cede to such crude blackmail? Artauds demands
would become truly hysterical: "You think of addiction in relation
to me ," he launched, "while I'm intoxicated with the sperm and
excrement from all of your sins" (April 29, 1943) .
The fact that Latremoliere was so profoundly injured by the
attacks launched by Artaud against his doctors upon his release
from Rodez indicates that his interest in this patient wasn't merely
fraternal and evangelical in nature . Ferdiere would prove far more
philosophical: attacks from patients "are part of the j ob," he assured
me . In Latremoliere's case , something else was present that could
be called friendship , if friendship could have existed between two
4 1 . La Tour de Feu, 1 36 , op. cit . , p. 86.

45

men situated at either extreme end of the mental health spectrum

and at different ends of the stick. But if the young intern found
himself in a "complex and delicate" situation with his patient,
the same was even more true for the latter, whose fate depended
entirely upon his doctors' whims . Mental patients and the doctors
who care for them are never on equal footing, even when they
want to be friends, as Artaud assured Latremoliere, who believed
him. This is precisely what Artaud expressed unambiguously
in a letter to the latter: "The doctor is always right against a
prisoner . . . and the patient always wrong because . . . even his
factual affirmations fall into the category of a catalogued delirium"
Quly 19, 1943) . This letter was written five months after his arrival
at Rodez, so he'd had time to learn this lesson , assuming his
previous experience of psychiatric hospitals hadn't been sufficient.
One month prior, Dr. Ferdiere, judging Artaud's health to have
sufficiently improved so as to withstand treatment , had prescribed
the first series of electroshock therapy. And it was Latremoliere ,
Artaud'.s close friend , who was responsible for administering it.
It is difficult to reconcile the feelings of human compassion
and fraternity in God , professed by this doctor, with the deliberate
practice of inflicting electric shocks on his defenseless patients .
It's easy to imagine the sincere Christian in him experiencing a
tormented conscience and resisting his superior's orders with all
his might. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality,
Latremoliere was rather excited by the idea of using this procedure ,
and he used it liberally on his patients throughout his practice at
that hospital, administering around twelve hundred electroshock
therapy treatments in three years. In addition to his desire to heal ,
this enthusiasm made complete sense : this form of treatment was
the topic of his medical dissertation.
Electroconvulsive therapy, as it is called, had the striking charm
of novelty at the time . It was already widely used in Germany,
but remained largely unknown in the French psychiatric world .
Latremoliere was a pioneer, being one of the first to experiment
with it. It had only been three years since the treatment had
appeared in France , precisely at Ville-Evrard , the hospital Artaud
had just left; and where it was anticipated that it would be
administered to him-but specialists are still uncertain whether
they were actually applied to him. It was there that Dr. Rondepierre
46

read a 1940 article on this method and decided to adopt it. Its
inventor, professor of psychiatry Ugo Cerletti, got the idea in 1938
after visiting a slaughterhouse in Rome and constructed the first
machine for administering electroshock therapy. Dr. Rondepierre
even went to visit a slaughterhouse in Kremlin-Bicetre , in the
sub urbs of Paris. He very carefully observed the type of forceps
used by butchers on a pigs head. The beast dropped like a rock
and the butcher bled it on the spot. He also remarked that if the
butcher hesitated one instant, the pig would get up "and wander
away with a funny walk." Dr. Rondepierre decided to build the
first electroshock machine with help from a radiologist, Dr.
Lapip e. He experimented first on guinea pigs, then on rabbits, and
fina lly on a pig from the pigsty in Ville-Evrard, before discreetly
trying his machine on a patient, and was "lucky that he didn't
kill him. "42 And it was this very machine that Latremoliere used
shortly thereafter on Artaud .
It was already known that epileptic fits could induce extreme
psychic transformations in the patient, and sometimes even
complete recovery. Before the introduction of electroconvulsive
therapy, such fits were triggered artificially by Cardiazol inj ections,
a treatment developed by the Hungarian Dr. Van Meduna . He
was the first to observe that schizophrenia and epilepsy are
incompatible ; he deduced that in provoking one , the other
was affected. This substance had one serious drawback: before
losing conscience, the patient experienced a horrible sensation
of imminent death and therefore resisted later injections with all their
available strength. Electroconvulsive therapy provoked similar
fits but, Rondepierre maintained , patients put up no resistance
to the treatment. They simply emerged from the epileptic fit in
a confused stupor, asking when the treatment would begin . . . .
According to him, it was a miracle treatment that worked even on
supposedly incurable patients, as in Artaud's case .
But miracles do not contain much science . Electroconvulsive
therapy, in fact, had a massive and indiscriminate impact, like
when you bang on the TV to stabilize the image . The possible
injuries to the brain or loss of memory were never properly
estimated . Certain patients assert that the effects lasted years and
not merely days or weeks . Others consider the effects irreversible .
42. " Economie de guerre , premiers electrochocs," in Recherches, n. 3 1, February 1 9 78.

47

These accounts cooled the initial enthusiasm for the invention.

But electroshock remains an easy way to knock patients out and
hospitals continue to depend on it today to cut back on staff
expenses. It wasn't that way at the time when this therapy first
appeared in French psychiatric hospitals . Chemical treatments for
mental illness did not yet exist and the patients were left to rot on
the premises of the establishment, as was Artaud's case throughout
the years leading up to his arrival at Rodez. "Asylum rot" was an
expression often used by staff to refer to them. It would seem
unj ust to consider electroconvulsive therapy as, essentially, a form
of punishment. In Artaud's case it constituted an attempt, albeit a
brutal one, to improve his mental state and it actually succeeded
to a certain extent-certainly more so than anyone today is ready
to admit . Contrary to Jacques Lacan's definitive verdict, the poet
did not remain "fixed" in his delirium; he began to write again .
Letters written by Artaud at that time about the treatment, where
he vehemently protests to it, but where he also describes its effects
with all the precision and power of which he was capable, also
belong to the history of electroconvulsive therapy.
Electroshocks were administered to Artaud at intervals of three
per week for a month at a time . Five days after the first session,
Artaud experienced intense pain in his back and liver and begged
Ferdiere to stop the treatment: "My very dear friend ," he wrote , "I
have a big favor and a big service to ask of you : please cut short
my electroshock therapy which my body obviously cannot handle
and which is certainly the predominant cause of my current spinal
curvature . . . this unbearable feeling that my back is broken"
(letter from June 25, 1943). Latremoliere recorded this abnormal
reaction in his dissertation, "Electroshock Accidents" published
in 1956:

48

OBSERVATION VI I
"Antoine A . , 4 6 , fo rmer drug addict , suffering from chronic
hallucinatory psychosis with profuse polymorphous delusions . . . .
Since the second session he has spoken of vague back pains ,
which became severe when he emerged from the third fit: bilateral,
constricting, aggravated by the smallest movement or cough . . . .
After two months of bed rest, intradermal histamine inj ections,
and antineuralgic drops, the pain subsided."
Much later, Latremoliere assured me himself that this type of
accident occurs very rarely, "maybe seven or eight times" out of
twelve hundred applications. But one glance at his dissertation
"Observation VIII: Louis B . , 22," a farmer of "well developed"
physique-tends to prove the opposite . The farmer in question ,
robust as he was , experienced intense mid-dorsal back pain,
presenting "the same characteristics as in other cases. " He, too ,
was confined to his bed for several weeks . The fact is , muscle
relaxers did not exist at the time ; the convulsions were severe and
the accidents frequent.
The treatment was inoffensive enough, in and of itself: a
brief electric discharge at the back of the skull. But the reaction,
depending on the curve and intensity of the current, could be
extremely violent. Patients experienced fits comparable to "petit
mal seizures" experienced by epileptics ; they would then fall into
a nebulous state (coma) accompanied by an organic erasure of
consciousness . They remained dazed and confused in the phase
following the shock, shaking from irrepressible leaps, jolts and
gesticulations . Upon awakening they experienced anxiety and
suffering with powerful fantasies and hallucinations evoking
schizophrenia. With Artaud , this expressed itself through that
wrenching feelings of dispossession he had described to Jacques
Riviere about twenty-five years prior. The German psychiatrists,
who were the first to use to this technique on a large scale ,
explained this state as "the anguish of the broken ego" (schildge) .
Artaud said that each time he lost consciousness he "suffocated
inside himself' for a whole day. He then felt so disoriented that
he didn't know where he was. This state of terror lasted several
hours, becoming more and more unbearable as his memory
returned , at which point a profound depression arose . He doubted
49

everything: his intelligence , his sense of purpose and his mission

on Earth . "I am disgusted with living, Mr. Latremoliere," he wrote
after three months of silence, "because I see that we are all in a
world where nothing is stable . . . . " (letter from January 5, 1945) .
To Latremoliere these were encouraging signs indicating that the
"mental reconstruction" of the patient was engaged. Doctors felt
j ustified in considering that from this point forward , the patient's
consciousness would be capable of correcting its own disturbances
and regaining its stability.
The first series of electroshocks was administered in July 1943.
Artaud never stopped complaining that this treatment was terribly
painful. "What I want more than anything is to avoid another
series of treatments ," he implored Ferdiere on October 24, 1943 ,
sensing more sessions were on the way. But the following day the
convulsions were induced again, and continued until November 22.
"Electroshock therapy," Artaud wrote after that, "was for me a
horrible torture lasting three months . And I never again want to
experience torture like that as long as I live . And I hope that in the
future you will spare me" (Nouveux ecrits de Rodez, 1943) .
Despite everything, his mental state improved. At times
he realized he wasn't Antonin Nalpas , but Antonin Artaud. In
February 1944 , under the impetus of a painter friend of Ferdiere's ,
Frederic Delanglade , he returned to painting and drawing.
These subsequently became his favorite forms of expression in
the asylum and eventually outside. But over the course of the
following months , doctors observed a new relapse in the patient,
who complained more and more of being a victim of bewitchment
and poisoning. Gesticulations and hallucinations resumed with
greater intensity. Artaud saw that their attitude toward him was
changing, and he began to panic. He warned Ferdiere: "I got back
on my feet after three months of anguish, delirium, confusion, and
memory loss. And I won't recover again because my soul has had
enough abuse and torture" (letter from April 2, 1944) . His terror
grew even more intense over the course of the following weeks and
again he pleaded with Ferdiere to spare him the treatment. "One
more series of electroshocks would destroy me . And I sincerely
don't believe you want that. " (May 20, 1944) . Three days later
Latremoliere began a new series of twelve shocks that lasted until
June 1 6 , 1944 . It rendered him unconscious for an entire month ,
50

to the point he wrote to his mother saying that he no longer knew

who he was or where he was . It is possible Artaud even endured
a final series of electroshocks in August of the same year, judging
by the letter he addressed to Latremoliere : "You yourself stopped
these electroshock applications that were so horrendous because
you understood that the treatment was torturing me; that a man
like me ought to be helped, not hindered in his work." And he
a dded, "Electroshock, Mr. Latremoliere, reduces me to despair,
it takes away my memory, dulls my mind and my heart, it turns
me into someone who is absent and who knows he is absent, and
sees himself for weeks in pursuit of his being, like a dead man
alongside a living man who he no longer is , but who constantly
calls to him, even though he can no longer j oin him . . . . Each time
it brings on those horrible splittings of the personality which I
wrote about in the correspondence with Riviere, but which at the
time was an intuitive awareness and not a living agony as with
electroshock. I have a great deal of affection for you as you know,
but if you do not stop these electroshock treatments immediately,
I will no longer be able to keep you in my heart. If the man inside
you who understood and loved me , and who showed me this love
as he did last August because he is your irreducible personal self,
I say if this man had been wholly present these last few days,
there is no way in the world you would have agreed to once again
inflict upon me the torture of sleep and horrible mental torpor
of electroshock. "43 He makes it clear that overall, this experience
profoundly affected his relationship with Latremoliere . How could
it have been otherwise? Upon his return to Paris , Artaud often
complained that his psychiatrists had made him suffer horrifically,
and his Parisian friends fiercely reproached their sadism . The
Christian doctor took this personally, and felt especially betrayed
because he considered his accusations unfounded: "He squealed
like a pig," he declared to me with a little chuckle and a shrug of
his shoulders , "but he didn't experience pain. "
The letter t o Latremoliere from January 1945 was the last Artaud
wrote to his "friend ," but it was not the last contact between the
two men. The course of outside events rushing along at the time
definitely had something to do with this sudden interruption;
defeated in Russia , the German army was rapidly losing its hold
43. I.a Tour de Feu, 1 36 , op. cit. , Letter from January 6 , 1 94 5 .

51

on Europe and the young intern j oined the Maquis to fight with
the Resistance. Upon his return to Rodez three months later,
in April 1945, he received a drawing Artaud had made for him
entitled Man and His Pain.
Artaud returned to drawing for good i n January 1945 , after his
last series of electroshocks began to shake his religious convictions.
His ideas about a global conspiracy, brought about by a handful of
Insiders who also performed a kind of "sexual black magic" on his
body requiring him to go through special exorcism rituals, were
starting to lose their importance to him, along with his idea that
he'd lived several past lives, and that his body had been inhabited
by a consciousness other than his own. Little by little, Artaud
found himself cured of his faith, but not of his religious penchant
or his "intentions of purity," which made up his unshakeable
founding principles . It was during this time that he began making
larger drawings-which I saw for the first time on the walls of
Paule Thevenin's apartment. These constituted his first coherent
attempt at constructing a body of work out of his own disintegrated
body. One of his first creations, dating from January 1945 , Being
and Its Fetuses , presented a prolific laboratory of the Flesh . This
large drawing dramatized a monstrous outpouring of organs,
fetuses, virgins, bones, viscera , hard nipples , forming a grotesque
body spread out exoscopically around two intertwined couples
copulating flat on their backs. Above them were rows of pictograms
arranged like a sun, and enticing female bodies in various stages
of decomposition. The first drawing was reminiscent of a graffiti
piece. It showed a couple locked in an embrace of corpse-like
rigidity, on either side of a prominent vagina that appears to have
j ust pushed out a fetus. The other couple, merely suggested by
an encounter of reproductive organs, was embedded in a kind
of coffin , or at least a mechanical device of some kind suggesting
the unnatural character of all begetting. In most drawings from
this period, which tried to preserve the pitiful awkwardness of
the flesh , sexuality was still the mold that casts all possible forms .
Artaud needed several months to acknowledge that for the first
time in years , he had succeeded at creating "something special" :
a space of cruel stagecraft, comparable in all respects to what he
had created in his writing and in his theatre . Artaud began to take
his drawings seriously-he sent two to jean Dubuffet-and found
52

them perfectly suitable to serve as a future source of income. Since

Ferdiere had only agreed to let him leave on the condition that he
would be financially independent.
In February 1945 , Artaud interrupted his production of large
drawings to focus on writing his Rodez notebooks, through which
he aimed to probe "the depths of the human subconscious , its
suppression and its secrets ignored even by the habitual self'
(letter from January 7, 1945) . What he discovered was that the
self was not rigorously bound to a single perception, and was
furthermore not unique in any way at all; nor was it perceived
in an absolute corporal space , but rather that it was "dispersed
throughout the body while the body is gathered together in
complete sensory equality. " The human being could sometimes be
a knee, sometimes a heart, or a foot. It could also be urine , food,
sperm, or a thought. If one abandoned all religious thought and
dogma , he noted , one would discover that it is in fact possible to
have a direct and material experience of the soul.
On April 1 , 1945 , as France prepared for its Liberation, Artaud
achieved his own liberation and officially renounced his Catholic
faith and all of his religious convictions. Throwing "communion,
Eucharist, God and his Christ" out the window, he declared he was
himself, "meaning simply Antonin Artaud , an irreligious believer
in nature and soul who never hated anything more than God and
his religions . " Freed from all faith, he could now devote himself
to the search for a soul that could be a body, and for a body that
could be a soul.
It was at that point that he gave Man and His Pain to
Latremoliere . Unlike his large color drawings , this was just a
sketch, stripped down , almost like a caricature . It showed a man
walking and "dragging along behind himself all his pain, like the
old dental phosphorescence of the cyst of decayed sorrow. " A
white rag was wrapped like a hood around the cheek, swollen
from the abscess, and the whole head actually resembled a big
tooth. In the accompanying text, which these quotations are taken
from, Artaud seemed to be casting a distant gaze upon his own
suffering. He was no longer complaining-on the contrary: he was
now loudly proclaiming ownership of his own suffering, as the
knowledge that he had obtained through his pain was far superior
to any metaphysical speculations. "And the nail of a shooting pain
53

through a tooth, the hammer of an accidental fall onto a bone ,

are far more illustrative of the dark recesses of the unconscious
mind than all the research on yoga . "
The various kinds of pain that Artaud was illustrating i n his
drawing were the pains he was suffering from: his teeth, every one
of which he had lost over years of neglect in the institutions, the
diarrhea with bloody stools that he often complained of in Rodez
was the first symptom of the rectal cancer that would eventually
kill him. The drawing doesn't explicitly make reference to the
electroshock treatments, but the first thing that Artaud mentions is
his back pain , and he never stopped complaining of that pain until
the end: "In our backs ," he wrote , "we have full vertebrae , pierced
by the nails of pain. "44 The man had his back broken at an acute
angle, and his whole body smashed to pieces under a bunch of
boxes piled atop one another, each one held in place by enormous
nails. Was this the result of an "accidental" fall onto a bone , as he
claimed? The allusion was perfectly clear for both Artaud and the
man in the picture . In fact, the posture of the man in the drawing
seems to match the description that Latremoliere himself gave in
his pedantic discussion of the "accident" that occurred during the
first series of electroshock treatments. "Starting from the second
session, he talked about having vague back pain, which became
violent after he woke up from his third fit . . it forced him to walk
hunched over, with his thorax bent far forward . " The man in the
drawing is shown in the same position , with his thorax bending
down , dragging all the pain of "his diarrhea of nails" along behind
him like a bunch of sacks. He seems to be walking but he could
j ust as well be immobilized in his bed-"nailed to the bed ," as
they say in French, with his rib broken , arms lying alongside his
body, mouth sealed shut, crucified by his suffering.
Latremoliere had his own interpretation . He drew attention to
the feminine forms hanging onto the man's body, those curves of
soft, erotic flesh , dangling from either side of the spinal column .
Another sack, flecked, stained red , dragged along below, at the
end of a cord. Artaud identified this with the mans pain-stricken
muscles , but Latremoliere nevertheless insisted that it was a
placenta-and a transparent reference to the little girl that his
wife had just brought into the world . Near this "placenta ," in
.

44. Anaud, Oeuvres completes XIV, p. 46.

54

fact, on the left side of the drawing, there is a little character that
resembles a fetus , falling headfirst. But this child was in fact the
exact inverse replica of the man: the same broken-in-two posture,
the same mouth sealed shut in pain. And so once again, perhaps
Latremoliere was proj ecting his own preoccupations onto his
patient: the homunculus wasn't Artaud burning with desire to be
his doctor's child, or his wife-homosexuality displaying itself as
powerlessness-but Artaud reborn from his suffering.
There is no doubt that this drawing is about pain , and it
is not a mere coincidence that Artaud deliberately gave it as a
present to the man, his "friend," who stubbornly went on denying
its reality And yet, at that time, Artaud wasn't really the same
person anymore (if he had ever been the same person at any two
moments in his life) . He now saw his experience of suffering in
a different light, as an aspect of what had become his mission on
Earth: to liberate the body and its abj ect organic libido from its
bewitchment by the incorrigible human mass .
After Artaud renounced God , the accusations he made
against society became more strident , amplified by a furious
aversion to psychiatry The miraculously cured body he sought
to fabricate demanded not only that the configuration of organs
fraudulently implanted in him be disorganized , but moreover
it demanded the "disorganizing" of the social body as well ,
in its entirety. This was no harmless matter, and in 194 7 , after
returning to Paris, Artaud could easily identify with Van Gogh's
sinister fate. The occasion arose to do so when a large Van Gogh
exposition opened at the Orangerie Museum, but what really
set Artaud's blood boiling was an article that came out about the
mad painter's works , written by a psychiatrist. In Artaud's eyes,
the fact that the author was a doctor was itself immediately a
strike against him, but what was intolerable was that this man
dared to call Van Gogh a "degenerate psychopath. " Vicariously
returning to his experience at Rodez, Artaud immediately decided
to celebrate Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society in a dazzling
essay where he also made a step by step analysis of the means
by which psychiatrists insidiously succeed-and not only by
way of electroshocks-in annihilating their patients' minds .
Ferdiere was like another Dr. Gachet, the psychiatrist who had

55

treated Van Gogh, and acted like he was his friend, when in fact he
detested him because he was brilliant and an artist.
At first, Artaud had been excited to see a kindred spirit
in Ferdiere, but it wasn't long before that nurturing father and
brotherly poet turned into a lethal character in his mind, a "swine"
and a heroin addict, j ealous of his patient's genius . Subsequently,
Artaud wrote to his sister from Ivry: "sometimes in life j ealousies
arise from the evil unconscious mind, when on the surface it
seems a writer is simply being encouraged to go back to writing"
(letter from April 3 , 1946) . That's also what happened with
Dr. Gachet , who j oined forces with society's collective
consciousness to pressure Van Gogh to kill himself. Like Artaud,
Van Gogh was a chaste person, and had j ust liberated himself
from "civic magic" when he was ruthlessly punished by society
The artist's self-mutilation then appears in its full meaning: Van
Gogh roasted his hand, sliced his ear off, and shot himself in the
stomach, motivated not by a feeling of guilt but by the desire to
take back his body from society
Artaud certainly did not have a gentle disposition toward
Dr. Ferdiere , but he saved his fiercest attacks for a certain "Dr. L . , "
who h e referred t o a s a vile creature, and a "disgusting bastard. "
It would b e hard t o imagine anyone rushing u p t o claim that he
was this Dr. L. , but then again that would be to underestimate
how hot-blooded Dr. Latremoliere was. Who else could be Dr. L. ,
he said ; he didn't beat around the bush. He promptly cleared up
any possible ambiguity about his identification with said Dr. L. , by
writing a text which used as its epigraph a quote from Artaud's Van
Gogh attacking the "vile depravity" of Dr. L. :
I only have to point to you yourself as evidence , Doctor L. ;
you've got the stigmata all over your face ,
you damned disgusting bastard .

The rest of the passage , which Latremoliere did not see fit to
reproduce, was hardly any less insulting to him:

56

If during coitus you couldn't cluck in your throat in your peculiar

way while simultaneously gurgling in your pharynx, esophagus ,
urethra and anus ,
you wouldn't be able to say you were satisfied.
And theres a certain habit you've developed in your internal organic
twitching, which truly is the living proof of your vile depravity,
And which you cultivate from one year to the next , more and more ,
because socially speaking, it's not quite within the scope of the law,
But rather falls under a different law, under the yoke of which the
totality of injured consciousness suffers , for your behavior truly
suffocates everyone .
You categorically declare consciousness at work to be madness ,
while at the same time you strangle it with your vile sexuality.

It would have taken more than that to keep the good doctor from
claiming loud and clear "I am Dr. L." And , he added sarcastically,
speaking of Artaud as if he were his friend: 'This rude remark
constitutes the last personal message that I received from Antonin
Artaud while he was still alive . . . . " This would doubtless raise
certain questions, but Latremoliere would not be intimidated by
such a discouraging task. "I wouldn't dare go so far as to call him
my friend ," he acknowledged. ''I'd have to redefine what friendship
means, and consider Antonin Artaud to be a 'innumerable heart.'
He was just the opposite . Yet the word 'friend' in regard to him has
nevertheless become an outrageous truism. "45
In a footnote , Latremoliere acknowledged that there were a
few troubling factors afoot. Indeed, Paule Thevenin, the editor
of Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society , thought it proper
to assert in a footnote of her own that Dr. L. did not refer to
Dr. Latremoliere . Artaud had told her so , she wrote . He was talking
about some other doctor. Paule Thevenin however did not go so far
as to actually give his name. And that was enough for Latremoliere
to simply believe it was just a diplomatic denial. He had good
reason to believe , from the bottom of his heart, that it was true.
Who could doubt for a moment, after their endless discussions at
Rodez, that Artaud considered him a fierce partisan of conjugal
mating, an unforgivable sinner? Not that this would have really
had much effect on Latremoliere . He was willing to bear such
45. La Tou r de Feu, op. cit. 1 3 6 , p. 8 1 .

57

insults as a Christian. Regardless , is any insult really so damaging

when it offers you a chance to exist publicly? Ferdiere on the
other hand had been the constant target of Artaud's new friends,
whereas they'd systematically ignored Latremoliere. But after all ,
it was Latremoliere who administered with his own hands the
electroshocks everyone had been howling about. In one sense , with
his unjust accusations , Artaud had himself rectified this injustice.
It was a potential windfall, and Latremoliere was hardly the kind
of man to let such an opportunity pass him by. "Since she didn't
reveal his name ," he wrote in response to Paule Thevenins footnote ,
"I will continue to pride myself on these epithets whose origins I'm
quite sure of, and which I don't hold the slightest grudge about."
And so , even defamed and dragged through the mud, Dr. L. , alias
Latremoliere , took center stage. The fact that a critic came all the
way from New York to Figeac, where he lived, to talk to him about
Artaud-since no one had until then made the effort to question
him about the subj ect-confirmed to him that at last his time had
come.
During my first visit in July 1983, I didn't know that Latremoliere
had proclaimed himself to be the infamous Dr. L. The special issue
of La Tour de Feu devoted to Antonin Artaud which I had in my
possession did not contain Latremoliere's article , "I Talked About
God With Antonin Artaud," his sole claim to glory, which was
inserted in a later reissue.
So I didn't have that one vital clue to understanding the hostility
that the doctor exhibited toward his former friend and patient
during our interview. It was also after the fact that I became aware
that Latremoliere had indeed thoroughly read Artauds entire
oeuvre , and had become quite the specialist in the author's work,
if only for the purpose of unearthing any other possible insults
toward him, simultaneously titillated by the interest that he was
given , and indignant about what he considered to be a betrayal
by a friend.
But the sore point is in the assertion that "Dr. L. was not
doctor Latremoliere . " Paule Thevenin had categorically assured
me of it when I saw her again in Paris. Artaud had told her that in

fact he was talking about doctor Jacques Lacan.

Since all the protagonists of this little drama , Antonin Artaud,
Dr. Ferdiere , Dr. Latremoliere , Paule Thevenin, and Dr. Lacan , are
58

all gone, there's no longer any reason to keep the secret about that
name . Today, Jacques Lacan has become world famous, certainly
not as an "erotomaniac" doctor, but as the master thinker of a
whole generation, a character infinitely more controversial than
poor Dr. Latremoliere , who Ferdiere had confidentially portrayed
to me as a "troubled soul. " Dazzling, abrupt, arrogant, "Dr. L." was
in his way both an autocrat and a genius , revered in his country
and often celebrated by his American disciples as "the French
Freud."
I didn't have the heart to reveal this truth to Latremoliere when
I came back to see him again exactly two years later in Figeac, the
sleepy little Southern town famous for its wine , about a half-hour
outside of Rodez . Nor did I do so when I was tempted to , in the
meantime , during the somewhat harsh exchange of letters I had
with Dr. L.
Like Ferdiere , jacques Lacan had gravitated into the Surrealists'
orbit, but never actually belonged to their group . Toward the end
of the 1 920s, he was practicing at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris ,
where he was getting his start in the art of "cursory psychoanalytic
observation . " The medical thesis that he defended in 1 9 3 2 , De

la psychose paranofaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalite,

was heralded as a revolutionary study by the young generation
of French psychiatrists, and this was also a unanimous opinion
shared by the Surrealist group , of which Artaud was a member
until 1 928. At the time , the French psychiatric milieu was still
deliberately ignoring Freud, and Lacan, along with the Surrealists,
was the first to take an interest in his work. But contrary to what
was then the general belief, Salvador Dali's foundational texts on
the "paranoiac-critical method," which Andre Breton himself saw
as the definitive formulation of the philosophy of Surrealism, were
not inspired by Lacan's study-quite the contrary.
It was in his capacity as a specialist in paranoia that
"Dr. L." examined Antonin Artaud at Sainte-Anne hospital in
April 1 938, after the patient had been transferred to an asylum
in the Rouen region with the diagnosis that he suffered from delirious
ideas of persecution with a fear of poisoning. " This file at Sainte
Anne specified that he was suffering from "a magic bewitchment
torturing his language and thinking. Split personality." These were
the exact symptoms Artaud described with stunning precision
59

in his correspondence with Jacques Riviere , which encouraged

Breton to invite the young writer into the Surrealist group .
According to Roger Blin (an actor who became one of Artaud's
disciples and a close friend) , Jacques Lacan performed one of his
express observations on Artaud. He found him to be in excellent
health, and predicted that he would remain that way until the age
of eighty. He considered his mental state to be irreversible .
That Artaud called "Dr. L . " an "erotomaniac" seems rather
ironic. True, in his youth the famous psychoanalyst had passed as a
dandy and a ladies' man, like his dandy companion , the inveterate
seducer Louis Aragon, who was called the "Parisian country-boy. "
Lacan's biographer, Elisabeth Roudinesco , gives some insight into
the matter. But truth be told, there was nothing really out of the
ordinary about him, at least to any ordinary person ; but Artaud, of
course , was far from ordinary. Jacques Lacan was always chic and
doubtlessly a socialite . He married several times and had a child
out of wedlock (out of his own wedlock, in any case) with Georges
Batailles wife, which greatly disturbed the strict legalist Lacan ,
and must have led him, Roudinesco suggests, to forge one of his
most debated concepts, the "Name-of-the-Father," the very name
that was denied his own child. But all this put together doesn't
seem to justify the term "erotomaniac . " Nevertheless, in Artaud's
eyes it was enough to turn Lacan into a sexual monster, as poor
Latremoliere experienced so bitterly, without, for all that, making
him the mysterious "Dr. L."
However, the irony of this accusation is to be found elsewhere :
in the first psychiatric claim made by Dr. Lacan. Because
erotomania was the particular notion that Lacan , in his study on
paranoia, had taken from classic French psychiatric classification
(the work of Clerambault) and claimed as his own. There was a
sort of poetic justice-if not a certain humor, imperceptible and
largely unnoticed-in the fact that the furious response made
by Artaud , the patient, was to turn one of his psychiatrist's most
emblematic concepts against him. For years, Artaud had been
working with Dr. Edouard Toulouse , a psychiatrist specializing
in precocious children ; with whom his parents had placed him
when he moved to Paris . Artaud had a thorough knowledge of
psychiatric terminology, and was perfectly capable of describing
his own symptoms like a specialist, which stupefied those who
60

corresponded with him-as well as the psychiatrists themselves .

How could a man so well informed about his own condition be
insane? There was no doubt that Artaud was fully aware of what
he was doing when he called Lacan an erotomaniac .
This "erotomania" was also a confirmation of the classical
Freudian interpretation of paranoia as repressed homosexuality,
which Latremoliere had implicitly brought up in his interpretation
of Artaud's drawing. Other psychiatrists looked in the same
direction for an explanation of the extraordinary horror of women
that Artaud had. Dr. Rene Allendy, an eminent psychoanalyst
who had helped him establish the Alfred Jarry Theatre , and who
knew him very well , told Anais Nin that Artaud was homosexual .
However, Allendy was Anais Nin's lover at the time , in the early
1 930s, and perhaps he was trying to dissuade her from getting
too infatuated with this intriguing actor. As for Latremoliere, he
attributed Artaud's issues with women to impotence and Father
Julien and the all too-strict religious upbringing, which seems by
far to be the most plausible answer. We'll obviously never know
the real facts , and anyway, what's the point of trying to figure it
out? The important thing is that Artaud managed to transform his
execration of the maculate conception into a powerful indictment
of God and society, into a poetic insurrection against life as it is.
Doctor Latremoliere was not a poet, not even a very minor one
like Dr. Gachet or Dr. Ferdiere, but he certainly considered himself
one . Otherwise , why would he have started off his article with
the rather incongruous assertion that he was "a Christian doctor
and a lover of poetry," before dropping citations pell-mell from
Villon, King David, Ronsard , and Solomon as his inspirations?
La Tour de Feu hadn't asked the good doctor to write poetry, just
to rant against Artaud and his detestable entourage-but he acted
like the world had been waiting with baited breath to hear what
he had to say: ''I'm aware , but very humbly," he wrote, "that I bear
within me the inspiration of five thousand years of the history
of mankind and culture . . . . " Doctor Ferdiere was perhaps not so
wrong in thinking that Latremoliere had some problems . Our
meeting in Figeac apparently had a kind of electric effect on
his life . As a result of it he seems to have stopped talking about
retirement and done a total about-face . He threw himself into
frenetic activity, making his testimonial about Artaud into a kind
61

of testament addressed to the whole world. In the letter he sent to

me in New York on February 1 3 , 1 985 he crowed , "I am currently
at work on a very audacious tome : A.A. , as he really was!"
The very next day, I received another letter, wherein he
confirmed his receipt of the transcript of our conversation-"the
report-back from our battle, which was an enthralling one for me
as well . " Attached was a copy of his article about Artaud and God.
"I think this will be of interest to you ," he wrote, "but rest assured
that my book will really make your j aw drop . "
Fifteen days later, without forewarning, I got a very terse letter
from him about the interview that he'd had with Ms. Malaussena ,
Artaud's sister, which I'd included in the transcript of our talk,
since he'd played it for me during our lively discussion and
obviously I'd recorded the whole thing. He'd j ust realized that the
interview was now part of the official version of our talk. That
interview, he said, made no sense outside of the context of his
book, and he would be extremely upset if I were to make use of it.
It would be, as he put it, "truly an act of rape. (RAPE) . "
I already had the vague idea that his interview with Artaud's
sister had been a bit slanted. In it, Latremoliere had acted a
lot more innocent than he normally did , in an attempt to coax
reactions verging on the ridiculous from his interviewee . It was
not so much-as I believed at first-a comedy of innocence , but
rather a theatre of cruelty. Anyway, I thought the idea of combining
the two interviews into a single text , like those little Russian dolls ,
would make for an interesting dramatic construction . Moreover, it
was an exact reflection of what had actually happened between us.
I replied at once, but once again our letters crossed paths in time .
The next day I received a furious, even more maniacal missive
from the doctor:
"Sir, you are a crook, both intellectually and materially. I forbid
you to use this text in any way before the publication of my
book. . . . "
I expressed to him how surprised I was at these mood swings
he was having. "Am I your friend or am I a crook? Did you start
hallucinating in my absence, or hallucinating due to the absence
of news from me? I don't think I've done anything to deserve the
kind of accusations you've cast at me, which are no doubt simply
an angry or anxious reaction on your part. But no one is being
62

persecuted here . In regard to your dialogue with Ms. M . , I did not

transcribe it for purposes of publication but only because it was an
integral part of the little communicational drama we had together,
which in fact I have quite warm memories of. "
I received another letter from Latremoliere on April 5 , 1 985 ,
in which he clearly found himself in retreat: "Dear friend, if I was
angry, it was merely righteous indignation, and it vanished rather
quickly-no anxiety or paranoia involved, thank you . My book
is now finished and I am looking for a publisher. My daughter
is typing it up for me : I'm keeping it in the family because of
the secrecy involved, so that nothing blows up. You know the
right thing to do-I wouldn't expect anything less since you're an
honest man ; I never really thought you were capable of rape. Feel
free to drop by and visit."
I met "Dr. L" for the last time at Figeac in july 1 985 . His office
was reverberating like a church with some liturgical music he was
trying out on his cassette player before playing it at an upcoming
mass. He turned it down when I came in, accompanied by my
wife Chris Kraus, but throughout our conversation you could
still hear the voice of a preacher constantly yelling "Hallelujah!"
triumphantly in the background .
The psychiatrist handed me a copy of his manuscript. I started
reading from the introduction: "I've decided not to insert our
conversation in my text, because certain arguments we had , in
a playful way, don't sit well with me . A recent telephone call I
received from Sylvere Lotringer in 1 985 showed that he is hardly
conscious of any conflict between us, and even holds me in some
esteem. My response consists in my decision to have this text
published no matter what, whether it is good or bad for me or for
him. And thats the way I think about Artaud as well."
I quickly paged through to the conclusion of the manuscript.
"The end is very nasty," he said with obvious satisfaction.
"So I've changed the title of my book. "LAbandonne de Dieu?"
[The Man Abandoned by God?] Why not?"
I sort of grunted vaguely. The idea wasn't exactly mind blowing.
"That's it. With a question mark, of course . "
"Uh, why would you put a question mark o n it?"
"Because I'm not really sure if it's true. Hell exists too , after all .

63

Of course you know that the holy Virgin Mary appeared to six
little boys and girls in Yugoslavia. She told them: "Now you will
see Hell. " And she took them down to Hell. These weren't just
some neurotic kids, you know-this was a real apparition, like in
Lourdes. I suppose its self-evident when it's real . . . . She said that
Russia was once again going to become . . . . "
" . . . A great Catholic country?" I interj ected . "But it never really
stopped being one . "
"Of course . B u t anyway, at the end of Artauds life there was no
love to be found . "
"Are you saying that Artaud was full of hate?"
''I'm going to give you a sermon now, whether you like it or
not. "
"I love sermons. "
"I g o t o mass every day. And we are overj oyed t o receive the
body of Christ and the blood of Christ, because both of those are
acts of communion. Our j oy is in Christ. Artauds j oy . . . was in
opium. And yet, Marie-Ange did say: 'he was a very deep believer
that boy, contrary to what people say about him. I really feel that
in spite of everything his belief in God held out against it all . "'
That was how he ended his book. Its never been published,
a s far as I know, and maybe i t was never even finished, i n spite of
his family's enthusiastic support. Doctor Latremoliere died a few
years after that, as did Paule Thevenin, Marthe Robert, all Artaud's
Parisian girlfriends, his young disciples . . . . Sometimes I wonder if
Latremoliere himself ended up going up to the kingdom of God ,
and if he met Artaud in eternal life , or rather if he too ended up in
limbo, waiting for some umbilical, like Artaud. Would the good
doctor have been willing to talk about God with Antonin Artaud
again, if he got the chance?
Here I too have to leave a big question mark .
God only knows.

64

I TALKED WITH GOD

ABOUT ANTONIN ARTAUD

Jacques Latremoliere: I must admit that when you called me

about this meeting, I wasn't very enthusiastic . It seems pointless

to dig up Artaud's life after thirty years . Then again, people came
by twice to photograph a drawing of his that I have . I never
got anything from them-they didn't even leave a card . So you
understand . . . . Now I've put Artaud's drawing in my bank safe .
Sylvere Lotringer: Were you personally responsible fo r Antonin
Artaud during his stay at the Rodez asylum?
JL: I worked with Dr. Ferdiere, the director of the asylum. I was

Artaud's friend for two years. Have you seen the article I wrote
about this relationship? It's called "I Talked About God With
Antonin Artaud . "46 I expressed pretty much everything I thought
about Artaud in it. Since then I've changed my mind on the
matter. The studies on Artaud are multiplying. I find it a shame .
Artaud carried no message . He never had a message . He was a
distinguished paranoiac with extraordinary delusions of grandeur
and persecution.
SL: You were Artaud's friend . . . .

46. 'Tai Parle de Dieu avec Antonin Artaud," in La Tour de Feu , n. 1 3 6 , Paris , 1 9 7 7 .

67

JL: He would address his friends-that is , those he took advantage

of-every time he needed opium. We never gave him opium, but
he requested it. We were his friends, but as soon as we turned
our backs , we became his enemies. And that was the case for a
considerable number of people around him. I consider his written
oeuvre as a cry. As a cry of horror from a man lacking all sense . All
sense of others. He put himself at the center of the world. There
was only him and the little birds .

SL: At least there were the little birds .

JL: Yes, at least there were the little birds , which wasn't so bad, but
still. I find the credit he gets a bit exaggerated.
SL: But isn't the horror at the root of his paranoia precisely what
makes what he says meaningful? His feelings led him to write , and
what he wrote caused a kind of shock. . . .
JL: How was it that he felt so many different things in short
intervals? That wasn't really him. I saw him scream, I heard him
scream. Never against me . He only screamed at me afterwards ,
didn't he , after he'd left Rodez. So I believe that Man will find
nothing in Artaud's work. Nothing. It will not advance civilization.
Certainly not. On the contrary, the elevation of such a character. . . .
There are others whose reputations are inflated . But those cries
behind the curtain, that horrific scene he made in Paris . He
screamed there too . He had lost his papers and started screaming.
He kept carrying on, and I consider someone who is unable to
control himself incapable of offering anything to anyone.
SL: Take for instance another writer, a contemporary of Artaud,
Celine .
JL: Celine, yes.
SL: Celine also found himself in the posltlon of a pariah,
tossed onto the streets of Germany, in complete disarray. What's
unbearable about Celine , and about Artaud , is that they reached

68

a point at which they're able to say things about humanity that

interest everybody
JL: I have the complete works of Artaud , and I've gradually
digested them. Have a look, they are first editions, he gave them to
me-well, when we read what he expressed in its totality, we see
that there's very little that's understandable. Very little.
SL: What do you mean by "understandable?"
JL: Understandable like the conversation we're having now. All
the words he invented make no sense-they add nothing to
civilization, nothing.
SL: Do you think civilization makes so much sense?
JL: Oh, yes . You only have to look at humanity since the beginning
to see that it's been steadily advancing. There are setbacks, but
overall it's a progression.
SL: We've gotten better at killing people , that's all.
JL: That's not all , no , thats not the case . Oh no , no . I've never
killed anyone, anyway If you do the research you will find that
there aren't many people who have the capacity to kill, except
those who do so for political reasons.
SL: Exactly I connect Artaud to Dada. The whole era . The first
large scale butchery.
JL: Surrealist. Artaud was a Surrealist.
SL: Of course . But Artaud's sensibility seems to me much more
chaotic, anarchistic and uncontrolled, like that of the Dadaists .
For me Artaud is a resonance, a source of resonance from that
huge rupture in our civilization that was Dada . If you can call
civilization this craze for worldwide annihilation. So Artaud may
be a paranoiac, narcissistic , megalomaniac, whatever you wish ,

69

but it gives him a certain perspective on things . A completely

inhuman perspective in some regards .
JL: Inhuman, that's the word . Therefore it's of no interest . Where
do you think it comes from . . . from above?
SL: No. It's the experience of humanity.
JL: You're getting deeper into what I'm trying to tell you . If he's
inhuman, he really has nothing to contribute to humanity.
SL: Maybe we're not conscious enough of the inhumanity of the
idea of humanity presented to us.
JL: I beg your pardon?
SL: The inhumanity of the kind of civilization we're trying to
produce .
JL: But there is no connection between actual civilization and the
work of Artaud.
SL: You don't think so?
JL: It's not at all constructive .
SL: What we're constructing at this very moment seems to me to
be totally destructive .
JL: So you say, but it's been going on for a long time now, you
know.
SL: Since World War I , the destruction has continued with a
power and a speed we've never experienced before . And which is
leading us to our end .
jL: And you believe Artaud was sensitive to this civilization? Ah , I
can guarantee you he was not. He was only interested in himself.
Throughout the period when I knew him, he was Christ, the center
70

of the world. So don't tell me he advanced society. It was quite the

opposite. And it never changed.
SL: What was it like to be Artauds friend?
jL: Well we'd speak at length, for hours . About God. And God
knows his ideas on religion were debatable. It was a kind of myth
in which he saw himself at the center.
SL: Artaud thought he had a privileged relationship with God?
JL: Privileged? He was to be the one in power before the last
a pparition of Christ on Earth . So you understand , I have to laugh
when you talk about his message . There was nothing. It was
empty like this [knocks on table] . Moreover, it makes no sense . I
was there. How many people read him? No one. No one. Maybe a
few intellectuals here and there.
SL: His work has had an enormous influence on culture.
JL: You think so? You think so?
SL: The entirety of Western theatre for the last twenty years is
derived from it.
JL: Listen, don't speak to me about theatre . He never had any
theatrical success. All his plays were flops. Don't tell me you
think the ideas in The Theatre and Its Double had any importance
whatsoever. That's totally beside the point. The proof is that these
ideas fail from a practical point of view. So I'm sorry. . . .
SL: Theres no doubt that all the great contemporary directors,
Grotowski, Peter Brook, The Living Theatre-from every country,
Poland, England, the US-everyone regards Artaud as the
source . . . .
JL: Yeah sure , something a bit eccentric always catches on.

71

SL: It's no coincidence that since the beginning of the century

everything important in modern art has looked back, like Artaud ,
t o primitive societies . Our civilization was losing its substance .
Everything was rapidly appearing and disappearing on its surface .
There was a need to reconnect with traditional forces , to rediscover
earthly roots, to reinvent rigorous rituals. That is Artaud's theatre .
That's what lead him to embark for Mexico and Ireland . And you
consider that a flop? I see it as a complete refusal to compromise . . . .
JL: Oh, believe me , Artaud was not afraid to compromise. Don't
tell me stories because I knew the man personally. He would come
to our house to borrow a book and make some declaration. He
was extremely convincing, but his theatricality ended there .
SL: And what did you make of it?
JL: He'd listen to himself.
SL: Perhaps if one listens to oneself, one starts to hear better.
JL: Listen, sir, I'm sorry but I've studied psychiatry for four years.
Don't tell me a thing like that because I'm afraid I'll have to tell you
it's absurd. It's the exact opposite , when one listens to oneself all
the time , after a certain point, one no longer hears others . It's the
opposite: one no longer hears others. Therefore he was incapable
of loving. That's why he was cast aside , particularly in Ireland.
He wasn't capable of having a normal relationship with anyone .
He was no longer sociable . And if we treated him-which we've
been criticized for-it was to protect him from himself. And in
this reverse sense , we contributed to his progress . He was finally
able to write again, to make drawings , to chat with us. We were
the ones who gave that back to him. All my life I'll remember my
friend Ferdiere's declaration: "If I'd have known, I wouldn't have
let him leave Rodez . I infinitely regret it."
SL: But it allowed him to write a number of important things.

72

JL: Pff! His letters were to anyone and everyone. Nowadays they
do whatever they want with those. There's a letter to Hitler, you've
heard about that? Good. Then .
SL: When you read Artauds texts, do you ever try to forget about
the man you knew? To read them as you would read Racine . . . .
JL: Oh, no . He speaks to me . He speaks to me , anyway. He doesn't
say much, but he does speak to me , yes .
SL: And what does he say?
JL: Bah! just images! He tosses images around. It doesn't mean
anything. In thirty or fifty years I'm sure no one will speak of him.
SL: How did you first hear about Artaud?
JL: I didn't hear about him. He arrived under our care at Rodez
because he had been starving at Ville-Evrard. Ferdiere knew one
of the psychiatrists there who had the option to lock him up.
When we received him he looked so wretched and thin. I hadn't
read anything by him at that point, and if I hadn't met him I never
would have-thats for sure .
SL: So you knew nothing about Artaud when you saw him for the
first time . How was he presented to you?
JL: Ferdiere informed me . He told me he was coming straight
from Ireland , that they'd arrested him for causing chaos on the
boat. He was talking about St. Patrick's stick when they locked
him up in the nearest psychiatric hospital-Sotteville-les-Rouen if
I remember correctly And they knew right away what they were
dealing with . No one claimed he was normal. You just had to
spend half an hour with him to . . . .
SL: I know quite a few people who aren't totally . . . normal, as you
say, or ordinary. I always learn interesting things from them. They
take shortcuts.

73

JL: If you view them from the outside , yes .

SL: And you-you view them from the inside?

JL: I had to . All psychiatrists are obliged to follow their patients ,
to speak with them as equals. But the fact that I had complete
power over his freedom worked against me-though I wasn't the
only one . It didn't make our friendship easy. But because he needed
me, he was always charming. Charming. In casual conversation he
never spoke the way he did later. Later, anything was possible for
him. Everyone hung on his every word. There are always people
ready to proclaim a miracle as soon as they see something unusual.
But if you really look at his texts, especially the later ones . . . . Take
Van Gogh: there are three correct pages in there. The rest is a joke .
SL: And how does he view Van Gogh? Not as a lunatic or an
enlightened one . It'.s the world that is ludicrous ; it's order that has
become criminal, abnormal . . . . And how does The judgment of God
start? It starts with visions of war, visions of excessive weapons
and devastation. The whole century had become murderous . I
was struck to see Artaud return to Paris the way people return
from concentration camps-emaciated, toothless , devastated . . . .
I'm not saying that Rodez was a concentration camp , of course ,
but isn't it strange that even isolated from the great cataclysm all
around him, isolated like Van Gogh was, a man who was evidently
not "normal . . . .
"

JL: Thank you !

SL: Finds a way to express . . . .
JL: Not quite normal !
SL: Finds a way to express all the horror, all the madness of the
world?
JL: You draw curious parallels .

74

SL: The point isn't to know whether Artaud deceived his friends.
I'm sure he did, especially those friends upon whom his freedom
depended . It's the least he could do . . . .
jL: That doesn't make it ok. It doesn't contribute to the betterment
of society.
SL: No.
jL: Thank you ! Thank you !
SL: Maybe those who surrounded him and those he depended
upon shouldn't have allowed that kind of relationship . But his
writing expresses intuitions not only about what's going on in his
head, but his head becomes the world.
jL: No, no . Ok, well-listen, I seriously pity you because you
really need tranquilizers . . . .
SL: Oh really?
jL: Yes, for sure .
SL: After all, why does literature even exist? Why do people wrack
their brains to say things indirectly?
JL: Because they hope to make money. How many people write for
the glory of getting on television?
SL: In Artaud'.s time there was radio . . . .
JL: The situation is still the same .
SL: Why do we teach these things in schools if people write only
to make money or because they're a bit . . . bizarre?
JL: What people? Artaud is hardly taught in schools.
SL: I teach him at Columbia University. And I'm not the only one .
75

JL: Yes, well I pity your students. Oh yes-because they are not
happy in life . This type of thing won't make them stronger. On the
contrary, it will leave them crawling around in the dark.
SL: You find that Artaud's texts don't have any power?
JL: No, I said they won't make people stronger.
SL: If they're powerful, they must generate power.
JL: But it's an absolutely grotesque power. I've seen him cry out. It
didn't hold any ground. He revealed himself. He alone mattered
nothing else . So don't tell me he was sensitive to civilization. He
was sensitive to his own brutal pain. I do acknowledge that. And
I investigated his pain. With him. But hey, his pain-it was his
alone . So don't put it on a pedestal .
SL: That also happened to Christ.
JL: Thank you . First of all, it was Artaud himself who identified
with Christ.
SL: Of course .
JL: There is still a slight difference .
SL: I wasn't trying to make a literal comparison . . .
JL: You've just done it! You've just done it!
SL: And why not? In both cases there is perhaps something of
interest for the world.
JL: In both cases? In the first, yes . I talked about God with
Antonin Artaud . So I know perfectly well what he thought. As far
as I know, Christ never vulgarly insulted entire populations. No,
no. I won't take you back to Sunday school.

76

SL: Regarding all this controversy about whether Artaud believed

in God or not-what do you think?
JL : Nothing at all . Because it's of no importance . He believed at
one time , and afterwards, he no longer did. When he believed, he
believed wrongly, or strangely. So if you can synthesize something
from all this, you're a lucky one.
SL: One of his texts on the Tarahumaras was written in Rodez in
1 9 43. It is strangely sprinkled with Saints and religious symbols ,
a sort of delirium on Christ and the Cross , which Artaud rej ects
when he returns to Paris a few years later, as stupid priestly
bewitchment. The texts written in Mexico, on the other hand , are
very beautiful, crystalline.
JL: What are you talking about?
SL: About 'The Mountain of Signs. "
JL: I don't know it.
SL: It's an extremely serene vision of things . Which is incredibly
unusual for Artaud.
JL: If you say so, yes.
SL: Everything is in its place . Gods , men , stones. Man is no longer
the center of the universe. He is sculpted in stone and the stones
are gods. There is a kind of material harmony.
jL: You call that harmony, when stones are gods?
SL: Thats what the Greeks said.
JL: The Greeks weren't necessarily the center of the world . They
were only one part of the evolution of civilization, and not the part
where Gods are rocks and vice versa , oh no .

77

SL: What about the Gauls and the Druids and dolmens ; are they
central enough for you? It's still our French, or rather our Celtic
heritage . It's not for nothing that Artaud went to Ireland .
JL: So?
SL: Why can we accept certain things about the Druids , and
consider their beliefs legitimate-but when someone takes himself
for a Druid and becomes a Druid, we lock him away? If that's
madness , then doesn't madness teach us about our own history?
[Pause. ] About who we are?
JL: You don't seem to mind mixing things up.
SL: Mhm.
JL: A little smorgasbord.
SL: You think so?
JL: Oh, it's quite a cocktail. To go from Artaud to Christ himself
then back to Druids-is a real feat.
SL: We were speaking about stones and gods .
JL: Yes yes yes yes yes . I haven't lost sight of our topic . Civilization
at that time could speak of stones and even sacralize them. Why
not? But later that was not the case .
SL: The Stone Age wasn't that long ago . When you think about
it, 1 500 or 2000 years of history isn't all that much . Anyway, it is
something that might be worth thinking about instead of watching
a football game on TY. When one starts to think about it, one may
wonder what it means to live , and to live in a society like ours,
where we no longer know what a god is; where we're no longer in
touch with anything, not even with stones. This sort of question
doesn't seem valid to you? I mean , that's what thinking is about.
Or writing. It is perhaps literature's j ob to imagine a world where
men are like stones, and not just blurred images on a tiny screen.
78

JL: Mmnn.
SL: When I read Artaud I see things that seem crazy to me . . .
JL: Thank you !
S L: . . . but beautiful; a sort of rocky, organic, primitive feel for the
lan guage that I find . . . upsetting.
JL: Yes. I've come across such passages, I'll grant you that. Maybe
there are a couple of pages , but the rest is utterly incoherent. So, to
come back to pebbles ; picking a few here and there and forgetting
the bulk of it, which is incoherent, makes it hard to arrive at a
synthesis.
SL: Yes, but why synthesize?
JL: Well, because it's always necessary.
SL: Why?
JL: What do you mean , "why?" You never synthesize things?
SL: Sometimes, when I can't help it. When I'm in a hurry. But it's
so simplistic.
JL: It's a starting point.
SL: That's what Dada began questioning: logic, dialogic, rational
thought-these processes that allow one to speed through without
truly grasping things .
JL: It's only one step from there to dream analysis .
SL: I'm not sure that dreams need to be explained.
JL: Oh, so now Freud doesn't even make it!
SL: What can we do if dreams have become reality . . . .
79

JL: How's your health?

SL: [Laughing] . . and reality has become a nightmare? If we
reflect a bit on the possibilities of destruction that currently exist,
catastrophe seems quasi-inevitable .
.

JL: It's never inevitable.

SL: It takes less than three minutes to stop these electronically
controlled atomic devices . . . that's the kind o f logic we see
governing today.
JL: That's been going on for forty years .
SL: In forty years , the time it took to reach an intercontinental
target went from a few hours to a few minutes .
JL: That's one more reason not to use them.
SL: Are machines reasonable? Soon they'll be making the
decisions. It's another form of inhumanity.
JL: I'm sorry, but machines are at the service of men , not the other
way around.
SL: It's the story of Golem. When he only had a few seconds left
to decide . . . .
JL: In that case , the fact that someone could actually kill himself
shocks me . The response is immediate . So it's suicide.
SL: Yes. It's crazy.
JL: Therefore it's impossible .
SL: A whole population wanted to commit suicide. It was
Germany. And they killed a good number of others . . . .

80

JL: I'm reading Churchill's memoirs , so you touch on a good

subject. It was a big process , you know, the climb . There were
even people behind Hitler trying to stop him. He bribed them;
otherwise he never would have made it.
SL: It was a controlled skid .
jL: It was enough to invade the Ruhr just when he'd recovered it,
and nothing happened. Nothing.
SL: Hitler wasn't in an insane asylum . He was head of the
government. Perhaps he was delirious or bluffing, but everyone
believed him.
jL: But he died like a madman. Suicide.
SL: He didn't die alone.
jL: No, alas .
SL: There were tens of hundreds of deaths. ls that something to
scream about? Even with narcissistic and paranoiac cries? When
a world is in the process of annihilating forty million people , a
scream is significant.
JL: Yes, but Hitlers scream had a direct influence on his people .
He was playing music for his people .
SL: His people enj oyed music .
JL: They liked music , but not necessarily that kind. They were
placed within the historic conditions in which Hitler could find
reasons from the recent past for them to be unhappy.
SL: The people went crazy. They became reasonably crazy.
JL: I'm not making you say this.
SL: Artaud was crazy.
81

JL: Not reasonably. I'm sorry, but that's the difference.

SL: Artaud never burned anyone .
JL: [ Coughs. ) No, but if you spread his thoughts out, I'm not sure
there wouldn't be burn marks.
SL: Napalm has existed for a limited amount a time . But burnings
have been around forever. Electricity can also burn . . . .
JL: D o you smoke a lot?
SL: No. [Laughs. ) For me literature is like putting on glasses. I
see the world differently. And when I put on Artaud's glasses
which aren't my own-I'm able to see things that would otherwise
remain invisible . And the fact that the world I see through his
glasses is fragmented-full of twists, treacheries and denials
doesn't surprise me . I see these same characteristics in newspapers
every day.
JL: If you mix up what you see behind Valery's glasses, Sade's
glasses, and a bunch of others , maybe you'll find a synthesis , to
come back to it, that won't be at all the same .
SL: Those are very different things . Why mix them up? Sade is
very organized in his pleasures. Not Artaud .
J L : He'.s not organized , that's for sure . H e has no happiness to
bring to anyone.
SL: No, commercials and advertising have taken care of bringing
happiness to everyone . All one has to do today is make a purchase .
Still , you don't find it strange that he continued to write in that
way, this giant body of work he produced . . . .
JL: He couldn't stop writing. Do you know how he wrote? He
had notebooks all over the place. Here , this will interest you . It's
a tape of a conversation with Marie-Ange Malaussena , Artaud'.s
sister, at Rodez. She told me about her brother's childhood, her
82

ties with him-despite what he was reproached for-the ties that

always remained between him and his mother and sister. She
doesn't see it at all the same way you do. Would you like to listen?

[Click of the tape recorder as the tape is placed within it. ]

INTERVIEW OF DR. LATREMOLIERE

WITH MME. MARIE-ANGE MALAUS SENA,
ANTON IN ARTAUD'S S I STER
JL: The way you felt just now walking through the landscape, the places
where he lived, how do you think he felt here? UL to SL: This takes
place in a public garden at Rodez. ]
Mme. Marie-Ange Malaussena: It's pretty diffi cult to imagine

but it seems to me, given what I knew about Antonin, that despite
everything-despite the mental and physical state he was in-he must
have been relaxed in this setting. You told me he used to come to this
garden often-he wrote I think, right? He would write here . . . .
jL: It's possible, I don't know.
Mme. M: So I have the impression that, given the state he was in,

having come out of hell at Ville-Evrard and finding himself in this

little corner, which is really very pleasant in terms of-how can I say
it?-the setting, in terms of the landscape. Certainly it was a relief,
psychologically, for him to be here.
JL: He also experienced this relief in the company of his poet friends,

the ones we heard last night. . . .

Mme. M : Yes yes yes yes.

JL: . . . and who maintained a very deep respect for him.

Mme. M: Infact that's what I sense.

83

JL: But they didn't live his drama.

Mme. M : No

JL: And his tragedy. . . .

Mme. M : And in spite of i t all . . . .

JL: Yes . . . .
Mme. M : They seem to have appreciated Antonin because, after all,

we've come here for the Antonin Artaud Award. This shows they are
continuing to respect and honor his memory.
JL: Sure, to honor and respect a pure genius.
Mme. M: Really? Don't you think that's a strong word?

JL: Not at all, why? Why a strong word? I don't think so.
Mme. M: Because in taking on the point of view of Artaud's sister, I
perhaps obviously express my feelings for him too strongly as well as the
feelings he might have experienced for his surroundings here.

JL: What's strange is that the words "honor" and "respect" are the very

ones being used by today's young people to speak ofyour brother's works.
Mme. M: That makes me very pleased. I'm very, very pleased.

JL: Well, now that you've spoken of your brother's work, of people's

respect for his work, perhaps it would be helpful to say something about
your brother's love . . . for you.
Mme. M: Well, I don't want to exaggerate but I believe it was total in

terms of, um let's see, the love a brother can have for a sister. It was
total. I always felt deeply loved by Antonin. And that feeling dates back
to our early childhood because we were always together, one could say
hand in hand.

84

JL: Hand in hand . . . . You were telling me last night about when he put

his hand in yours.

Mme. M: It was during the excursions they had us take. He was always

worried about where I was. He stayed close to me and held my hand

tightly so I wouldn't get away.
JL: Because he had the impression that people could get away from him?
Mme. M: Yes, always.

jL: Why do you think that was?

Mme. M: I don't know. It was his personality, his way of thinking.
He was always afraid of losing those he loved. It was the same thing
with our mother. He was always very attached to our mother. He really
adored her. I've told you about those little childhood scenes when I had
to act as a go-between and bring my mother the letters Antonin had
written to . . . to ask her forgiveness.

jL: Forgiveness for what?

Mme. M: For the way he had behaved toward her. Which was really

nothing to anyone else, but for him it took on enormous proportions.

JL: Because he lived these things with an enormous intensity. . . .
Mme. M: Always. It was his temperament. He was extreme in

everything he did, I believe-in everything.

JL: Extreme . . . .
Mme. M : Yes. The word is perhaps too strong, not a t all suited to
Antonin'.s personality ?

JL: Why not?

Mme. M: So you agree?

85

JL: Sure.
Mme. M: In my opinion, Antonin always lived in the absolute.

JL: Yes.
Mme. M: Both in terms of his relationships and in terms of what he

liked to . . . work on, and since he was a poet, in terms of poetry, in terms
of working as a writer, in terms of a man of the theatre. He was
always . . . inclined toward the absolute.
JL: Yes . . . . And you think that the work he did around you, while very

young, already, um . . . demonstrated . . . .

Mme. M : O h yes, o h yes, profoundly.

jL: Showed a certain curiosity. . . .

Mme. M : Yes yes yes, profoundly.

JL: Profoundly in what way ?

Mme. M : [Silence .] Well, how can I explain this thing that i s s o diffi cult

to define? It was his temperament, his personality that demonstrated it.

He was . . . he wanted so much for things to be done meticulously, right,
that he sought the absolute even in the smallest detail.
JL: In the smallest detail. . . .
Mme. M: Yes, yes.

JL: And how did he express this search when he was young . . . ? The way

he worked when he was young . . . I mean in the drawings that he made.

Mme. M: Well, the drawings were somewhat strange. I told you that

on Thursdays and holidays he often went out on the boat with our Dad.
And when he got home, his first impulse was to get a notebook and
immediately start drawing boats and boats and boats, all the time. He
was very marked by this question of boats. Then at thirteen, he started
86

writing . . . writing poems, and each time he wrote a poem, he read it to

me or to our mother.
JL: I was struck that you said "boats" and not "the sea. "
Mme. M: The sea? No, not so much, not so much. When he was little,
we went on a vacation to Smyrna where my grandparents had a house,
and he almost drowned. He was six. For a long time he had-how
should I put it-a fear of water. But it didn't last because, I remember so
clearly, much later, we were together, we swam in the sea together and
he was a kid who wasn't afraid of the water. He was a good swimmer
and always happy to be in the water. So it was a childish phase that
didn't last.
JL: As for the boats. . . .
Mme. M : Oh, the boats were his passion. But suddenly after a few
years this passion fell by the wayside and he started writing, writing,
writing all the time.
JL: Don't you think that the reason the boats became such a passion was

because they were essentially his father?

Mme. M: Oh yes, possibly, possibly. It's very likely that-how can I put

it? Dad's work influenced him.

JL: How was his relationship with his father?
Mme. M: It was good. It was good. In fact, Dad got very involved

with-how can I put it-his studies.

JL: Yes.
Mme. M: He was a humanist. A very pronounced humanist. And for

many years he corrected Antonin's Latin homework. Always.

JL: He did his schoolwork-excuse me, this question is so banalMme. M: I'm at your service, Doctor.

87

JL: He enjoyed his schoolwork, his Latin translations?

Mme. M: Yes. He enjoyed Latin tremendously. All languages-Greek

and . . . .
JL: Ohl
Mme. M: Yes, but he didn't like math at all.

JL: Right . . . .
Mme. M : He didn't like math a t all. On the other hand, he loved Latin.
And as I said, Dad helped him a great deal, and he liked it a lot. In any
case, he always got very good grades. He was known as a good student.
I remember at the end of each week he brought home color-coded little
cards. The pink card meant Very Good and the blue one meant Good,
and the green one meant Satisfactory. He almost never got a green card.

JL Yes . . . .
Mme. M: And when he did, he was so sad.

JL: just before you spoke of the Smyrna vacation, when he took back the

name of Nalpas and began signing his letters with that name.
Mme. M: That's our mother's name. That's mother's name.

JL: That's his mother's name.

Mme. M: Our mother's name.

JL: And how did you explain this metamorphosis, thefact that hefinally

abandoned, to a certain extent, his father's name for his mother's?

Mme. M: Well, I'd like to add something that seems to me, um, quite
specific. That is, when he wrote letters in terms of mysticism, he signed
mother's name. And when he wrote letters about current, everyday
things, he signed Dad's name, his real name.

88

JL: Yes yes yes yes yes. I understand. And how soon did this com e about?
Mme. M: Oh very early, very early.

jL: Around what time? Did this happen in his early youth?
Mme. M: In his youth? No.

JL: No?
Mme. M: It happened when he got sick.

JL: Very well. Very well. Let's skip over what everyone already knows,

that is, the diffi culties he encountered at the end of his youth, etc.
Mme. M: Yes, yes.

JL: All his health problems. I don't think those interest us today.

What interests us is his profound life, his development, his attitude

toward life; and the images that marked his youth, perhaps.
Um . . . you spoke before of vacations in Smyrna. He was marked, in
fact, by this oriental nature.
Mme. M: Yes, yes. Actually, I'll tell you something: my mother was a very
good singer. And Antonin took after her. When my mother told oriental
legends or French legends, he admired her; he listened very closely. And
then when he recited something, you could hear something in his voice
that resembled mother's. She told marvelous stories, but she had a way of
not only telling them, but miming them! She mimed them, too . . . .

JL: She mimed them?

Mme. M: Oh yes. Yes yes yes. She mimed them.

JL: That explains a lot about his . . . synthesis.

Mme. M: Yes, exactly.

JL: A lot.
89

Mme. M: I remember when she told us the story of how Joseph was sold
by his brothers. It was a wonderful story. We also loved listening to the
story of Bluebeard.

jL: Yes.
Mme. M: Mother had a great imagination, I think Antonin took after

her in that respect.

jL: Excuse me when I say this madam, but that's quite a bold comparison,

I mean, to compare Bluebeard with Joseph and his brothers.

Mme. M: Oh sure, of course. It just came to me that way in terms of

memory, Doctor.
jL: It is no coincidence that childhood legends of that time were all

terrifyingfor young children.

Mme. M: Yes. Yes yes yes.

JL: And in everyday life there are, besides these terrifying images, the

horrifying images of God that everyone knows.

Mme. M: Yes, yes yes yes.

jL: Deep down, this synthesis wasn't artificial. It came from his mother.
Mme. M: Yes, I can tell you that Antonin was very passionate when

mother told terrifying legends. You see, he was always taken with things,
how can I put it, that overstepped the boundaries of the normal.
jL: Oh really?
Mme. M : Yes, yes.

jL: The horrifi c.

Mme. M: The horrific, that's it. So for him obviously the story of

Bluebeard coincided with his childish views at the time.

90

JL: OJ course, of course. And later he became interested, as you told

me last night, in Mexico, in North American civilization. Do you have

memories of that period?
Mme. M: Yes. My most vivid recollection has to do with magazines.

He would buy these travel magazines that had terrifying images of

Mexico. So obviously when he got home-it was Thursdays he bought
this magazine-and there was something extraordinary on the front
cover, he was happy. I told you last night the story of a young woman
whose heart was ripped out in the middle of the forest-a virgin. He
was obsessed with-let's see-terrifying ideas. Yes. That's the word. He
often frightened me. As a child he would hide in the house and jump out
at me yelling and screaming-as a joke. That was his style.
JL: You said as a joke. In other words you played together in this way,

and you accepted it as a joke.

Mme. M: Oh, yes.

JL: You wouldn't say it was abnormal?

Mme. M: Oh, no. I definitely didn't find it abnormal.

JL: It was a game.

Mme. M: It was a game, it was a game.

JL: A game through which he expressed his personality.

Mme. M: Yes.

JL: His anxious personality?

Mme. M: Not so much when he was little. No. When he was

little he was often quick-tempered. He would get very angry,

but five seconds later he was the first to regret what he'd said and done.
JL: At what point did you notice the anxiety he often developed in his

oeuvre-this profound, existential anxiety ?

91

Mme. M: I believe it began around the age offourteen or fifteen.

JL: In what form?

Mme. M: You know-how do I make this clear-I was going to say
in his poems. But no, his poems didn't show anxiety at all at that point.
In what form can I tell you? For example I could tell you the story
of the staging he organized around age fifteen. He had a cousin-a
first cousin who we really liked-who came over often. So one day
Antonin staged a macabre greetingfor him. He sent everyone out of the
house-the maid, everyone-and he set up these heads in his room
with candles lit all around, and he disappeared. When my cousin rang
the bell and came in, he went into Antonin's room looking for him. He
found this terrifying scene and he was-how should I put it-very
scared. Then Antonin came in, they laughed together and that was it.

JL: You lost your father when he was very young.

Mme. M: Dad died in '24. Antonin was twenty-seven.

JL: And he'd already left the nest.

Mme. M: Yes, he left the moment we went to Switzerland. He would come

homefor holidays: Christmas, Easter. When he was away in those places,

he stayed away. He didn't move. At that time he was about eighteen. When
he had those nervous breakdowns-that kind of neurasthenia that he
had-my parents sent him everywhere: Savoy, the Pyrenees, but not to
a mental home. And we were always with him.
JL: And when he came back, did he seem better?
Mme. M: Absolutely, absolutely.

JL: Those were periods where he was simply sad.

Mme. M: That's it.

JL: He was a bit afraid of life, huh?

92

Mme. M: You know, he wasn't a very talkative kid, about his feelings.
He didn't say much, but we understood him. The family understood
him.

JL: You evoked a beautiful image last night. You told me that while he

was terrifi ed of the outside word, he took refuge near you when something
was wrong. He would come take your hand and you shared . . . .
Mme. M: Oh yes, indeed. You 're referring to the famous bread incident.

It's simple. I don't know how he managed to get ahold of a piece of that
special bread. But since we slept in the same room-we were children
when everyone was asleep, he'd get up, tap me on the shoulder, and give
me half of the bread that he had taken from downstairs. He probably
found it delicious and didn't want to keep it all to himself-let's see, um,
I'm at a loss for words, I'm feeling somewhat emotional, Doctor. . . .
JL: [Softly. ) Don't worry, i t doesn't matter. In any case, what really

matters is our attempt to weave together all the threads that made up
your brother's life.
Mme. M: Yes yes yes yes.

jL: And particularly, I think, during his youth. Do you think that

perhaps he wasn't . . . loved enough? Uh-not by you, but . . . .

Mme. M : I know what you mean.

jL: That's not how to phrase it, but he gave the impression of not feeling

loved.
Mme. M: Yes. Perhaps he felt that he wasn't loved the way he would

have liked to have been. That's it. But at home, he always came first.
Everything he wanted, my parents gave to him. And when he wanted
to go to Paris to participate in this literary life that pleased him so
enormously, they didn't object. They let him do as he pleased. In general,
my parents never objected to any of his projects. He was free to speak
as he wished.

93

JL: I think thats very important. And your mother who was so

saddened by the events surrounding the end of your brothers life-she

always understood the depth of his thoughts. She always remained in
communication . . . with him.
Mme. M: Always, always, always.

JL: I think thats very important for him.

Mme. M: Yes, yes, indeed. I think one thing is for sure: my mother
adored my brother and my brother returned her affection. And she
always protected him-or at least she tried to.

JL: Of course.
Mme. M: She tried.

JL: Of course.
Mme. M: Indeed, she followed his every step through life . . . . Dad was

dead. She sold everything in Marseille and she went to live in Paris and
she took him with him-I mean with her. Before that, when he was in
Paris and we were still living in Marseille, which I mentioned to you last
night, Dad would go to Paris every month to give Antonin money. So
from a material standpoint, he had nothing to worry about.
JL: He was absolutely not abandoned.
Mme. M: Oh not at all. The idea that he was abandoned was a horrible

myth invented by Antonin s friends at the time of his death.

JL: And particularly when he went to Ivry after he left Rodez, he

continued to visit you.

Mme. M: Oh, completely. Wh en he came back from Ivry
from Rodez actually-he was often at the house. And sometimes in the
afternoon he would nap and ask me to wake him up at a certain time
because he had to leave. He stayed with us and he wrote.

94

JL: He was afjectionate with you . . . .

Mme. M: Yes, yes. He came to eat at the house, he loved the children;

he was so affectionate.
JL: And he didn't disrupt your family's life.
Mme. M: Not at all; on the contrary. We were so happy to have him

with us-so happy. He'd write letters to mother, saying: ''I'm going to
see Marie-Ange on such-and-such a day. " There's a letter that touches
on the things among those that have been reproduced. On the eve of his
death-but we're skipping to the end of his life-I was at his house. He
had asked me to put his things in order. Then the time came for me to
leave. He wanted to walk me to the door. I think I told you about the
great anxiety he had about finding a corner, a hiding place, for his last
writings. So for a while, for a long while, he turned around in the room,
and finally I said: "The best way to hide your writings is to place them
among the new notebooks I brought you. No one will look for them in
this big pile. " And that-how should I put it-reassured him completely
and he calmed down. All this goes to show that he didn't trust the people
around him very much.
JL: Do you think he foresaw his approaching death on the very

morning before he died since he said to you: "If I take too many of these
tranquilizers there's a danger of. . . . "
Yes yes. He was taking chloral hydrate at this
time. The previous day, while I was with him, he wanted to take
some chloral with a glass of water. He took a tablespoon and said:
"See, if I take just a little bit more, I could die of a heart attack, or
a blood clot. " And that's what must have happened during the night
because the next morning, they found him dead. I assume that somehow
he must have unintentionally increased the dosage. And he died.
[Pause.] What more can I tell you, Doctor, to try to shed some light on
Antonin's anguished life?
Mme. M:

JL: Perhaps you could help, madame, by describing the place . . . . God

had in your youthful life.

95

Mme. M: Oh!-

[End of Sylvere Lotringer's tape. He asks Dr. Latremoliere to

rewind his interview with Mme . Malaussena a bit . ]
[ SL: Take it back a bit further. ]
UL: Louder?]
[ SL: No, take it back a bit further. ]
UL: Oh, sure. ]
[ Click of tape. ]
Mme. M : . . while I was with him, h e wanted t o take some chloral with
.

a glass of water. He took a tablespoon and said: "See, if I take just a

little bit more, I could die of a heart attack, or a blood clot. " And
that's what must have happened during the night because the next
morning, they found him dead. I assume that somehow he must have
unintentionally increased the dosage. And he died. [Pause. ] What
more can I tell you, Doctor, to try to shed some light on Antonin's
anguished life?
JL: Perhaps you could help, madame, by telling about the place . . . God

had in your youthful life.

Mme. M: Oh! Certainly. Do you mean from Antonin's point of view?

JL: Yes, much obliged. He is dead.

Mme. M: Well, he was a very religious boy. Up until the time he left

home and even afterwards, he was religious. I always saw him with
rosary beads in hand. Always, always. He never entered a church
without them. Contrary to what people have invented, he was a believer.
And I think his faith in God outlived all his misery.
JL: [Affected tone . ] I do too.

96

Mme. M: Thats what the Dominican, whose name I can't remember,

who knew him so well, wrote: "Antonins cries are the cries of a true
believer. "

jL: Yes, uh . . . we could . . . .

Mme. M: He took care of us. When I was little, like all little girls I

tried to write poems. I would bring them to him and ask his opinion. He
would say, "This ones good. This ones horrible. You can fix this one. "
He was so invested in . . . in what I asked of him. And at Christmas for
example, he took me into his room and we wrote letters and made cards
for our parents and slipped them under the napkins for Christmas Eve
dinner. He dictated the letters. This is to tell you that, ultimately, he was
very attached to us.
jL: He was very affectionate.
Mme. M: Yes, very. I can't tell you how affectionate.

JL: Also, he was always seeking affection.

Mme. M: Oh yes, always. Always lookingfor affection . . . now how can

I put it? He'd never forget birthdays or holidays. He would put money
aside a long time in advance for these occasions. He bought mother. . . .
One day after h e had seen a statue i n a store, h e took m e there to see if
it was suitable, then he went in and bought it! So you see he was very
thoughtful. He was always trying . . . to please others.
Dr. L: I was struck byM: I've been delighted to speak with you, but right
now . . . with the medicine I'm taking. . . .

Mme.

[End o f tape . ]
JL: Interesting document, huh?
SL: Very. When is it from?

97

JL: About ten years ago . Before Ms . Malaussena's death obviously

She had come for the Prix Antonin. Each year at Rodez there is a
Prix Antonin Artaud where they present the prize to the writer of
the year.
SL: And you're one of the judges?
JL: No, not really I j ust attend it.
SL: So you consider Artaud's texts to have a certain literary value?
JL: It's so biased. Its biased for a psychiatrist, you know, when we
see the basis of the problem appear! The person's way of thinking
and we know they're paranoid and delusional . A doctor never
reacts with his patient. I often heard Artaud ranting. Your theory
that the scream emitted by a man can have a . . . mystical value . . . .
SL: It's yours .
JL: What?
SL: You told me that he let out a scream . . . .
JL: No, no . He was screaming all the-his whole oeuvre is
basically a scream.
SL: You , me , and Father Julien all apparently agree on that.
JL: Its a scream , but sometimes it's disj ointed. Which detracts
from its value , between you and me .
SL: When he spoke you didn't particularly pay especially close
attention . . . . How was heJL: No, he spoke normally. That's what I want to get you to
understand. When he went to his sister's he was all nice and
normal . He didn't trouble them. But when he was with his friends
in the cafe he started screaming at the top of his lungs . Screaming
nonsense.
98

SL: At any rate he seems to have had a remarkable ability to adapt.

That's how you characterize normality, right? The ability to adapt
to a situation.
JL: But ... but we don't judge a man on individual instances. I had to
pass judgment on Artaud in order to treat him. On his overall behavior.
SL: Why must you judge people?
JL: To return them to normality. That's a doctor's job : to return
them to normal. To allow them to live in the outside world without
bothering anyone , you know? Now I'm telling you , Ferdiere
bitterly regrets letting him leave . He should have kept him another
three or four years. Entrusting him to a doctor who left him the
keys to the clinic so he could go out whenever he wanted. It's
strange, to say the least, hm?
SL: That happened when he returned to Paris.
JL: At Ville-Evrard , yes. He had a key to the clinic.
SL: At lvry.
JL: What?
SL: At lvry. It was at Ivry that he was free to come and go as
he pleased, at least until nighttime, not at Ville-Evrard . At Ville
Evrard he was heavily guarded.
JL: Yes, it was at lvry. He had a separate room. Which is why he
died alone.
SL: Do you think Artaud should not have been granted liberty?
JL: Well! Ferdiere insisted he be kept under surveillance .
SL: Why? He was afraid Artaud would commit suicide?

99

JL: No! No, no , not at all ! He was afraid he'd cause trouble . That
he'd be out of control. [ Clears his throat. ] When he got out of
Rodez he went to the cathedral. He got down on his knees in the
middle of the aisle and made wild gestures . . . .
SL: That never killed anyone .
JL: He never killed anyone , I can easily grant you that.
SL: Sane people have done far worse. I've seen thousands of people
crawling on their knees up the aisle of the cathedral in Krakow, in
Poland. And they were excellent Catholics, I can assure you .
J L : No, no , I ' m just telling you this, a s a tiny detail . One little
thing.
SL: Frankly, if Artaud were crawling along the sidewalk in New
York, no one would have given him a second look.
JL: He wasn't fit, you know. He wasn't viable . He had to be right
by our side , and then yeah . . . he would act as he did when he
went home: appropriately.
SL: Every day in New York I see people sleeping in the subway
half naked, their genitals hanging out; I see people screaming
in the street accusing an imaginary speaker; people in pajamas
or wrapped in a towel ; people dressed to the extreme , the most
outrageous stuff. No one locks them up. You'd have to lock up the
whole city.
JL: Listen, sir. Lets be serious. We're talking about a delirious
paranoiac, not a guy sleeping on the subway.
SL: So what are you afraid of? What is there to fear?
JL: Him acting out, that's all !
SL: In what way?

1 00

JL: He's done his fair share . . . . [Clears his throat. I

SL: For example?
jL: [Remains silent.]
SL: What kind of acting out . . . that would endanger society.
jL: If you saw him coming, you wouldn't have to ask. He spent all
his time pacing the hallway. Pft! Pft ! Pft! He spat behind him at the
demons following him. So, please ! Don't exaggerate .
SL: He didn't turn his demons on others . He kept them to himself.
jL: Oh, no sir, listen . . . .
SL: He didn't endanger people passing in the hallway. . . .
jL: I'll give you one example here, but there are many. When my
wife passed by him, he would bow very low, and then Pft! Pft! Pft !
Because t o him she was a demon. His friends . . . the wives of his
friends were demons .
SL: What makes you think that?
JL: The only thing that mattered to him was his personal purity.
SL: In relation to women?
jL: Yes ! Definitely! Definitely! And besides , I can speak
knowledgeably because I'm convinced he was impotent. Impotent!
It happens to good people , thats not what I mean. But still . . . a
series of screams . . . that's what the screams in his work are about.
SL: You mean it's like when they castrate people to make them
better singers?
jL: They sing better, you think?

101

SL: They were castrated especially for that purpose in Italy for
example, in the nineteenth century.
JL: Listen, listen. I don't really like that kind of j oke . Artaud wasn't
a eunuch , but he was miserable . Yeah. So he wanted everyone else
to be.
SL: I was talking about castrations performed on opera singers .
Their mutilation was the price they paid to . . . sing.
JL: I've never heard of that. I have seen choirs made up of young
boys, sure. But that goes back to . . . .
SL: The questions you asked Arta u d 's sister. . . . I was
wondering . . . you were trying to , let's say, judge how close he was
with his sister, his mother. . . .
JL: What?
SL: Artaud's relationships to his sister and mother. After all, they're
women too . . . .
JL: That has nothing to do with it.
SL: Nothing.
JL: No, no , no . . . . Its visible in his work later on. [Clears his throat.]
If you look a t my book . . . [ throat clearing] my article, you'll see at
the end [throat clearing] . . ah, Man must be emasculated.
.

SL: You mean it hadn't already happened?

JL: Hm?
SL: You think Artaud already was?
JL: No, meaning Man in general . Yes, Man had to be emasculated
because he indulged in . . . impure acts . That's all he had in his
head .
102

SL: That's very . . .

JL: Immaculate Conception . . . .
SL: Thats very Christian.
JL: What! You think so?
SL: It shows a horror of sexuality.
JL: You think so?
SL: Since the apple , yes.
JL: Since Jansenism. Not since the apple .
SL: Do you think Artaud was a Jansenist?
JL: Why? He was a madman, thats all .
SL: But very influenced by the church. If we believe his sister's
account, he was a profound believer. You agreed, by the way. . . .
JL: Yes . . . yes , but after all I spoke with him on the subject and it
didn't go very far, you know.
SL: Maybe he was even more of a believer than the others. A
horror of sexuality exists in many cultures, in many religions ,
especially for Judea-Christians . Only it's not always taken so far.
Perhaps Artaud shows to what point, when reasonable things are
exaggerated , they become dangerous; that in the end, reasonable
things are dangerous.
JL: What are you talking about?
SL: The fact that in the Christian religion there is a certain defiance
of sexuality.
JL: But never of life . You're talking about thirty or fifty years ago .
1 03

SL: Yes, thirty years ago , in Artauds time . And even further back.
JL: I'm talking about now.
SL: But the Mexicans Artaud spoke of, they weren't from now
either. Maybe Artaud's religion was more primitive , more radical.
He was searching for roots.
JL: Let me repeat: Artaud's religion was himself. He was the center
of the world.
SL: And when he went to church, he was God going to church?
Or himself going to church?
JL: Oh, no. That was . . . . That was one of his inconsistencies.
SL: So sometimes he was God and sometimes he wasn't God.
Sometimes he was Artaud.
JL: Yes, sure . Because it really varied.
SL: And you saw him in all his different phases over the years?
JL: Oh, I didn't see him for that long in the grand scheme
of things. But now that I know him, I find him in his texts .
[ Throat clearing.] And the texts, after all, reveal his exasperation
with man . With man's sexuality.
SL: And you think that has something to do with his . . . impotence?
JL: That's it, his impotence . Emasculating others meant bringing
them down to his own level.
SL: Man's sexuality hasn't changed much either. In the nineteenth
century it was still something private . Now its so public and
displayed all over the place that we could say its a kind of
emasculation.
JL: You're dreaming, huh.
1 04

SL: Sexuality is no longer so sexual . We consume it . . . at the

movies , on billboards , on the couch. Sexuality is society.
JL: It's not a kind of emasculation. You have some strange ideas
about society. Excuse me , sir, for not sharing them.
SL: No? Not at all?
JL: Not at all.
SL: I see things . . . by following Artaud's gaze. You know, America
isn't America; it's the world sped up, more intense. It reveals things
that still remain elsewhere-here in France for example-in seed
form, in the darkness . A madman like Artaud did it in his corner,
not far from here , with madness in his head . . . .
JL: But there is also a resurgence of religion in America .
SL: Yes. And its taking o n some fanatical forms, I must say.
JL: N o , absolutely not. That exists , of cours e. Everything
exists in America . But there is also a resurrection of piety
and Christianity. In France , too . Look, people came to find
me because they were looking for a sect . . . that isn't . . .
outside the church . . . where they pray to the Holy Spirit .
I assure you there are people at those meetings. Lots of them.
SL: Luther also had a large following. What's the difference
between someone who is heard and someone who isn't heard?
Hitler screams and people obey with enthusiasm. Artaud screams
and people look at him . . . first with skepticism , then panic, and
finally perhaps a bit too trustingly.
JL: Not too many people fall for him.
SL: Then why is he published? ls the world crazy for publishing
such things? In respectable publishing houses like Gallimard?

1 05

JL: [Silence. ] I'm not saying there's nothing there. I'm saying it
won't leave a trace .
SL: What does leave a trace , for example? What writer,
contemporary of Artaud , do you think should endure?
JL: I don't study literature for pleasure . I believe in . . . finding a
form of civilization that is necessary.
SL: In literature?
JL: In . . . life . In life . I didn't do literature with Artaud , you see; I
did life . I shared part of my life with him. I don't care about the
value of his texts, and I'm inclined to believe , again, that they
won't last long before disappearing. They'll fade into oblivion, it's
obvious. When you speak with people, nine out of ten . . . . When I
say nine , it's much more than that. Ninety-nine out of a hundred
don't know who Artaud is. You're in a field where he's known, yes .
But . . . it's a very small field.
SL: It covers the planet.
JL: What?
SL: A giant anthology of Artaud's texts was just published in the
United States . It already sold out.
JL: One . One volume .
SL: There are already three or four.
JL: Three or four! How many come out each year in the United
States? Hm? How many? And how many people read them . . . .
SL: And if the world endowed it with meaning . . . .
JL: What meaning? It's incoherent from start to finish .
SL: Thats what I'm saying. If the world was as incoherent as Artaud?
1 06

JL: Then there would be nothing left to do but pray.

SL: [He didn't hear. ] To pay?
JL: To pray.
SL: Pray . . . . Maybe that's what Artaud was doing in his own way.
Maybe that's the type of prayer we need. These days , people don't
seem to pay attention unless theres blood or violence involved.
Or screams.
JL: [Silence. ] Don't you think we're fed up these days with all the
terrorism? It, too , will eventually pass because it's . . . incoherent.
Yeah, it's incoherent .
SL: What terrorism?
JL: Terrorism . . . all over. Every news channel on television is
reporting catastrophes all over the place .
SL: So what is terrorism? Madness?
JL: You think I'm an idiot.
SL: I'm following your train of thought. You're talking about
terrorism and incoherence . Not only is there terrorism. All over
the place there are wars breaking out, not breaking out . . . . People
dying of hunger, tortured people exterminated left and right.
Whether we hear about it or not. Today, tomorrow . . . . The whole
world is going up in flames and its not over yet.
J L : Lets hope not. All of this started with Stalin . I'm reading
Khrushchevs memoirs. He talks about the thousands, the millions
killed by Stalin .
SL: But Stalin was a perfectly reasonable man .
JL: You think?

107

SL: He adjusted to fit the circumstances. He commanded people .

He did his theatre . Artaud was incapable of staging a play. Stalin
turned the world into a big theatre .
JL: Hitler, too.
S L : Yes. H e helped him. The two of them succeeded. Artaud
failed. But Artaud is crazy.
JL: [Silence. ] You know, your reasoning doesn't sit right with me .
It doesn't hold up. It doesn't hold up at all.
SL: What makes a person mad? What makes a person adapt? Hitler
was completely adapted to a country on the brink of collapse ,
whose blood had been sucked by the victorious powers .
JL: Listen, sir. If you're asking me what madness is , go see for
yourself in a psychiatric hospital. You'll know right away. You'll
know right away. I don't need to demonstrate . You'll see right away.
SL: When a madman writes . . . .
JL: You shouldn't play with words that way. You don't have the
right to play with words.
SL: When a madman writes and that writing is read, it becomes
literature . What do we do with this type of literature? Why do we
read it? Why shouldn't we read it? What is culture?
JL: Why do we forget it after a certain amount of time?
SL: There are things we forget that we later remember and things
we remember that we later forget completely.
JL: [Silence. ] Yes . And Artaud will be forgotten very quickly.
SL: It's in the order of things . It's in the disorder of things . I see
things as being pretty disordered. And Artaud was part of that
disorder.
1 08

JL: You're content with being a spectator.

SL: Spectator? No, I'm fully in the center of things .
jL: You too?
SL: Its sort of a false center. New York. I'm not saying it's the
center of the world, but the world always needs a navel to gaze at.
So why shouldn't it be New York?
JL: Yeah .
SL: It was Paris in the thirties. It was London before that. And
Berlin. And Constantinople .
JL: Yes. And?
SL: So, being at the center of the world, as Artaud was , you see
some things .
jL: But Artaud wasn't the center of the world. He put himself
there , which is different.
SL: He became the center of the world. He was God .
JL: [Laughs softly . ] Yeah, yeah. Listen, h e thought so .
SL: That's it. He believed it. When Jesus said I am God, everyone
believed him.
JL: No.
SL: No? They killed him.
JL: Yes. That's different.
SL: They gave Artaud electroshock. That's also different .

I 09

JL: Listen, please don't talk to me about electroshock because I

administered it myself. I can show you Ferdieres letter. Its a shame . . .
SL: What?
JL: That people reproached Ferdiere for administering electroshock.
It's a shame . It's idiotic.
SL: It's anachronistic.
JL: Hm?
SL: An anachronism. That said, many people are anachronistic. In
New York they give electroshock every day.
JL: Rest assured , this is also the case in France . My daughter is an
anesthesiologist and she administers anesthesia for electroshock.
They still use it in certain cases , but they've limited its use . I'm
convinced they would have given Artaud electroshock even today.
SL: It's possible . I have my own thoughts on the matter. But I don't
study electroshock, I read Artaud.
JL: Yes, yes , I hear you .
SL: And electroshock is part of what makes all this something
that some people listen to . And find important. It's something we
teach . . . . Its a classic subj ect, taught in a class . I teach the classics;
you might call it shock classics .
JL: You include whatever you want in the classics.
SL: I'm paid by Columbia University to teach Artaud every two
years .
JL: Yeah. Well! You must be teaching some strange things in there .
SL: I must be teaching strange things?

1 10

JL: Yes, things that don't reflect the reality of his character.
SL: You must be used to hearing strange things; that's your
profession after all.
JL: No. When I speak with a reasonable person, I'm used to
hearing serious things.
SL: But your patients are still strange people . Antonin Artaud . . . .
JL: I'm no longer a psychiatrist, anyway.
SL: Really, you're no longer a psychiatrist?
JL: No, no . It's been quite a while since I've practiced psychiatry. I
only did it for four years . I had to practice psychiatry as soon as I
could because I had three kids to feed.
SL: You didn't work as a doctor of. . . .
JL: No, no . General practitioner.
SL: So what does that four-year period of your life represent?
JL: Uh . . . it wouldn't have represented anything if there hadn't
been so much hype around it, for one thing. On the other hand ,
you're asking what did it represent for me? It gave me an idea of
the normal man. It led me to the idea of the normal man . He who
is capable of living in society
SL: And Artaud wasn't capable of living in society
JL: No. If he hadn't been plunged back into society, he would have
lived much longer.
SL: So for you , life is about living as long as possible .
JL: What?

111

SL: Hitler, Stalin; they were capable of living in society. They were
totally normal people .
JL: You're trying to analyze things that are on completely different
levels .
SL: Artaud wrote to Hitler. Do the two things not relate?
JL: No, because you're analyzing historic phenomena. Events
that pile up and occur over a considerable number of years.
With a whole population coming into its own . That's politics, not
philosophy.
SL: Maybe one day we'll see that Artaud was history and that a
great many other things we consider as such, were not.
JL: I'm certain that-no .
SL: Four years changed your idea of man . Of normal man . Four
years isn't much, but still .
JL: Four years , three of which were spent with Artaud.
SL: Three with Artaud . Then that period of your life was really
marked by Marteau-um!-by Artaud .
J L : Oh , no ! That only became the case afterward. When people
were talking about him. At the time , he was a patient like everyone
else .
SL: Did you have patients with symptoms similar to those of
Artaud?
JL: No, not exactly. There were all kinds of mental illnesses from
the schizophrenics to the manic-depressives , the epileptics-any
number of things.
SL: So you weren't paying particular attention to Artaud .

1 12

JL: No, not especially.

SL: Was there any awareness at the Rodez hospital that this man
was perhaps , lets say, exceptional?
JL: No. Absolutely not.
SL: Nothing whatsoever that he said , or that he read to you , or
even his drawings like the one you keep in your safe . . . nothing
special.
JL: Oh! His drawings . There are drawings like that everywhere .
There's nothing exceptional about them.
SL: I still haven't really understood why you decided to place that
drawing in the bank safe. Was it because everyone was asking to
see it?
jL: Yes , yes , yes . Two people came to photograph it. They promised
to send me a photo .
SL: And you put it in the safe to protect it?
jL: Yes , to protect it, because it was in a country house . Its not as
if I'm expecting Artaud's drawing to be worth a fortune some day.
SL: Yet we put things of value in the bank.
JL: [ Unwillingly . ] Yes. More or less . It could be valuable. I would
be sad to lose it.
SL: So maybe . . . maybe we will retain traces of Artaud. Otherwise
his drawing wouldn't be valuable , right? Maybe you believe in
Artaud after all .
JL: [Silence. ] Listen, this little game doesn't interest me at all.
Not at all.
SL: I'm trying to understand.
1 13

JL: Oh, yeah? You haven't understood?

SL: I've understood some things . I also understand that you're
sometimes reacting to my questions according to controversies in
which I have no part. I am not in the same position as those who
have attacked you . I have my way of seeing things , as each person
does . There are obviously certain ways of seeing that I like , and
others that I don't understand.
JL: [Dryly . ] That's quite apparent.
SL: Sure. If I had nothing to say about Artaud , I wouldn't teach
him. And teaching Artaud . . . . I'm not going to read aloud from his
books . I don't understand what he's saying.
JL: [Less dryly . ] I didn't make you say it.
SL: But something is happening here . What I'm gathering slowly,
through little glimmers , is enough to incite me to continue. It's as
if someone were leading me by the hand, showing me unusual
things. There are things I don't want to see , and there are obscure
things. But there is something happening.
JL: I knew him too well for his prose to teach me anything.
SL: Are you saying that you've had your fill of Artaud.
J L : I think so.
SL: But all this is retrospective . It's what was later added onto the
Artaud you knew, like the literary tribe that came and attached
itself to him afterwards, and not before , when he might have
needed it most. I'm trying to grasp your unmediated relationship
with Artaud.
JL: All my responses are in the article I wrote for La Tour de Feu.
It's all there . The only difference is that I've come a long way since
then and I no longer hear him. I no longer have the desire to

1 14

hear him. He doesn't teach me anything-about him or myself. Or

Man. Definitely not about Man.
SL: So why is he published?
JL: There are trends .
SL: The history of literature is a series of trends . There was the
Racine trend, the Marivaux trend ; and after all , that's what we call
culture.
JL: Artaud won't remain.
SL: It's difficult to say what will remain in a culture as bizarre and
as diverse as ours. We know what's happening in all countries at
the same time. It's a bit cluttered.
jL: It's not the world that's cluttered, it's that news is delivered as
mayhem.
SL: But news is the world.
JL: It existed before , but it was spoken about less .
SL: It's true. Before when people wanted to learn something about
a country, they went there .
jL: They went ther.
SL: Like Artaud went to Mexico . Now we listen to the news , or
we travel there within three hours. It's this kind of phenomenon
to which Artaud was reacting in his Correspondence with Jacques
Riviere, remember? They're letters of suffering. But what did he
suffer from? Artaud said, "I don't know what my mind is . I don't
know whether my thoughts belong to me or what this brain is
that's producing these thoughts ."
JL: That was the beginning of his confusion. You heard his sister
speak about his time in mental homes throughout his youth.
1 15

Even when he wasn't in mental homes . He was off to Savoie , and

elsewhere . He saw doctors right and left and when he returned
home, he was always cured.
SL: The fact that news is our way of connecting to things is
perhaps a symptom of things no longer having any substance. It's
also what Artaud complained to Riviere about. He no longer knew
what belonged to him and what didn't. As if we had the radio
plugged into our head telling us what to think, like the weather
forecast does in the morning.
JL: Yes.
SL: Telling us who we are .
JL: Thats sort of what he felt, yes . It's called a hallucination.
SL: Sure . But aren't people hallucinating j ust a tiny bit these days?
JL: Oh go ahead , predict the future!
SL: I'm just piecing things together because for me literature isn't
separate from the world .
JL: Your synthesis is very strange . . . and it's yours alone .
SL: You think so?
JL: I'm afraid so .
SL: See , I put the world of Figeac and the world of New York
together. It doesn't bother me at all. They coexist in time and in
space . There's Artaud's world, and then there isJL: Yours and mine. Thats not the reason people will listen to us.
He cried out, he was able to string some words together that had
a musical quality for sure-I always granted him that. But nothing
more. A musical quality, that's all.

1 16

SL: Celine said , "all I have is a little music . "

JL: Well, well.
SL: He's a writer. He makes music in his own way. Mallarme's letters
were musical. Musicality was his talent. It was his contribution to
civilization. Artaud also made a contribution to civilization.
jL: No, that he did not do. None whatsoever. I'm sure of it. After
living with him, reading him, reading articles like this one ,47 or
others, like the ones I have upstairs . . . after thinking about it, I
came to this conclusion: he is of no value to civilization whatsoever.
SL: Is he a danger to civilization?
jL: Not one bit. That would be giving him too much credit.
SL: During his lifetime he was enough of a danger to be interned.
jL: Now you're going off on the word "danger?" Yes! Yes! He was
incapable of living normally.
SL: Four years ago I went to Africa. just to experience living in a
different culture .
jL: I see you've come back.
SL: In Africa , for various reasons , some of which were practical,
(I was living with nomads in the desert) , I shaved my head. Lots
of people shave their heads.
JL: Why not.
SL: When I got back to France I immediately felt all this
animosity toward me. People shot me looks in the subway,
the cops stopped me in the street at night with their guns
drawn and searched me. Because of this pretty benign thing,

47. Magazine litteraire from May-June 1 984 on Artaud.

1 17

shaving my head, I felt like an alien, a social outcast. I was

disturbed by it. Is that being a danger to society?
JL: But it was j ust you feeling that way. That was a sane reaction.
They weren't hip-they hadn't experienced what you had. What's
the problem?
SL: What was Artaud's problem? Others hadn't experienced what
he had experienced. In Mexico , in Ireland , in his head-shaved
or not. So what does it mean to become a danger? What is it that
provokes hate and disturbed looks from people? Should we take it
into consideration and to what extent?
JL: [ Tapping his finger on the table. ] What is a society?
SL: It's a group of people who let you live as you please , as long as
you don't prevent them from doing the same .
JL: Thank you ! Thank you ! It's not disrupting the liberty of others .
SL: Yes, but the society must be fairly open-minded, so as not to
feel disrupted or menaced the minute someone shaves his head .
Or screams .
JL: You're absolutely right.
SL: In the Middle Ages they blamed it on witches . People were
possessed by the Devil, not by the radio.
JL: You've lost your footing on the ground . The solid ground.
Solidity.
SL: Where is the ground?
JL: It's under our feet, under our steps .
SL: We're talking about what a society is, since Artaud's problem
seems to be posing a threat to society.

l l8

JL: I never said that. I spoke about the danger for him-yes .
SL: Lets get on the same page here . Were you protecting him, or
were you protecting society against him?
JL: I was protecting society against him.
SL: You protected society against him . . . . Good, at least that's clear.
We know where your ground is.
JL: Because society rej ected him-listen. Go have a look in a
psychiatric hospital and then you'll come around.
SL: I've already been.
jL: I wouldn't have guessed it.
SL: It's not the relationship between patient and psychiatrist as
such that interests me , but the fact that what occurs there , within
the gap , in a psychiatric hospital, can be of interest to the entire
world. And that there are mad people like me who examine the
traces left by such experiences and view those traces as the cultural
melting pot of the twentieth century.
JL: Mmmhmnn.
SL: Like Dada , for me , is twentieth century culture .
jL: A little phenomenon.
SL: A little phenomenon?
JL: No one talks about Dada anymore . You're the only one talking
about it.
SL: All American culture is founded on Dada .
JL: Oh?

1 19

SL: Especially the arts: Duchamp . . . .

JL: Come on, that won't last.
SL: It won't? People are snatching it up at top dollar.
JL: Artaud , for example?
SL: The painting market. It's also part of culture in it's own way.
JL: No, it's trends.
SL: It's gambling.
JL: This is really something else . You're bouncing around from
one thing to another.
SL: Trends increase value. Value is money. Money is subject to
speculation.
JL: You're American. It's obvious.
SL: No, I'm French.
JL: No, you've been contaminated.
SL: I don't have a drawing of Artaud's in the bank.
JL: Me neither, how about that. If Artaud's drawing is in the bank
it's only because people came to see it. And they brushed me aside
at the time .
SL: If people came to see your wife, would you put her in the
bank?
JL: [He taps impatiently on the table. ] Listen, sir, let's stop this
conversation. I don't think it's going anywhere .

1 20

SL: What if we speak about what I'm asking you , which is: How
would you react to Artaud without this storm that has blown up
around him?
JL: I told you . He was one patient among many. He interested
us a bit more because he came to our houses for lunch and read
different writers' work; it was fascinating. And afterward we spoke
about other things. That's it. There's nothing else . He didn't make
a huge impression on me. I pitied him with all my heart. I tried to
be as close to him as possible, to help him. And in three years we
almost managed to do it, but not quite.
SL: Dr. Ferdiere offered him literary work. It was a good idea .
JL: It wasn't Ferdiere , it was Father Julien , the chaplain . Since
Artaud didn't speak English, he would mess around trying to
translate these English texts , and then he'd work on whatever he
wanted . That's how he began working again.
SL: I overlooked the fact that Artaud didn't know English.
thought he had translated those Lewis Caroll texts himself.
JL: The two of them did it together in Father julien's office . Artaud
took notes . He came up with "joufflu mafjlu" for Humpty Dumpty.
See , that was how we had fun with Artaud . We spent our time in
interesting ways .
SL: Do you consider that a certain kind of therapy?
JL: Ferdiere called it "art therapy."
SL: It didn't exist at the time?
JL: No. But aside from our relationship with him and aside from
electroshock, nothing extraordinary happened. We lived with
him, that's all . I had three hundred and fifty patients to look after,
so you see , I couldn't devote all my time to him.
SL: Was Artaud free to come and go as he pleased?
121

JL: Toward the end . Not completely, but almost.

SL: His friends in Rodez who he sometimes went out with knew
they were in the company of someone exceptional.
JL: They did, yes, because they didn't live with him. It's not like
he had a valet, you know. We were at his service . We took care of
him.
SL: It was Sainte-Beuve who said we need to know everything
about great men .
JL: Why are you acting like he was a great man? He was a lunatic.
SL: Gerard de Nerval was a lunatic. And Nietzsche. And
Holderlin . . . .
JL: Thats a type of reasoning that I know well and it doesn't prove
a thing.
SL: It proves there is nothing to prove .
JL: What time are you leaving?
SL: I'm catching the 6 : 28 train to Paris .
JL: Um, it's 6:03.
SL: Yes.
J L : Well, I ' m sorry I haven't provided you with any illuminating
perspectives . I now have a firmly established idea about Artaud
and I'll share it with whoever wants to hear: it's a tiny phenomenon.
SL: You were only part of a tiny phenomenon?
JL: Yes.
S L : That's too bad.
1 22

JL: No. It's not my fault. Its his.

SL: Artaud never gave you electroshock.
jL: You don't understand what its like to administer electroshock.
We see a dissolution of the patient followed by a reconstruction.
And every time we did it on Artaud we rebuilt him a little more .
That's it.
SL: But was he the same Artaud?
jL: The same .
SL: Was it the familys Artaud that came back?
jL: No. just Artaud himself. I'm sure of it.
SL: You told me Artaud changed according to the people he was
around. So j ust who is Artaud?
jL: He's the original Artaud , the blueprint .
SL: Is that who you were searching for in your interview with
Artaud's sister?
JL: I was trying to find out what his biggest influence was during
his youth.
SL: And what did you conclude?
JL: You heard it: the mother. The father was j ust there to make
money; it's obvious.
SL: And women? The mother is still a woman . . . .
JL: The mother isn't a woman. She's the woman .
SL: So she's like the Virgin .

1 23

JL: Except that the Virgin was a mother as well .

SL: Mother, but woman .
JL: She was a virgin .
SL: It doesn't matter whether Artaud was impotent, as you claim.
JL: I didn't think he was at the time . It was fifteen or twenty years
later that I realized it while reading his work. Artaud's scream is
the scream of impotence .
SL: If that's true, I pity the fertile.
JL: It's 6: 1 5 . You barely have time to catch your train. I'm sorry if
I didn't answer as you would have liked.
SL: You've answered beautifully
JL: Leave me your card , please .
SL: I don't have a card .
JL: Oh?
SL: No.
JL: You don't have one either?
SL: No, but I can show you my ID [Laughs. ] After all , that's the
only use for identity

1 24

I l l. C L I N I CAL C RU E LTY

WHO I S DOCTOR FERDI ERE?

When h e came t o visit his friend Antonin Artaud in 1 94 3 at the

Ville-Evrard asylum, the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos had a
hard time recognizing him. Artaud had become a manic lunatic,
who spouted mystical writings by Saint Jerome and invoked the
magical powers of the universe to protect and avenge himself.
"For me personally it was a painful spectacle ," Desnos recalls, "to
see him in a state of frenzy and madness. He really seemed firmly
fixed in his fantasies , and it seemed like it would be hard to cure
him. " A few years before, Dr. Lacan, an authority in matters of
paranoid delusion, had made the same prognosis after a quick
examination of the patient.
No one would ever have doubted such a j udgment if Artaud
had remained in that psychiatric hospital until the end of his
days. In the end, the patient owed his return to health to a doctor
less cluttered with theory than Dr. Lacan, a doctor who ended
up proving the prestigious psychoanalyst wrong. While Lacan
resolutely stuck with the Freudian analytic model, Ferdiere was
attracted to new therapeutic practices. He used art therapy, a
practice he claimed to have invented . But he first had to unlock
his patient's madness, by inducing in Artaud a series of "electrical
convulsions," which, apparently, were successful. The three years
Artaud spent at Rodez, and the two years following his return to

129

Paris until his death in 1 948 were the most productive years of
his life .
And yet, i n 1 946, when h e had only j ust been freed from Rodez,
Artaud immediately laid into the doctor, accusing Ferdiere of
having tortured him. He felt, indeed, that the electroshocks were a
violation of his person. He was terrorized by them and complained
loudly about it, and as a result ended up getting everyone to side
with him. Such behavior, Ferdiere explained to me, is the kind
that anyone who works with mental patients has to expect. And
Desnos himself was realistic enough to expect that Artaud would
also hold it against him one day-but Desnos ended up being
deported, and he died in an extermination camp in 1 944.
Artauds belated admirers have a tendency to forget that at the
time there were no psychiatric pharmaceuticals available, and
there wasn't really any other method available that would have
been worthy of being called a treatment. Psychiatrists simply let
their patients waste away in overpopulated psychiatric units . The
incurable ones were referred to as "asylum rot. " Such was the state
Artaud had been reduced to during the six years after his first
flagrant psychotic episode, which seized him on a boat, when he
started claiming that he was going to return Saint Patrick's stick to
the Irish . The administration of electroshock therapy at Rodez was
not so much a punishment as it was an early, groping attempt to
modify a patient's psychic condition. This kind of therapy was still
in the experimental stage . So it seems that it should have been to
Dr. Ferdieres credit that at least he tried to do something to help
Artaud recover from his incurable condition. But he was forever
stigmatized, accused of having abused his power, and even having
sadistically enj oyed it. Had the poet unjustly defamed Ferdiere's
reputation, making him out to be some kind of a new Dr. Caligari?
Such was the question posed by Claude Bourdet back in 1 949 , in
Combat, while the family, doctors , and disciples were tearing each
other apart over the poet's still-warm body. . . .
The repugnance that Ferdiere felt toward the behavior of the
mentally ill in public hardly made things any better. Responding
furiously to Artauds new defenders, the most tenacious of whom
were the Lettrists, Ferdiere claimed in 1 949 that his former patient's
behavior posed a "danger to public order. " This was the argument
that j ustified the indefinite internment of supposed disturbers of
130

the peace. Ferdiere seemed to be doing all he could to confirm

his enemies' worst suspicions. Was he really being earnest? Could
someone like him who had sympathized with the anarchists and
Surrealists really defend such a hardline position? And he even
did it again, in 1 9 7 1 , on a live television show where he referred
to how "dangerous" Artaud was, and reaffirmed that "society must
defend itself. " Defend itself against what? It was like a caricature of
Michel Foucault's denunciations at the time . And Ferdiere claimed
that he had been one of the reformers of psychiatry on the eve of
the war. . . . Why would he go out of his way to make Artaud seem
to have been right? Had he been infected by Artaud's madness?
What danger could a mad poet really pose? Certainly, he
did display some rather special manners at the doctor's table .
As an adherent of a brand of Christianity that according to him
condemned all human sexuality to damnation, Artaud would
go around muttering his mantras every time he passed by
Latremoliere'.s pregnant wife. Would such acts really be capable of
causing any mental or physical damage to anyone?
When Artaud j oined the Surrealist group in 1923, there were a
good number of psychiatrists among them, such as Dr. Ferdiere .
No big surprise there ; the Surrealists had been the first in France
to resolutely dive into an exploration of dreams and irrationality.
They'd enthusiastically adopted certain of Freud's ideas, which
were still considered anathema among the French psychiatric
establishment up to World War II and beyond. In 1932, Jacques
Lacan himself had defended his thesis on paranoia without making
the slightest allusion to Freuds case study on President Schreber. It
was useful for the Surrealists to have all these young psychiatrists
on hand when things went wrong. But not one psychiatrist among
them played a leading role, not even Lacan. As for Ferdiere , who
was no genius, especially as a poet, he paradoxically extracted his
notoriety from Artaud's season in Hell, or rather, in Rodez. In the
end , all these fellow travelers of the unconscious came to adopt a
less poetic conception of madness as soon as they had risen to a
position of responsibility. Thats what happened to Ferdiere .
At the end of six devastating years spent in various psychiatric
institutions, nothing remained of Artaud's brilliant character,
which had made such a strong impression on the Surrealists that
Aragon had proclaimed him the "dictator" of the group. Like a
131

number of his Surrealist friends , Ferdiere was petrified when he

saw the wreck of a man who finally washed up at Rodez. Artaud
looked homeless . In Ireland, this savage enemy of Christianity
had rediscovered the religion of his childhood. As an extravagant
atheist, Ferdiere could not appreciate the metamorphosis.
Artaud was not moderate in anything he did. Among the
Tarahumaras of Mexico , he was more Indian than the Indians .
Among the Irish, he was Saint Patrick brandishing his magic stick.
Back in France, that elder daughter of the Church, he embraced
Christianity anew with such zeal that no Christian, except for an
Albigensian heretic, would have wanted to recognize him as a co
religionist. Not being Christian himself, Ferdiere had no desire to
discuss dogma in detail with Artaud, as Latremoliere would have
done. For Ferdiere, each of his ideas was crazier than the last and
called for vigorous argument: electroshock. And he subjected his
patient to it as soon as he'd recovered from his ordeal. Artaud's
initial enthusiasm turned cold . He suddenly realized that his
psychiatrist "friends" would not spare him. That's when he began
feverishly talking about religion with the devout intern and about
the marvelous with the aspiring Surrealist, panicked by the prospect
of a new series of shocks.
"Seismotherapy," the poetic name given to electroshock by
Ferdiere, remains at the center of the storm that has swirled
around the director of the Rodez hospital ever since his patient
was released . Were Artauds accusations j ustified? Ferdiere
succeeded where all the other hospitals-Quatres Mares , Sainte
Anne and Ville-Evrard-had failed (supposing they had ever
even tried, which no one could have accused them of doing) .
Why did it have to be him? There was indeed , in the will to
impose electroshocks on his patient, despite his terror and pleas ,
something sinister and intolerant that the doctor himself seems
hardly to have been aware of. He seems to have assigned to
himself the mission of bringing down the poet, j ust as Gerard de
Nerval, Edgar Allen Poe , Baudelaire , Rimbaud and Nietzsche had
been poisoned, imprisoned , paralyzed, hanged , and subjugated
before him. Grouped together behind Ferdiere, silent, vindictive,
approving, satisfied, Artaud saw them, those "spirits of Evil that
are the authentic bourgeoisie of life . " The psychiatrist was actually
acting in their name . As for Artaud, he knew that "madness" was
132

j ust another name for superior lucidity 'Tm not sick," he wrote
feverishly in his notebooks, 'Tm conscious. "
That's what he was frantically trying to communicate in his
letter from May 20, 1 944, sensing that a new series of electroshocks
was being prepared for him. But how could he have convinced
Ferdiere that his "delirium" was merely an extension of his poetic
vision? Artaud kept reminding him that as a young intern he had
expressed admiration for his striking images . These images had
made Ferdiere "love the poet and the mystic that I was . " Why
then, he asked himself, were they now regarded "as crazy by Dr.
Gaston Ferdiere , director of the Rodez hospital?" There were two
men in Ferdiere , one of whom was out to destroy him "because
he was possessed by some mysterious desire . " And Artaud was
compelled to ask suspiciously, "how is it that what you love about
my work you fail to recognize in my person?"
That Ferdiere was jealous of Artaud's genius is a shallow
accusation , but not an inconceivable one . It could be said that
behind every psychiatrist is a repressed artist. Certainly what the
doctor despised most about Artaud was the reminder of the feeble
poet that he himself had abandoned. In 1 94 7, Artaud wrote (in
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society) that "In all living psychiatrists,
there is a repugnant and sordid atavism that causes them to see
an enemy in each artist, in every genius before them. " Van Gogh's
case illustrated this remark. In 1 947 a huge retrospective of the
artist's work was held in Paris at the Orangerie , and an influential
art magazine came up with the idea of asking a certain Dr. Beer
to report on it. And the psychiatrist plainly stated his diagnosis:
Van Gogh was a degenerate , an unstable maniac , subject to
violent outbursts. He said he belonged to "Kraepelin's mixed
states. " This disrespectful clinical portrait outraged Artaud, and
he immediately recognized in Dr. Beer's "ridiculous terminology"
the same terminology from the diagnosis they had imposed upon
him. Artaud's diagnosis in turn was that such remarks could
only have been the upright product of a "broken brain. " It wasn't
difficult for him to recognize a shadow of his own persecutor in
Dr. Gachet, amateur psychiatrist and self-proclaimed friend of
Van Gogh who actually had pushed him to suicide. Hadn't Ferdiere
abused his friendship with Artaud by leading him to admit that he
always felt bewitched by occult forces?
1 33

Ferdiere told Artaud that he was there to "straighten out" his

poetry, the same way Dr. Gachet wanted to clean up Van Goghs
painting-out of j ealousy. The delirious poet remained speechless
before this "blatant and sinister dishonesty. " "The necks of
enchanters and sorcerers must be wrung," he wrote , "and nothing
remained of Dr. Ferdiere but an enchanter and a sorcerer. "48
Van Gogh's madness was the result of an "enchantment" cast by a
society that delegates to psychiatrists the task of strangling those
who dare raise even a corner of the veil on its shady actions. For
Artaud , not only were these enchantments real, but nothing else
existed. This society that didn't want to hear about enchantments
was itself entirely a product of enchantments. It had forged "that
perfectly functioning, poignant, perfidiously and meticulously
well-aimed weapon called 'psychiatry,' in order to throw out of
kilter (similar to how poison was used in other centuries) anyone
who was trying to put things back in balance. "49 Now, that was
exactly what Artaud had set about doing: exposing the somber
plot, revealing the true nature behind "the idea of the fate inflicted
by the machine, that interminable , anonymous machine called
'society,' on anyone who doesn't think like it does, anyone who ,
here and there throughout history, has tried to take down the
framework, and has died for it. "50
At this point it didn't really matter who Ferdiere was . The man
who now sat across from Artaud was no longer the man he'd once
known; he was now simply "a megaphone for the whole vile ,
hellish horde that has been persecuting me for fifty years and has
kept me in a mental asylum for nearly nine years now. "51 Artaud's
remarks were no longer aimed at Ferdiere the individual ; in his
mind, the doctor had become a vessel inside which his perceptions
about all the evil influences of the time had crystallized. And it
wasn't only Artaud who was hexed, in a sense; the doctor himself
was cursed. With a little hindsight, he even ended up noticing
how lucky it had been for him that the evil had come down upon
him in such a flagrant manner. Ferdiere had offered him a singular
chance to discover the black magic of society at work in his own
life. "Anyway, my spats with Dr. Ferdiere have only been a very
48.
49.
50.
51.

Antonin Artaud , Oeuvres completes XXVI, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 1 3 5 .

Ibid. , p. 184.
Ibid. , p. 1 39 .
Ibid. , p . 134.

1 34

small incident within the span of my life," he wrote on his return

to Paris. "I only spent so much time on them in order to provide a
detailed example of the maneuvers whose criminality I denounce
and which has had other audiences and other stages in the world
to perform on besides my so-called delusional brain . "52
It wasn't until the debates within the antipsychiatry movement
of the 1 9605 that Artaud's visions were adequately conceptualized.
Before then, it had been recognized that something called
Madness existed, and that certain traits, deriving from a universal
essence or model , could indicate its presence in an individual.
The irony of history willed it that Artaud's delirium played, for
psychiatry, the role that Lacan himself had given to "hysterics,"
whose disturbing symptoms plunged Alienists53 into perplexity
until the turn of the century when Charcot presented them at the
Salpetriere hospital in such a convincing manner. The hysterics ,
Lacan said, posed a question to the medical world through their
bodies, "the way a question mark is drawn with a pen," forcing
them to respond with a new science : psychoanalysis . Artauds
convulsing body was also a question mark. It wasn't conjuring a
new "science" from the mysteries of the mind (it actually was , but
Kabbalah could claim that too) : it was challenging psychiatry to
be anything but a normalization process in disguise . Psychiatrists
like Ferdiere , who were among the most liberal , were persuaded
to act in their patients' interests while imposing their own criteria
on them. By resisting the coma induced by electroshock and
by defending madness as a superior form of lucidity, Artaud
abolished the established boundary between the conscious and
the unconscious, between madness and mental health . Psychiatry's
ultimate obj ective was not to cure the sick, but to establish its own
legitimacy at the patients' expense. "Medicine," Artaud wrote in
Van Gogh, "is born of maleficence when it is not born of malady,
and much to the contrary indeed, it has provoked and invented all
sorts of maladies to j ustify its own existence . " In 1 963 , Foucault
said pretty much the same thing in The Birth of the Clinic.
Though he totally rej ected psychiatry, Artaud also mistrusted
psychoanalysi s , c o n s i d e ring it to be p r e t e n t i o u s a n d
5 2 . Ibid. , p . l l 5 .
5 3 . Alienists was the prominent title given t o doctors who w e would now refer t o as
psychiatrists.

135

indiscreet. His own " disease" did not call for a convoluted
interpretation: the enchantments that he was complaining of
were not imaginary, or even "misplaced"-they expressed a sharp
perception of the disciplinary system underlying society, which
spread its roots in all directions implanting and imposing normality.
All that was left for Artaud to do was to expose it everywhere ,
every time, in its every detail; "for I cannot accept that groups
of sorcerers from all classes of society would place themselves
in certain locations in Paris to try to influence and impair my
conscience-me , Artaud-these tailors, laundrymen , druggists,
grocers, wine merchants, warehousemen, bankers , accountants ,
shopkeepers, cops , doctors , professors, administrators, priests
basically, priests above all , religious nuts, monks, friars, all of them
incapable and inept, all serving the spirit, a spirit called the Holy
Spirit which is merely the anal and vaginal result of Mass . . . . " And
he continued by indicating, with haunting precision, the locations
and times of day or night when these groups gathered to cast their
spells, "fifteen days ago , avenue de la Motte-Picquet," "the day
before yesterday rue de Prony, around four in the afternoon," "last
night around eleven , place de la Concorde . . . " (letter to Parisot
from September 1 7 , 1 945) . The thought of all men on Earth
erupts "in my testicles and in my genitals because it's the driving
force of all that exists" (December 9, 1 945) . What would , in fact,
become of society without Artaud's testicles, or moreover, if sexual
activity halted abruptly, as he had ardently wished to have happen
by the grace of God? Artaud must certainly have been nuts , or
dementedly puritan, to entertain the idea that sex commanded
everyones mind completely. But was that not exactly what the
young Freud had dared to proclaim at the beginning of the 20'h
century to the entire medical community, that even babies who
were just learning to walk thought only of that? And because
of this, he horrified the physicians of Vienna. In his "insanity"
(his religious and anti-religious delirium) , Artaud had struck a
harsh blow to the foundations of "civilization," which had made
sex the new idol, or the last religion, or in any case the supreme
commodity. His delirium was like the discourse of some kind
of outlaw academic , the mad genealogy of the libido in western
culture-something like The History of Sexuality.

136

Evidently, a hyper-lucid vision was needed to reveal that which

was shrouded in peoples' minds . But Artaud didn't make anything
up. The enchantments were real; everything that happened to him
was real. The only way to make these things visible was to inflate
them, to push them to the limit. That was Clausewitzs strategy:
raise the stakes until things reveal themselves for what they are .
In Mexico Artaud was not a simple Tarahumara , in Dublin he was
not a simple Irish Catholic and in the asylum he was no ordinary
madman: he was worse. Delirium was worse than insanity because
it opened a direct access point to reality. So it should hardly be
surprising that Artaud always demanded more consciousness
and not more unconsciousness. "I never lost one atom of my
lucidity," he wrote to Ferdiere in 1 946, "and I never once made
an unconscious gesture in all my nine years of internment . . . . My
only lapses of consciousness came each time I entered into . an
electroshock coma , whereupon I had no idea what I was doing for
two months. " Delirium wasn't simply a way of looking at things ,
but a way of seeing them for the first time , as if no one had seen
them before. This was how he viewed sexuality, it was how he
viewed "mountain of signs ," in the Sierra Tarahumara: with his
eyes wide open, so wide they were no longer his own eyes, even if
he continued to say: I see boulders in the shape of a woman's breast;
I see a man pinned under a rock; I see a sort of enormous phallic
tooth with three stones on its summit . . . . It wasn't Artaud who
saw, it was the vision-miracle or abomination-that unfolded
before his eyes, revealing reality as it was. "It wasn't quite noon,"
Artaud recounts , climbing on horseback toward the heights of the
Sierra Tarahumara, "when I encountered this vision . . . .
Only delirium can cleanse the mind of set ideas, whether
political or religious, so that it can view the world as it is: "Utterly
gentrified, with the verbal whirring of the Soviets , anarchy,
communism , socialism , radicalism, republics , monarchies ,
churches, rituals, rations, quotas, the black market, and the
resistance. This world survives every day, while something else
happens, and each day the soul is called on to be born and to be"
(September 1 7 , 1 945) . Delirium is an exercise in lucidity in that
it unmasks all posers. In a taxi carrying himself and Andre Breton
to the Vieux-Colombier theatre , Artaud turned to his old friend
and declared abruptly that Breton was dead. He had been shot at
"

137

the Havre while trying to free Artaud from the grips of policemen.
Naturally, Breton denied it. And yet, Artaud was right: as a friend,
Breton was dead. In all those years, Breton hadn't lifted a finger to
free him from the asylum. He even refused to visit when he found
himself next door to the Sainte-Anne hospital-it was the story of
Nadja all over again. Artaud's declaration was evidently "delirious"
since he addressed himself to Breton as if he wasn't there , or as if
he were speaking of an other Breton besides the one sitting next
to him. There are some truths whose unveiling isn't enough ; they
have to be operated on with a scalpel. Artaud never reproached
Breton for betraying their friendship , it was worse : he had Breton
die in front of himself. Artaud encountered this truth the same
way he encountered "that vision among the rocks"; he created it
"poetically" with Breton's body that disappeared more each passing
second. Delirium is j ust a way of administering poetic justice .
It requires a destructive humor; that is the fundamental nature
of delirium. just before leaving Rodez, Artaud gave Arthur Adamov
a striking indication of this humor in action: "I've now found other
means for acting," he said , "which the laws don't touch and which
makes them laugh . It is concrete , absolute humor, but it's humor,
after all . " Deliriu m , as Artaud deliberately practiced it-that is ,
"cruelly, " sometimes despite himself when he became "furiously
mad" at the world-was a kind of forced laugh: imperceptible
but relentless. Artaud had been Alfred jarrys disciple for a reason.
For centuries Artaud endured martyrdom in order to deny the
existence of God, and suspected himself of being a god-and I
was, he added assuredly, "because Gods real name is Artaud." One
wonders what would have become of God had Artaud ceased to
contest his existence.
It isn't surprising that Artauds oscillating attitude toward
religion throughout his life and the blasphemous and violently
anti-Christian character of many of his last writings troubled his
pious family as well as his zealous Parisian friends. Which in no
way j ustifies the attempt of his followers to destroy his Christian
writings. With someone as deeply religious as Artaud, devotion
and blasphemy are merely two sides of the same coin. There was
one moment in Artaud's strange "career" that escaped the deep
imprint of religion, or more precisely the "intentions of purity"
that underlay it. For years , Artaud was haunted by the idea of
138

sacrificing himself to save the world. And it should be said that

this is a popular fantasy among populations found in mental
asylums . And Christ himself didn't escape it.
The paradox is that Artauds status as sacrificial victim is due
to the fact that he endured electroshock therapy administered by
his involuntary accomplice, Dr. Gaston Ferdiere . Alone , Artaud
could never have defended his fantasy with such conviction.
Furthermore , everything the psychiatrist proceeded to declare
in his own defense could only be interpreted in the "cruel" light
of Artaud's irremissible victimization . In a kind of reversal , the
doctor who was "devoted to his patient," according to his friends,
transformed , according to his adversaries , into a mad scientist,
performing "monstrous experiments. " One can always have done
with the j udgment of God , but Ferdiere never fully managed to
have done with the j udgment of Artaud. The madman ended up
turning his "persecutor" into an involuntary actor in his delusion .
Ferdiere considered Artaud's persecution allegations to be
part of his illness-a "retrospective delusion" to which the poets
new Parisian disciples were only too eager to adhere . "Next
year I'll propose an essay on the extraordinary contagiousness
of retrospective delusions to the Medico-Psychological Annals,"
he sardonically declared in 1 97 1 , in a special new edition of
La Tour de Feu. But , as Artaud remarked in 1 933 in "Theatre and
the Plague," what is important about the plague is not only its
contagiousness, but also its prophetic virtue; its extraordinary
capacity to view as real that which has yet to come . What was
it ultimately: the universe of conspiracy, of secret poisonings , of
violent demonic forces, divine will , cosmic catastrophes, vengeful
fury that was Artaud's universe, if not the echo chamber of what
was encroaching all around?
In the near future , he prophesied on June 1 0 , 1 943 , "this story
of persecution from which I now suffer will end in a general
inferno ."
just like delirium, the plague pushes images and ideas that are
mere possibilities to the extreme , and thus erases the distinction
between what exists and what does not exist. The plague-and
the theatre as Artaud conceived of it-reveals "all the cruelty that
the mind of a person, or of a nation , is capable of. " This surely
applied to the madness that was spreading across Europe at the
139

time , "these collective dashes into extreme , aggressive , ecstatic

nationalisms, by whole countries" that Celine had also denounce d
that same year, before himself being carried away by its extreme
contagion. Still at Ville-Evrard, Artaud immediately understood
what World War II was all about-it was a war of religion, a battle
between Ormuzd, the prince of light, and Ahriman, the prince
of darkness . Only Jesus Christ, he thought, could save the world
from Hitler. Like Dr. Schreber, Artaud was convinced that if the
world was to be saved, someone would have to offer themselves
up as a sacrificial victim. Humanity could only be redeemed the
day some chaste being, one alone , would die-and their corpse
would come to be inhabited by another soul . Such was the
task Artaud set for himself. In 1 940, he renounced his fathers
name-Artaud-and took instead his mother's Greek family
name , Nalpas . He thought that this way he could bring into his
body a consciousness other than his own. The French nation had
sold itself out to the Antichrist, and only he , Antonin, who had
lived a succession of existences , was in a position to fight for the
immaculate empire of God.
As with his predecessors in modernity, Emmy Hennings and
Hugo Ball, who saw in their fragmented bodies emblems of the
technological era beginning, Artaud's madness did not only have
individual traits. But unlike the Dadaists, who were more analytic,
Artaud's reaction to the monstrous travails pushing the civilized
world toward the abyss was paroxysmal. If Artaud's madness
still touches us so deeply today, it's because it was in fact double
sided, showing the mirror image of the plague that had fallen
upon Europe , with its procession of "conflicts, struggles , disasters
and devastations," and which would end up smothering it under
"pyramids sagging with cadavers . " It was this type of murderous
madness that Artaud sought to exorcise on stage with sequences
of ritualized cruelty, before definitively experiencing it himself in
the hands of professionals in another kind of dramaturgy. The
cruelty at work in the minds of psychiatrists was obviously of
a different nature , but its dark side was there , and the patients
delirium contributed to bringing it up to date , at the same time
that Artaud was revealing the cruelty of the times by abandoning
his body to its convulsions .

1 40

CODA: THE NAZ I DOCTOR

Ferdiere was not the diabolical character so many people would
have liked him to have been. In Artauds mental theatre, he was
j ust a fiery figure , an archetype "emerging in our newly awakened
minds" for a clash against other symbols. It wasn't always that
way for Artaud's clones and zealous disciples , who genuinely
succumbed to the contagiousness o f his delirium, and never
stopped denouncing Ferdiere , as Tristan Tzara had predicted,
for "invading the pure figure o f Artau d . " In that respect , the
final episode that reunited Artaud and his persecutor for the last
time in an atmosphere of chaos and urban insurrection appears
exemplary.
In 1 970 the leader of the Lettrists, Isidore Isou , and his disciple
Maurice Lemaitre drafted a somewhat excessive pamphlet :
Antonin Artaud tortured by psychiatrists and Who is Dr. Ferdiere? To
which they simply replied : 'The Eichmann of Nazi psychiatry. "
I t was a provocation, similar t o those they'd practiced on other
occasions. After the war, Isou was one of the first to understand,
well before the Punks , that "Nazi" could be used for its shock
value . They deliberately titled their first magazine Dictatorship.
And despite everything, their first complaint wasn't so off base .
Ferdiere claimed to be a connoisseur of art therapy. Isou and
Lemaitre vigorously contested this. What Ferdiere considered
signs of insanity in art-minutia of detail in contours, dissociated
forms, an air of "three sheets to the wind" drunkenness in the
composition-could j ust as well have been "a normal and natural
form of aesthetic expression . " Ferdiere, they insisted, belonged to
that infamous school of psychology that considered great painters
such as Van Gogh to be insane , searching paintings for elements
shared with madmen, and failing to associate them with an
independent aesthetic field . So Ferdiere belonged to those "super
Nazi psychiatrists" who preceded or followed "the Hitlerists who
called modem art (Max Ernst, Klee, etc .) degenerate art and
banned it." The attack went too far but its target was just. Pushing
even further, the two Lettrists affirmed that "during the German
occupation, the psychiatrist was the torturer of the great poet at
Rodez and, in May 1 968, the torturer of the poet and creator Isidore

141

Isou . " Apparently, one victim wasn't enough for Dr. Ferdiere: he
was a serial torturer. . . .
Who is Isidore Isou? A new Antonin Artaud , one might think.
Like Tzara, who was his initial model, Isou emigrated to Paris from
Romania after World War II where he established a group called
the Lettrists who would present themselves as a new avant-garde
and compete with and replace the aging Surrealist movement.
The explicit objective o f the group was to accelerate the modernist
decomposition of occidental culture and return each art form
to its raw material, it's infinitesimal components: the "letter" for
poetry, which led them, among other extravagancies, to recognize
Artaud's glossolalia as a foreshadowing of their own exploded
poetry. In 1 949 , Isou , an unabashed megalomaniac and prolific
j ack-of-all-trades was the first to announce the youth uprising
in his manifesto , Youth Uprising, which anticipated not only the
Situationists' On the Poverty of Student Life that contributed to the
sparking of May 1 968, but also the philosophical theses of Herbert
Marcuse and Paul Goodman. Upon his arrival in Paris in 1 945 at
the age of twenty, he understood that the French youth, excluded
from the economic circuit, were capable of fueling a massive
cultural revolution.
Isou had immense ambitions that were never fully realized,
considering that Guy Debord , his old disciple ended up turning
into his archrival, and succeeded in stealing his thunder. But
the Lettrists never gave up and loudly saluted the events of
May 1 968 as their maj or breakthrough, despite having played no
part, dreaming that the political leaders "were dying to meet Isou
and learn the way of the youth insurrection from him . " Alas , on
May 1 0 , just before the Night of the Barricades , the conducator
was in a clinic in the suburb of E pinay, for sleep therapy. His
right-hand man, Maurice Lemaitre, had himself asked Ferdiere for
advice when he saw that his boss was on the verge of a nervous
breakdown . Probably feeling guilty, Lemaitre hurried to pin the
responsibility of this historic failure on "Ferdiere's fraudulent
and retrograde psychiatric conceptions. " By depriving the masses
of their leader, he proclaimed, Ferdiere had provoked "despair
among young people and adults" and "disaster in France . " While
the Situationists saw themselves being (wrongly) accused by
de Gaulle of having plotted the insurrection, the Lettrists enj oyed
1 42

no such publicity. They accused the Rodez psychiatrist of having

tortured !sou , thereby making him a reincarnated Saint-Artaud,
and restoring Artaud's ghost to the revolutionary stage. In 1 969
the Lettrists also distributed insulting leaflets supposedly written
by "socialist psychologists" from the universities at Nanterre and
Vincennes , demanding "the arrest and punishment, to serve as an
example , of the Nazi doctor Gaston Ferdiere, persecutor of the
poets Antonin Artaud and Isidore !sou . "
!sou , who had always considered himself a myth i n his own
right, did not hesitate to pose as a friend of Artaud's , or to compare
Artaud's "electroshock comas" to his own deep sleep therapy. Marx
wrote that tragedy always repeats itself as comedy, which surely
confirms that fabricated amalgam. The media at the time, still
under the thumb of the 1 968 "Events," paid no attention to this
bizarre coda of the "poetic revolution" that nearly brought France
to its knees. But Ferdiere obviously did . The Lettrists didn't spare
him; they denounced him as a "pornographer and j unkie ," and
finished by calling him "one of the greatest criminals in the history
of humanity. " Ferdiere sued them and won .
All things considered, the bitter judgment that his colleague
Latremoliere pronounced against his patient applied perfectly to
Isou's madness: "his terribly self-interested reasoning, in the end,
made him build up his trivial personal needs into vertiginous
intellectual edifices . " Even madness can apparently end up being
over the top .

1 43

THE GOOD SOUL OF RODEZ

Gaston Ferdiere: I'll speak with you about Artaud and other

things . . . .
Sylvere Lotringer: Perhaps you'll speak about yourself first.
GF: No, no . I have no place in this story.
SL: If you didn't, you would have nothing to tell me. How did
Artaud first fall into your lap?
GF: I like the expression "fall into your lap ," because he literally

fell into my lap , which is what I was afraid of.

SL: You already feared him?
GF: All my Surrealist friends in Paris had told me about him. They
said, "You have to intervene. You have to do something for Artaud.
One of these days the police will lock him up . "
SL: What did you know about him?
GF: All I was able to read were issues of La Revolution surrealiste
which he was in charge of when he was running the Bureau of

1 45

Surrealist Research. The Theatre and Its Double went practically

unnoticed when it came out.
SL: So you didn't know Artaud as an author.
GF: I knew him as a man . . . .
SL: So you knew him personally?
GF: Well, I spoke with him once maybe in passing, at a meeting,
on the street or in a cafe , thats all.
SL: So basically you didn't know him.
GF: No, it wasn't possible. He was always swarmed by a crowd of
people and in any case this had nothing to do with him personally.
People would say, "Look, there's Artaud," and I'd say, 'Tm crossing
to the other side of the street. "
SL: Still, you knew enough to avoid him.
GF: I knew he had eccentricities-mental problems , to put it
plainly. Still, at that time my position vis-a-vis the police of the
Seine Prefecture was delicate . There were no social workers at
the time , and I had been chosen among the clinic's interns and
assistants to go to peoples homes . I told the police , "Oh no , this
one is deeply delirious but doesn't pose a threat to anyone . Nor to
public safety or public order. Leave him alone . " I let hundreds of
madmen go free in Paris that way. . . .
SL: Hundreds of potential Surrealists.
GF: . . . Who were as crazy as Artaud. Certainly people who had
altars of all religions of the world in their homes, and who , after
they'd closed their shops, went home to pray all night only to
return the next day and open up their fabric stores . . . . "And you
let them be, why?" . . . "Mr. Prefect , they aren't causing any harm.
Shes an excellent shopkeeper in the Bastille neighborhood. Why
do you want to bother the woman? She's not dangerous, she does

146

her work admirably, and she's well liked by her clientele . At night ,
let her do as she pleases-hallucinate , speak to Mohammed and
Jesus Christ, wear flowers , write inscriptions, hear voices-what
harm will it do?" I think I was in the spirit of liberalism and the
law of 1 938.
SL: So you're against internment?
GF: I almost never commit anyone . My role usually consists in
scaring my colleagues so they release patients. I once released the
patients from the Clinic Asylum of Sainte-Anne in Paris because
anarchists launched an attack on the hospital throwing rocks. I
must say I have a certain audience in anarchist circles. The director
begged me to speak with them . . . . I spent my life, you could say,
leaving people with their freedom or giving their freedom back to
them.
SL: You must not be very popular in the profession. So you didn't
know Artaud and you didn't care to know him . . . .
GF: My friends absolutely wanted me to care for him, as a man,

not as a writer. They said , 'Just yesterday he caused a scandal in

a bistro . And the other day he insulted someone in the street. He
looked at a woman and said to her husband , 'Sir, your wife is
green, totally green."'
SL: Maybe he meant she wasn't old.
GF: Anyway, it was obvious it wasn't working out anymore . . . .
At that time we didn't have antipsychotics to administer. They're
an extremely dangerous part of the therapeutic arsenal , but at
least they exist. We didn't have electroshock therapy-we had
nothing. So what could I do? Lock him up? Dump him in a
psychiatric hospital somewhere-or as we said, an asylum-and
then leave him there? What good would that have done for him?
None . Consequently, when I saw Artaud approaching in the Latin
Quarter, I crossed the street.
SL: Who were your Surrealist friends?

147

GF: Robert Desnos was my very close friend and I spent at

least one night with him a week, on Saturdays . But there was
also jean-Louis Barrault, the actor. And Gita Fraenkel, the wife
of Dr. Theodore Fraenkel , with whom I was very close . He had
participated more in the Dada movement than in the Surrealist
movement. Then there was Tristan Tzara , etc. Pierre Frevert often
came around as well . I love that guy.
SL: I was really curious to meet you , I must say . . . . You were part
of those fascinating people, especially psychiatrists, who swirled
around the Surrealist group like moths around a flame , no doubt
because the Surrealists were the first in France to take an interest
in Freud, in the irrational , in the occult, in madness. That was one
of Andre Breton's biggest virtues-to have, in some way, erected
guardrails around their exploration of the unconscious. Breton
obviously didn't want it to go too far.
GF: Breton kicked some out, some of the Surrealists . . . but that's
another story.
SL: What's remarkable is that he often stayed in touch with those
he'd excommunicated, like Artaud (that maniac) or Bataille (that
psychopath) . It was his Robespierre side . He sent his friends to the
guillotine-but the blade didn't fall. He only wanted to cultivate
his style.
GF: People made Breton out to be an authoritarian character that
he was not. Perhaps internally he was, but with his acquaintances
he was always amiable and kind . . . .
SL: From the very beginning, the Surrealists themselves had close

ties to psychiatry.
GF: Definitely. Breton was a practicing psychiatrist and Aragon was
a psychiatry student. And the Surrealists themselves were often sick
and needed someone on their side to help in moments of difficulty
because they didn't always have happy times. When I came back to
Paris they said , "Ah, what a j oy to have you here again. "

1 48

SL: You were there . And they trusted you .

GF: They all trusted me , completely.
SL: That was kind of your role with the Surrealists-the friend,
the doctor, the confidant. . . . One foot in the asylum, the other in
writing . . . because you also published poems .
GF: They told me their stories . Automatically, when something
was wrong I intervened because , you know, it's pretty hard for a
Surrealist to explain himself to a doctor who's not a Surrealist. We
formed a very separate group . I remember the first time I was in the
staff room at the Sainte-Anne hospital-I was in charge of payroll;
in the staff room whoever's in charge of payroll is really respected,
hes treated like the director. I don't know if you're aware of our
old French medical habits-the same day I invited Andre Breton
and Duchamp to lunch with us there. Marcel Duchamp . . . and
then-everyone went off to attend to their own business. That
night one of my colleagues, whose name I would tell you if I were
a gossip , said to me , 'Tell me, those two guys you had for lunch
what was that?" He hadn't understood one word of what we'd said.
So how could you expect a sick Surrealist to confide in any old
psychiatrist? There was another one who , on the intake certificate
at Sainte-Anne, had written "literary pretentions. " Yet hes a great
fellow who I like a lot. He became a remarkable psychoanalyst and
very influential . It's freakish ! It makes me laugh , but it's rather sad.
SL: Why sad?
GF: Because I have great admiration for all those groups, for
everything they do . "Literary pretentions! . . . " When you're dealing
with a man whose pen scribbled the most important lines of an
era . . . .
SL: Freud wasn't very receptive of Breton's ideas either.
GF: No, Freud was anti-Surrealist.

149

SL: Not completely. He found Dali very reasonable-a nice young

man . Not surprising: they had the same delusions. Breton never
had delusions. He had principles. He didn't like the asylum kind
of madness . He also refused to go see Artaud when he was at
Sainte-Anne. That was his way. He did nothing to save Nadja . . . .
GF: Freud was also afraid of psychosis . He even said that he was
afraid of coke , being quite a bit of a user himself.
SL: He should have been afraid. He killed his best friend with
cocaine. It's good for a psychiatrist to actually act out sometimes.
You can't just fantasize all the time. Were you already a psychiatrist
when you arrived in Paris in 1 932?
GF: I studied medicine in Lyon. The neuropsychiatry professor, at
the time a man named Melange , said to me , "You want to go into
psychology? Then get the hell out of here and go to Paris-there's
nothing here . " So I went to Paris and everyone there was saying,
"Listen, it is a scandal . Can't you find a way to help Artaud?"
SL: He had literary pretentions .
GF: Then I forgot about him completely. Now we're getting into
the 1 930s, 1 940s. I must not have read The Theatre and Its Double,
but people like Barrault, who I also saw regularly at Desnos'
parties, spoke highly of the book to us because it had touched him
very deeply. Without Artaud he wouldn't be Jean-Louis Barrault.
And that brings us to the war, to the Occupation. One day, in
autumn 1 942, I received a frightening letter from Desnos saying,
"Our friend Artaud is dying; hes interned; hes at Ville-Evrard near
Paris and his family barely goes to see him. " I can show you the
letter if you want-it's here . He told me Artaud spent a long time
in the "security ward" because he was constantly agitated. He was
getting worse and worse ; he was dangerously thin. You remember
that was during the time of food rations and people were starving
to death at Ville-Evrard. They forced the directors of psychiatric
and administrative hospitals to make do with the ration card, and
the ration card was a death sentence . Thats why between forty and
fifty thousand mental patients died in France , and among them
1 50

a woman who touched me particularly, Seraphine. She died at

Clermont de l'Oise in 1 942 ripping up grass from the courtyard
and eating it, gathering bits on her bed to keep from starving.
Seraphine . . . .
SL: And Artaud . . . .
GF: So, I replied to Desnos right away: "We'll get him out of there.

I'm in Rodez right now, but I was working in psychiatric hospitals

in the Seine Department. We'll transfer Artaud to Chezal-Benoi:t,
to another so-called rural psychiatric hospital, attached to the
police of the Seine Prefecture, but in a free zone. And from there
I'd have no trouble transferring him to Rodez , where I'd be able to
make sure he is well-fed." At Rodez I was my own boss , I did what
I wanted, and I was dealing on the black market in a completely
official way. My patients were no longer starving.
SL: It was a physical rescue mission . . . .
GF: A survival operation, a survival operation .
SL: Having nothing to do with his mental condition .
GF: Nothing, initially.
SL: Artaud arrived in very bad shape.
GF: He was terribly thin . I have his weight, his chart , I have
everything. It was horrible . But things turned out well . Desnos,
who had great social skills, went to see some people he knew at
the administrative center for the Seine Department and I wrote
to inform them he was coming. Anyway, these correspondences
were sold by a Parisian bookstore , the letters exchanged between
Desnos and me , maybe two or three years ago-falsified letters,
to make it seem as if Artaud'.s passages had been successive . But
when he arrived at Chezal-Benoi:t from Ville-Evrard , we kept him
for twenty-four hours.
SL: Where is Chezal-Benoit?

151

GF: Its in Indre , on the border of Cher and Indre , next to Issoudun,
if you know the area at all? So Artaud arrives at Rodez in February
1 943. I'm at the station waiting for him. I say to him, "Artaud,
hello, is that you?" He recognizes me . Does he really recognize
me? I don't believe so , the main thing is that he calls me "My dear
friend ," climbs into my car and we go eat. So here's a guy who was
interned for so long in a place where people were starving and
suddenly finds himself at a dinner table with normal people, a
doctor eating with his wife . . . .
SL: He must have been grateful to you all his life : to eat with
normal people . . . .
GF: Well, yes! He ate lunch at my table , my personal table . My
wife was an angel to invite a guy straight out of the cell who
behaved poorly at the table, burping, farting, spitting-it wasn't
pleasant. It was a challenge !
SL: He didn't act that way everywhere?
GF: He did. So why wouldn't he act that way at my house?
SL: It shocked you more there than elsewhere?
GF: Well, because it was in my home. Listen, you wouldn't like it
either if, in front of your children , a man behaved like that!
SL: Artaud alludes to your children in a letter from the last
published volume of his CEuvres completes.
GF: Yes, yes .
SL: . . Where he describes you as a murderer, by the way
.

GF: Who?
SL: Artaud

152

GF: Oh yes , of course . Oh yes . Well I am a murderer, as you can

see . That's another story.
SL: What was his behavior like when you invited him for dinner?
GF: Oh there was nothing remarkable about how he behaved. We
spoke about the weather.
SL: Did he always eat with his fingers?
GF: No, only in the beginning. Afterwards he became very proper.
He ate with a knife and fork. So we invited him more often.
SL: Artaud himself came from a fairly respectable family. . . .
GF: Even more than respectable . But they still could have made an
effort to feed him when he was at Ville-Evrard. People in Paris ate
well . I think his family could have found something on the black
market-which was an official organization, or quasi-official
to give their brother who was starving to death in a hospital ten
kilometers away. . . .
SL: Artaud'.s sister, Marie-Ange Malaussena, claims she always

took care of Artaud , that she always provided for all of his needs .
GF: Yes , she brought him a little tobacco and a bar of chocolate,

but feeding someone is different than bringing him a few treats . . . .

SL: Once Artaud sent his mother, Euphrasie , a long list of treats

that he was missing most: nuts , pistachios, Turkish delights , sweet

cakes , cookies , all the sweets from his Eastern upbringing . . . .
Do you really think there was a shortcoming on his family'.s part?
GF: Ah, well I'm convinced of it.
SL: Marie-Ange called you an amnesiac . She claims that in 1 943
you advised her mother against visiting him at Rodez, alleging it
was too tiring at that time . And you told her the packages had
been opened and eaten by rats . Anyway, she published these

1 53

letters. You have to admit that Artaud himself, considering the

restrictions at the time , pleaded to his mother not to send him
anything anymore . You can't trust anyone in this affair. Thats why
there's an "Artaud Affair. "
GF: At one point I fought with them intensely. In an act of
anger, for some manifesto , I called them a "posthumous family. "
That offended them a little . Then one day Madam Marie-Ange
Malaussena came to the Club du Faubourg where I was giving
a lecture. She asked to speak on stage , and then she said to me ,
"I know you've said some bad things about me , but you did my
brother a great service , so I forgive you . " And then she kissed me
in public , j ust like that. It made an impression . . . . You must have
in your archives everything she said in the special Antonin Artaud
edition of La Tour de Feu?54
SL: Yes, if I recall correctly, she reported that after his return to
Paris, Artaud spoke of you "with deep contempt" and that he had
an "extremely unpleasant" memory of you.
G F : Madam Malaussena wrote what she had to say. That was the

spirit of La Tour de Feu. They gave everyone a voice. Everyone said

what they wanted.
SL: There are many accusations of that kind in Artauds writings
on his return to Paris.
GF: No, not that many. He accused me of being a barbarian , an

executioner . . . . Any doctor who worked in a psychiatric hospital

has been the obj ect of such complaints a hundred times, a
thousand times. If I were to hold you in a psychiatric hospital for
two days, given the horror of the hospital itself, you would take
me for a torturer . . . .
SL: And you weren't hurt by these attacks?
GF: I'm used to it.

54. La Tour de Feu , n. 1 3 6 , 1 9 7 7 ; new expanded edition of the 1 9 5 9 issue .

1 54

SL: You didn't feel the need to j ustify yourself?

GF: No, not at all. You can say I belong to a profession that is

constantly under attack . If a patient commits suicide , its our fault.

If we release him too early and two days later he kills someone ,
its our fault.
SL: You have to be a bit of a masochist to be a psychiatrist. . . .
GF: It is masochistic.
SL: Especially for a Surrealist psychiatrist. Did you ever think

about that?
GF: Yes , a great deal . First you have to be a bit crazy yourself.
Throughout my life I only ever liked, I was only ever close with,
and I only ever hung out with madmen. Look at this one on the
wall across from you . Hes a little known Surrealist, Anton Prinner,
a friend of Victor Brauner. He was my friend and it was thanks to
me that he was never interned. He died senile in his own home
on rue Pernety.
SL: I thought you were more affected by these controversies.
GF: No, it doesn't bother me at all. Otherwise a psychiatrist would
be affected all the time.
SL: Why did you publish Nouvelles Lettres de Rodez on you own?
GF: To document them. Because Artauds letters themselves
seemed beautiful to me . They're not all great, but some are
exquisite. I couldn't keep them to myself.
SL: In the preface you accused those who had insulted you of
being murderers .
GF: I did what I did and that's all. Those who consider it wrong
are free to think what they please , and those who consider it
right can tell me so . I did what my conscience told me to do.

155

The important thing, in my view, is that Artaud's life was saved,

meaning he fattened up, he ate his fill , he had what he wanted
to smoke-because he smoked a lot. And tobacco was rationed.
Tobacco was something I kept in my house-in the director's
house. It was a kind of currency. . . .
SL: With Artaud?
GF: With everyone . Artau d and everyone else . When I went to
buy potatoes I would say to the farmer, "Oh, thats really expensive .
What if I throw in twenty or thirty pouches of tobacco , would you
do that?"
SL: Celine said that the only thing a man can't do without is
tobacco . It must be said that he wasn't too keen on sex either. But
at least he liked to watch .
GF: I bought potatoes with pouches of tobacco. What can I say?

It was like in the army: as head doctor of a psychiatric hospital ,

I received one pouch of tobacco per patient, even if that patient
was dreadfully senile and bedridden I wasn't going to let him go
without tobacco . I kept it in the trunk of my car. Artaud had all
the tobacco he wanted, he j ust had to say the word . He had all
the tobacco he wanted . He didn't have to purchase it on the black
market.
SL: You would give it to him during your visit?
GF: Oh no , he would come over and get it whenever he wanted,

whenever he wanted . . . . He was even very nice to my wife. And

women were evil to them-I mean , to him.
SL: To them?
GF: To him. To him a woman was a diabolical creature. He never
passed the wife of my intern, Dr. Latremoliere, in the halls without
spitting at her.

1 56

SL: She must have been pregnant at the time. They were
newlyweds . Artaud saw it as the Devil's work. He only tolerated
the Immaculate Conception, and . . . .
GF: My wife was a psychiatrist. She lived with me in Paris. So she
knew how to deal with Artaud and how to answer his questions . . . .
He had very long conversations with her.

SL: He also spoke endlessly with Latremoliere .

GF: Latremoliere wrote an article in La Tour de Feu entitled
"I Talked About God With Antonin Artaud" which doesn't interest
me at all .

SL: Why? You never talked about God with Antonin Artaud?
GF: No, and I don't feel any worse off for it. Latremoliere is a
believer who needs to talk about God. He went through an intense
period of mysticism and that's his business .

SL: Latremoliere told me that in the beginning he had no idea

who Artaud really was .
GF: Latremoliere wasn't part of my social circle . He was fresh

out of a religious school in Rodez. He married a good bourgeois

woman from Toulouse , so how could you expect him to know
who Artaud was? When did you see him?
SL: A few days ago .
GF: Ah! He not too senile?

SL: No.
GF: Because he's really lost it. There are times when . . . he's
cyclothymic. You must have caught him at a time when he was
able to respond. At another time he would have sat motionless
before you .

157

SL: He wasn't motionless at all . In fact, he was on the attack.

GF: Oh, well it comes and goes . Oh yes! He read everything there
is to read on Artaud. He informed himself. Hes a smart fellow. But
he couldn't have known Artaud before; it wasn't possible .
SL: He found himself in the middle of a controversy-no, not in

the middle: mixed up in an affair that more or less turned his life
upside down, it was something he had a hard time understanding.
GF: You know, Latremoliere'.s life is easily shaken up. It's been
shaken up several times j ust by meeting people. Artaud was ready
for the lions.
SL: I can imagine the two men: the young intern and his toothless

patient meandering in the alley of the asylum gesturing like

semaphores , having passionate discussions about God, dogmas ,
sex, and angels . Artaud couldn't accept the idea that his body
contained waste and desires. One night he wrote that naive letter
to the woman who would become his fiancee, Cecile Schramme ,
a Belgian artist. No doubt she got too close to him: "You thought
you could conceal from me your animal nature," jabbed Artaud,
frightened like a young girl. "One night your monstrous bestiality
made me sick. . . . " Anais Nin claimed that Artaud was homosexual
and she had heard it from her lover, Dr. Rene Allendy, who took
care of Artaud. But Latremoliere came to another conclusion on
his own . He suddenly understood that Artaud's hatred of sexuality
was a way of bringing humanity down to his own level. To put it
plainly, Artaud was impotent.
GF: Yes, that's one of Latremoliere's theories .
SL: You don't share his opinion?
GF: No. That's been said of many people . First, we would have
needed to have had a closer relationship with him and that's
something we never dared discuss with him. We may seem like
brutes but we're careful not to j ostle the patients , not to vex them,
not to ask them embarrassing questions . We're very kind and
1 58

gentle with the patients. We don't do interrogations like that. So

to go and ask a gentleman, "Are you impotent. . . . " Plus I had the
chance to meet one of Artaud's former lovers . She would have told
me . . . .
SL: Genica Athanasiou , the Greek actress? She's the only one
Artaud managed to live with for a few years . It must not have
been very relaxing, judging from certain "Lettres de menage" that
he published in 1 924.
GF: I met Genica in 1 963 through mutual friends. She would have

alluded to what you're talking about . . . it's not possible.

SL: Remember what Artaud threw in her face: "You judge with
your sex, not with your mind?" He was convinced Evil imposed
its particular biology on the human organism and that eroticism
was a tenebrous operation.
GF: Genica was a great woman . I also knew other girlfriends of
his. They would have taken me aside . In any case , I knew Artaud
quite well .
SL: There was a kind of outpouring of hatred from Artaud toward
everything sexual .
GF: It wasn't only Artaud who felt it.
SL: They didn't nail an enormous crucifix to the wall of his

childhood bedroom for nothing.

GF: Artauds sister belongs to a bourgeois family, very Catholic
and practicing . . . .
SL: I think he must have been driven mad by his own desires .
All throughout his stay at Rodez he complained that incubi and
succubi came each night to suck his substance . It couldn't have
been clearer. When you think about it, the most bizarre proj ect
of his life was the marriage he concocted with young Cecile .
Imagine spending your wedding night with Artaud. . . . He must

159

have really been at the end of his rope after his failure in Mexico
to resort to such a thing. The parents of his fiancee weren't blind :
one look at him and they forced their daughter to break it off.
That was the last straw, and it pushed Artaud to cross the English
Channel with the famous cane of St. Patrick, his head surrounded
by lightning bolts . . . . The rest was predictable: the uncontrolled
skid across Ireland, sneaking off at night to avoid paying his bills,
the conversion, the fights with monks in Dublin, the police , the
forced repatriation at Le Havre and finally the steady stream of
asylums , large and small , blazing across Europe , clinging to his
cane like a witch to her broom.
GF: His mad rant was always about 'The cane ! The cane! "
SL: H e didn't let anyone touch it.
GF: At one point, I remember, his big pastime was to swipe all
the glasses off the table at La Coupole, in one swoop of his cane.
SL: It was his way of achieving a tabula rasa. What was he like ,
Artaud , when he arrived at Rodez? Did you have a hard time
figuring out what was wrong?
GF: It wasn't hard to see that he was sick. He was in a constant
state of delusion, in the proper sense of the word . He said that on
his way back from Ireland, on the boat, he had been the victim
of a coalition of superior beings, diabolical spirits, and that he
found himself chained up at Le Havre , then later at Rouen, by evil
forces. That's one paraphrenic delusion ; there are plenty of them.
Don't let the word "paraphrenic" scare you ; it's a delusion that
doesn't affect fundamental intellectual faculties in any way. You
fully retain your memory and your reasoning. You j ust have this
little delusional fungus, that's all .
SL: And how does it grow?
GF: Well that's another story. It's a question of the psychogenesis
of that kernel, of that particular embryo in the unconscious.

1 60

SL: And this delusion had nothing to do with paranoia? What

Lacan called "delusion of interpretation?"
GF: No, Artaud didn't have any systematic paranoia . . . . Excuse

me, my friend , for being a bit academic , but I have to give a

proper explanation. We generally distinguish between three
types of delirium: we have paranoiac delirium, paranoid delirium,
and paraphrenic delirium. In paranoiac delirium, we have
persecuted people who can describe what's happening to them,
those who wish them harm, and the ways in which they defend
themselves. And sometimes you want to say, "After all , these
people are right . " This is what I would call permeable delirium.
And then we have "the paranoid" who are totally impermeable . It's
a type of schizophrenia .
S L : Are they impermeable to the exterior world?
GF: No, they aren't permeable for you . You can't take part in their

delirium, whereas you can participate in the paranoiac delirium

and say, 'This man is right: indeed, they bother him; indeed,
they throw buckets of water on his head; indeed, they insult him
when he walks by the corner grocery. " But if you're seated across
from someone on the train in Paris tonight who says , "Sir, I have
amulets in this pocket, you see , without which Satan would come
set my clothes on fire ," you're not going to believe him.
SL: On the road in Mali I met an African sorcerer who had
converted to Catholicism and gone mad . He'd been cursed . And
I asked him, "But you don't believe in animism anymore?" "No ,
but if the village sorcerer wanted me to die , I would. " Is that
paraphrenic?
GF: Yes , that's paraphrenia .
are extremely rich, fantastical
happens with the paranoid , in
their fundamental personality,
that clear?

The delusions of paraphrenics

and fabricated, but unlike what
no way do their delusions distort
memory, judgment, or reason. ls

SL: So then how is it a delusion?

161

GF: Well , because they spout monumental rubbish. Artaud had a

type of theological complex: higher powers , Evil, Satan , his own

conflict with God-when he was in conflict with God, so you
couldn't really believe all that.
SL: Is it only about belief? Do you believe in the famous sardine
that blocked the harbor in Marseille? Everyone in Marseille is
known for telling unbelievable stories. They're even said to "spin
yarns. " Does that make all people of Marseille paraphrenic? And
don't forget this detail: Artaud was from Marseille . . . .
GF: By pronouncing the word paraphrenia , we refer to notions of

German psychiatry. . . .
SL: Emil Kraepelin, "dementia praecox. "
G F : Ah , you know a thing o r two. With paranoia, you have

something coherent that is transmissible . If you had a paranoiac

here, you wouldn't know if what he was saying was true or false.
You'd say to yourself, "But this guy is right! "
SL: Artaud arrived a t Rodez in pitiful condition , and yet, five
weeks later he wrote that fairly long essay that you published in
your book; a commentary on Ronsard's "Hymn to Demons . " It's an
astonishing text. . . . Artaud really knew how to write .
GF: Yes. The power of words in Artaud . . . . I have a great admiration

for his style.

SL: That essay on Ronsard is especially admirable for the scope of
its references.
GF: Oh, the great paraphrenics like the famous Morgan Taylor or
jean-Louis Alessi, right, and many others , and also Puj olle-who
my other intern at the time , jean Dequeker, made the subject of
his thesis-that are immensely delirious but highly productive
and leave me dumbfounded with admiration.

1 62

SL: And you think it was something Artaud needed to be cured

of?
GF: Why would you want to cure him? I'm saying don't cure him,
don't touch him . . . .

SL: Don't touch paraphrenics?

GF: No, I believe they should be practically left alone .

SL: When Artaud arrived at the Rodez asylum, he was

paraphrenic . . . .
GF: He was paraphrenic but I tell you he wasn't doing shit. A
paraphrenic should create.

SL: Ah! That demand for productivity is very occidental . . . .

GF: Well, yes ! I've lived with paraphrenics all my life and have
seen so many of them do amazing things. . . . And when this
paraphrenic showed up-who belonged to the Surrealist group ,
who had some success as an actor, who had already published
The Theatre and Its Double and could publish another book
whenever he wanted at Denoel-you say to yourself, we're not
going to let a little madness get the better of him . . . .

SL: You see what madness can create in someone while at the
same time handicapping him . . . .
GF: I'm Jacksonian. jacksonism is the idea that as madness
destroys one thing, it creates another thing elsewhere . Madness
must be creative elsewhere, particularly in paraphrenia.

SL: Artaud's paraphrenia was brilliantly creative . So why subj ect

him to electroshock?
GF: I didn't have a choice . It was the only treatment in the
therapeutic arsenal at the time .

1 63

SL: Paule Thevenin , who edited his CEuvres completes , told me he

never stopped writing. He wrote a great deal .
GF: Paule Thevenin claims he even wrote his notebooks, which
I don't fully believe . I think they were doctored. It's not possible
that he concealed so many things. They must have arranged and
tweaked them. Paule Thevenin is a woman who can easily imitate
the writing of others .
SL: The writing of others?
GF: Yes, Paule Thevenin is a plagiarist .
SL: She would have "doubled" Artaud?
GF: Yes, in part. How can you believe Paule Thevenin after the
farce she delivered regarding Artaud? He was starving in Mexico
so she proposed he give some lect ures that he could be paid for.
Mexican journalists reported on the lectures the next day, and it
was after these reports that Paule Thevenin wrote a text in Spanish,
which is not Artaud's text, that she herself "translated" into French
under a pseudonym. And you want me to believe this woman who
fabricates lectures and poses as a translator? It's unbelievable ; it's
never been seen before in literary history-it's in extremely bad
faith!
SL: Do you think Artaud's Revolutionary Messages are apocryphal?
GF: I believe so .
SL: Some of them were published in Mexican newspapers .
GF: Only the reports of Artauds lectures were published in the
papers . I'm familiar with the Surrealist way: arriving at those
lectures with just a few notes scribbled on a piece of paper. And
its from that alone that she reconstituted those famous lectures.
SL: Maybe it's faithful to what Artaud did not write. And its better
than having nothing.

1 64

GF: Maybe, maybe, but it's passed off as real, and its not Artaud.
SL: And is his journey to the Land of the Tarahumaras an authentic

text?
GF: Tarahumaras is a real text that I saw written before my
very eyes . I gave it to Marc Barbezat who I knew through the
Resistance networks . I went to Lyon one day to bring Barbezat this
manuscript, and he published it in a way that I find marvelous , on
beautiful paper for that time , and impeccable typography
SL: So Artaud must have written a fair amount at Rodez . . . .
GF: Yes, but during the first months he was doing absolutely
nothing. At the time , I said to Latremoliere , "Now we have
electroshock in our hands, which is harmless. Lets apply a few
shocks; why not? We can do it without him even noticing. "
SL: Without him noticing?
GF: I've done it a hundred times. I could give you an electroshock
this instant and you would never know-if I were in agreement
with your family . . .
SL: Let's leave my family out of it for the moment. It's impossible
that I wouldn't notice what you were doing to me .
GF: Oh no, it's not!
SL: You're telling me that while speaking here , in the middle of
our pleasant conversation, you could administer an electroshock
and I wouldn't notice?
GF: In a pinch, yes . If I'm working with someone who comes up
behind you , while we're engrossed in our conversation and places
two electrodes on your temples. Or I give you a little intravenous
inj ection. You would fall asleep for a few seconds and I would
place my moist electrodes on your temples during that time . That's
how they do it in America , even for dental work.

1 65

SL: In America dental work is done under e lectroshock?

GF: Under electroshock. An American dentist told me so. They do
it to avoid any kind of blood poisoning.
SL: In other words , you "knock out" the pati ent. . . .
GF: For a few seconds . I even did it on the fly a few times , just like
that, at the homes of extremely agitated people, with the family
right behind them. Zap ! At the same instant the button is pressed.
It happened more than once . . . .
SL: And the patient wasn't aware that he had been administered
electroshocks?
GF: Oh yes . In psychiatric hospitals they don't do what they do in
a private clinic. The patients tell each other, "You had electroshock
this morning. I saw them putting the machine in your room." Or
they wake up somewhere and say, "Hey, what am I doing here?"
They have to piece together what might have happened .
SL: The others could see what was happening?
GF: Well, how could they not? We couldn't strap each patient to his
bed . If a patient wants to watch, out of curiosity, while you're doing
an electroshock-even behind a curtain, even shielded as much as
possible-you can't stop him. There wasn't going to be an army
of nurses guarding the bed where we were doing electroshock!
SL: And the same was true for Artaud?
GF: Of course . Artaud had a separate room and he was no dumber
than anyone else-perhaps even more intelligent than most. He
would discreetly go and watch how it went with the others . . . .
That's how he came to his fantastical descriptio ns of electroshock
and the anxiety it induced, which he repeated later at his lecture at
the Vieux Colombier. His personal experience couldn't have had
anything to do with it.

1 66

SL: Do patients scream under electroshock?

GF: No. Well, sometimes there is an initial scream, which is
pretty painful to hear.
SL: What sort of scream?
GF: Like the scream of an epileptic you hear in the subway in
New York.
SL: That must be impressive in a hospital room. And the patients
could recognize it?
GF: Of course .
SL: And you informed Artaud in advance each time of your
intention to administer shocks to him?
GF: Never, never. You never let a patient know that information!
It would be cruel for him to anticipate the electroshock.
SL: You never discussed the necessity of it with Artaud?
GF: I never discussed psychiatry or even medicine with him.

It was decided with Latremoliere . And when he questioned us

about certain patients he had observed in the room, we answered
evasively.
SL: Describe to me precisely how you administered the
electroshocks to him. Was he lying on his bed? Were several
assistants present? Was he conscious at first?
GF: He was lying on a bed, like everyone else . . . .
SL: You gave him a preliminary inj ection?
GF: No. Electroshock under anesthesia is more dangerous. There
have been very disturbing cases. And those who administer
electroshocks that way have killed quite a few patients in
167

Scandinavia and elsewhe re . As a resu l t , I simply do my

electroshocks without preparation.
SL: And you have the cooperation of the patient?
GF: Yes, and if I don't I obtain it. . . .
SL: And no accidents have ever occurred?
GF: During the first series of shocks-I think it was the
third-we broke one of Artaud's vertebrae , but it wasn't serious.
At that time I didn't use the precaution that I did later on, which
is to place the patient on a mattress to keep the spine hyper
extended . I noticed that in cities where patients slept on extremely
soft , flexible mattresses, I broke a lot more vertebrae .
SL: And what happens when a vertebra breaks?
GF: Its fine , except the little snapping sound. And I'm not saying
little just to be contrary; it's really not painful at all . The vertebra
breaks precisely in the middle . You know how a vertebra works
don't you? The vertebra snaps, then the two parts come back
together and they fuse quickly. So it doesn't really damage any
nerves, and there's no displacement involved. You really don't
have to do anything. You don't even have to tell the patient.
SL: Not tell him? But Artaud complained of violent pain . He was
bedridden for two entire months. You didn't have to tell him? And
how did Artaud react to this on a daily basis?
GF: He was extremely nice , extremely gentle. He never protested
against electroshock. And I promise you , if I did it to you , you
wouldn't protest either. You wouldn't feel a thing.
SL: Psychiatrists must be sadistic! Artaud fought like the devil.
He protested every single time-to you , to Latremoliere, to his
mother-before and after the electroshocks. In a letter from August
1 944, he begged his mother to interrupt "the atrocious treatment
called electroshock that each time lasts one month and , for two

1 68

months thereafter, destroys the intelligence and the memory of

those who are subjected to it . " Two months without memory. . . .
The only time Artaud wrote nothing-or when no letter was
found-were the weeks following these sessions . Artaud was
terrorized by the idea that he would be given another round . He
sensed it coming. And described it in great detail, "This treatment
is an atrocious torture because during each application you feel
suffocated , as if falling into an abyss from where your mind will
never return. " It must be very violent, an epileptic fit.SS
GF: Yes, for sure. Read the descriptions of the great writers who

experienced them: Flaubert, Dostoevsky. Flaubert was a big

epileptic and one day he had a fit in a carriage that he described
admirably
SL: ls it the famous scene between Emma and Rodolphe in

Madame Bovary?
GF: Epilepsy is the disease from heaven, it's a sacred disease . It's
terrifying; it's a horrendous thing to see .
SL: Did you see it in Artaud?
GF: Well yes, since we created it.
SL: The definition Latremoliere gave was that an electroshock
causes the personality to dissolve so that it can be reconstructed .
GF: The definition isn't his , it's that of professor Delmas-Marsale
of Bordeaux, but it's pretty accurate . . . . We destroy it so as to
build something better. I'm only speaking metaphorically of
course, but it proves to hold true . . . .
SL: And this something better comes through violent convulsions?
GF: But you don't see them. You're in the dark. In neurology we
call that "the epileptic hole . " The epileptics you see fall in the
5 5 . Letter from August 2 3 , 1 944, in Laurent Danchin, Le Cabinet du docteur Ferdii:re.
Artaud et l'Asile, (Paris, Seguier, 1 996), p. 64.

1 69

subway, in the street-everyone's seen them-there is that tonic

phase where the muscles contract, and that phase is followed
by repeated movements . With us there's no falling obviously
because it's being monitored; it's controlled epilepsy.
SL: The engravings from that time make a strong impression: the
patient twists himself up, bites his tongue, rips his clothes , writhes
around on his bed . . . .
GF: . . . And then he falls into a post-epileptic or "post-electroshock"
sleep , the length of which we aren't able to predict in advance.
With some it can last five minutes , with others half an hour.
SL: And what exactly passes between the electrodes?
GF: A very faint current, very faint, a few milliamps, which
produces an induced fit that is not dangerous as long as it's well
controlled.
SL: It doesn't cause the destruction of nerve cells?
GF: Nothing, nothing. We've never seen any destruction of that sort.
SL: No one ever asked brain cells what they think. . . . An American
surgeon, Dr. Peter Bregin , recently published a book translated
into French affirming the exact opposite . In truth, we don't know
what happens . Its not at all certain that electroshock doesn't cause
irreversible damage .
GF: If you repeat it fifty or a hundred times. But if you do it only

five or six times . . . we never saw any significant after-effects, even

with memory.
SL: Latremoliere mentions in his thesis that he administered fifty

one shocks to Artaud, which seems significant enough to me . In

fact thats what you are most reproached for: having pushed the
button too many times .

1 70

GF: In some clinics they would do up to three electroshocks

per day. Three per day is really too many. People recovered
from a fit only to have another one , and they fell into a kind
of stagnation until they reached a coma-like state , totally
disengaged. This is to tell you of the abuse that took place
in that domain and elsewhere . You put a type of therapy in the
hands of a doctor and he has a tendency to abuse it.
SL: And you yourself didn't abuse it?
GF: Never. I have done many electroshocks in my life-I'm
responsible for maybe three or four hundred thousand-those
which I did myself, those which I had my assistants do , and those
that I ordered to be done at clinics where I assisted in consultations.
That must be a considerable amount , but I never hesitated once .
And I'll do more , naturally. All the psychiatrists are doing it now,
all of them, because we prefer to cure a bout of depression that
could lead to suicide in eight days, instead of leaving the patient
on anti-depressants for months , constantly changing medication ,
varying it, mixing it with anti-psychotics, sleeping pills, and
doses that may prove dangerously high. In one form or another,
electroshock therapy seems absolutely necessary to me .
SL: Is it not followed by disorientation, a total loss of bearings?
GF: At one point I did a lot of ambulatory electroshock.
recommended electroshock: people brought the sick to the
hospital in the morning, we did their electroshock, and a half
hour later they were out of there . . . . We only asked that they be
accompanied in the subway so they would take the right line and
not get lost. But that's nothing; it doesn't count.
SL: You're saying that subway lines could get mixed up after
electroshock, but not lines in the brain?
GF: They experience temporary disorientation . . . .
SL: The effect of which can be felt for an extended period of time .

171

GF: We don't know. It's all part of the realm of theory, and as with
all therapy in medicine , results are all that count.
SL: That's what worries me . . . .
GF: Me too . What makes you think that it doesn't scare me too?
SL: I'm thinking more in terms of the patients. In New York I

met a man who had been administered electroshock during his

military service because he showed up late for the draft. Instead
of j ust saying that he'd been with his girlfriend, which everyone
would have understood, he admitted he'd been caught up reading
Wittgenstein-unforgivable. Ten years later, he had significant
memory loss . . . .
GF: No. I assure you , no . His disease had progressed, as Artaud's
did, and despite electroshock it continued to impair him.
SL: Do you think the first signs of Artaud's madness were
detectable in his Correspondence with Jacques Riviere?
GF: It became clear around 1 924, in the early period, which was a
pre-madness, introductory period. It was during those years that
his psychosis began to reveal itself. It had probably been managed
by the friends that surrounded him and through his Surrealist
activity, which in itself was an excellent distraction. Maybe that
slowed it down for a few years by satiating his appetite ; then it
exploded in the streets of Paris between 1930- 1 93 5 .
S L : Whence Artaud's eccentricities . . . .
GF: . More and more visible . So much so that even his friends ,
who loved him very much, wanted to do something to help him.
Because there was something pathological behind it, and thats the
doctors domain . So yes, I think a mind versed in psychiatry could
certainly see in these letters the first hints of dissociation and the
beginnings of autism. But thats j ust a theory.
. .

SL: What exactly is autism according to you , doctor?

1 72

GF: Oh, it's when the interior life isn't reflected in others

but continues alone on its own account . It's the refusal o f

communication with others; whereas the autistic person who
describes himself as Artaud did, and is capable of communicating
his message , is no longer in his autistic life .
SL: When he arrived a t Rodez, Artaud refused t o communicate . . . .
GF: No, he wasn't autistic at that time . When they asked him,

"Why are you here?" he told a pretty colorful, far-fetched story, but
he did explain himself. He responded. He never confined himself
to muteness , ever.
SL: And the autism in Correspondence with Jacques Riviere . . . .
GF: Autism can be recognized in certain turns of phrase , in certain
stylistic forms . For those who are familiar with the beginnings of
schizophrenia , there is a little hint of something . . . . Reread the
poems in those letters because they're crucial.
SL: Those were the poems Riviere refused to publish. He found
them imperfect. They weren't exactly "permeable" as you said .
For me , Correspondence displayed the dispossession of the self.
What does it mean to think? ls it my mind that thinks? How are
my thoughts formed? Do the words I think really come from
my brain or did someone "whisper" them to me? This type of
total dissociation regarding what the mind can produce, and at
the same time a very pointed fascination with the mechanisms
through which thought itself is produced . . . .
GF: That was the obj ect, the basis of his debate with Riviere . . . .
SL: Now, as much as when Artaud had begun to doubt the reality

of things, as Breton would say, and especially his own, reality had
started to become a bit uncertain. The telephone , when you think
about it, was already absent presence : a voice without a body,
a body without organs . It was an experience of dispossession.
Someone like Artaud, who had a heightened perception of
that kind of rupture reacted to it like a seismograph, and never
1 73

stopped asking himself: What is it that I am? Or, Am I actually?

Fine, in a clinical framework it could be classified as a nameable
symptom-autism, schizophrenia-but maybe these names
would have needed fifty years for culture to discover them and to
recognize its own realities within them.
GF: Yes, in any case Jacques Riviere understood what Artaud was

trying to tell him. It's perfectly clear. He related to him and replied
to him with an exactitude and a meticulousness that's almost
troubling. We sense a refined man who is afraid of not perfectly
grasping what the other is trying to tell him. Jacques Rivieres
personality troubles me a lot; almost as much as Artaud's . It shows
a man of exceptional loyalty. Do you know many writers who ,
before publishing their first book, have a similar exchange?
SL: Certainly not. And yet here is this young writer, Artaud, who lays
himself bare before Riviere , who cannot escape his impossibility of
being, dissecting in an almost hallucinatory manner the functioning
of his own brain, and this well-intentioned humanist offers him
what? Advice , consolation; as if it was a simple personal problem.
Now, what was eating away at Artaud was that there was no one there
where he was supposed to be; he felt that there was nothing
personal about life itself anymore . To me that seemed to coincide
with something rather fundamental about the century that was
getting started at the time (getting off to a bad start, that is) with
the fluctuation of entirely different notions of identity, things losing
their substance and people losing their emotional capacity. Those
who still thought themselves capable of personal thoughts were
really the ones hallucinating. At least Artaud no longer claimed to
have his own ideas, and all around he watched what could already
be called a generalized "flight of ideas" spread like the plague . . . .
GF: No, no , no , the flight of ideas is completely different. For
us, the flight of ideas is where everything is equalized. Meaning a
state of manic excitement where the ideas flow, the person is lost,
j umping from one idea to another and immediately forgetting the
previous one. I never saw the flight of ideas with Artaud . On the
contrary, I saw more of an accumulation, a return to a previous

1 74

thought that would spurt up again two or three sentences later,

but which retained its importance . . . .
SL: For sure . But I think Artaud made such an effort to refine
his thoughts that he suffered all the more from this phenomenon.
And you agree that the world today is in the grips of this flight of
ideas on a very large scale . Today, that state of manic excitement
is what we would call the media , mass culture , immediacy of
information, and it's exactly what Artaud feared; it's what he was
trying to defend himself against, in advance, with the collective
experience of cruelty. Cure through shock was invented by Artaud
himself in the theatre even before the technique was imported
from Roman slaughterhouses and applied to the mentally ill a few
years before the war. But he had invented it for culture as a whole.
And it's kind of ironic that it was Artaud who ended up paying the
price-"Artaud , shocked by society. . . . " Are you still a supporter
of electroshock?
GF: Yes , I think it's a therapy we were wrong to forget about. If we

used it more today, we wouldn't be contributing to the chemical

abuse that's become so horrific in the last few years.
SL: If Artaud were still alive today, would you subj ect him to
electroshock therapy?
GF: Oh no , I wouldn't need to. If he was working, if he was
continuing to produce works like Van Gogh, why would I intervene?
Because I'm telling you , delirium and paraphrenia don't seem to
me to be sufficient reasons to classify someone as a madman and
intern him.
SL: If I understand correctly, you thought this shock therapy
could only do him good.
GF: I didn't only think so; it did do him good. It was after the
therapy that he started writing again, responding to his friends,
requesting books and English poems to translate, etc . . . .

1 75

SL: You never had a guilty conscience? Even when Artaud

violently attacked you?
GF: Oh no , no , no ! If we had weak consciences we'd be dying all
the time. Anyway, I couldn't have done Artaud any harm. And in
fact, he began working again; he remembered what poetry was .
All the work that followed, including the admirable Van Gogh,
would not have existed had I not done what I did .
SL: You and Father Julien.
GF: Oh no , no . I never discussed psychiatry with Father Julien.
He was an extremely nice and modest guy who had his little j ob
as chaplain at the psychiatric hospital, and as an English professor
at the little seminary, that's all. You can't discuss psychiatry with
people like that. He worked as a priest. I made the decision
alone-completely alone . Who else could I have made it with?
SL: I don't know. With Latremoliere . With the people you worked
with in the asylum.
GF: They were only my assistants . They were required to accept
whatever I said . In all medical practice there is one person who
has authority.
SL: And it was you , the anarchist, who had authority.
GF: Yes , unfortunately.
SL: That must have pleased Artaud . . . the Crowned Anarchist. In

fact, Latremoliere spoke to me a good deal about Father Julien.

GF: Father Julien was a good friend of his. I was interested in Lewis

Carroll at the time, so we tried to get Artaud to start writing again

by lying a little, asking him to translate it for us. Father Julien said,
'The Director"-they called me the Director there, what do you
think they called me? Mister Director?-"The Director is extremely
interested in Lewis Carroll. You must help me translate this passage
because I'm unable to do it alone . You have imagination, you're a
1 76

poet, etc . " And my Artaud visited Father Julien every day "to help
him translate . . . . "
SL: As far as I know, Artaud didn't know English . Still, that didn't
stop him from translating Lewis' The Monk.
GF: Father Julien did the translations and from those Artaud
created neologisms like Mafflu . . . .
SL: Yes, it was "Dodu Mafflu himself, intropoltrabruly. . . . " It's in

rArve et l'aume.
GF: He made an effort to find equivalencies in "portmanteau
words. " It's an extremely important translation.
SL: Is it a translation , or is it in fact a totally original language all
his own? Does it relate to what Lewis Carroll wrote?
GF: It's a translation that I find to be quite good. It's very poetic.
Artaud found the rhythm of the language. Strangely, it seems to me
that in the twentieth century, phenomena of poetic creation were
so specific to each language that they seemed to be an internal
destruction of each language . Whereas before we attacked formal
structures and formal stories , now we're really at the level of the
destruction of all structural forms .
SL: Isn't that precisely what Isidore Isou and his "Lettrist" friends
advocated right after the war? The role of the literary avant
garde , according to them, was, from then on, to attack the letter
itself. . . . They also attacked you personally, and rather viciously,
in a lampoon entitled "Who is Dr. Ferdiere?" where they echoed
Artaud'.s accusations against you .
GF: The Lettrists were a very annoying, restless group . It took on
the tone of a dangerous and toxic argument , with those bastards
calling me every night at midnight or five in the morning to insult
me . That was extremely tough.
SL: How did the whole thing end?

1 77

GF: Well, I figured out exactly who was calling me . I called the
banker who was the young man's father. . . .
SL: Isidore lsou?
GF: No, it was his friend , Maurice Lemaitre . lsou sent me all his
works regularly. He liked me a lot and I avoided interning him
many times despite everything . . . .
SL: It must have been a pretty uncomfortable position, siding
with madness on the one hand and electroshock on the other.
GF: Well yes, thats my position. How could it be otherwise?
SL: You were sort of the Freud of Surrealism. It wasn't an easy
situation. You had to make a bet . . . .
GF: With who?
SL: With madness .
GF: The psychiatrist makes that gamble every moment of his life.
You think we aren't making a bet when someone sitting across
from us says , 'Tm going to kill myself this afternoon" and we send
him home with his family saying, "Go ahead , he won't kill himself,
don't worry. "
SL: How did you survive all of that?
GF: I am constantly searching for ways to do things better, and
I continue to live this way. There's a great man who you perhaps
know, Andre de Richaud who , one day, in March 1 946, asked me
to intern him. At the time he was living at Fernand Legers place
because Legers wife, Simone, was his mistress . He said to me , 'Tm
begging you , Ferdiere . I'm coming to Rodez tomorrow. Intern me !
I'm drinking more and more . If you don't intern me , I'm screwed ."
The next day he arrives at Rodez. I tell him, "Listen old pal, you're
very kind but they're going to say I intern everyone. Thats not
my thing. I'll put you up in a little hotel j ust outside Rodez, in
1 78

Espalion, fifteen or twenty kilometers from here, and then we'll

see what happens . " And so I get Leger's wife coming in the next
day telling me , "Oh thank you , you didn't intern him, etc . That's
so great, I'm going to see him . " I tell her, "Let him rest a bit and go
see him in eight days . " And she went over there with three liters
of Bordeaux . . . . What are you going to do? Richaud didn't feel bad
about insulting me , because I deserved it in that case . . . .
SL: Artaud accompanied Richaud to Espalion to try it out. You
wanted to see how he would act out in the world, but it wasn't
exactly a success. Artaud scared the guests at the hotel so much with
his habitual grunting, snorting and spitting that they threatened
to leave the hotel. A good deal of damage was done in Artauds
room and the owner ended up pressing charges. You had to send
a car with two nurses to take him back to Rodez. Before leaving,
Artaud stopped into all the local pharmacies looking for opium . . . .
Did he also do this in Rodez?
GF: The door was left open to him and he could go into town
alone, so there were definitely a few small precautions to take .
We knew he wanted opium or opium substitutes , so I told all the
pharmacists: "Artaud is going to stop in later. . . . " "Oh yeah? What
should I give him, doctor?" "Uh, give him a little codeine, some
Codoforme ," it's a cough medicine . And Artaud was very content.
He thought he had tricked me .
SL: But was he still hooked?
GF: Oh no ; I'm telling you , Codoforme sufficed. He never

appeared as a man in "withdrawal ," to use the exact word . Anyone

who's seen withdrawal in his career knows what it looks like . . . .
SL: The Surrealists weren't above drugs , though they didn't

mention them much .

GF: The Surrealists especially appreciated mescaline , otherwise
known as peyote. I have mescaline at my house. I knew the
pharmacist Rougier who did his thesis on peyote, the plant that

1 79

makes you see marvelous things , and my God , I still have at least
ten grams here . . . .
SL: Oh really? It's difficult to get, even in New York. . . .
GF: But they're complete idiots; there is no danger whatsoever.
There's not a single known case of addiction to mescaline , so if
they class it among toxic substances then where will we . . . .
SL: Artaud always complained of severe neuralgia.
GF: All sick people say that. I don't believe it. My interns,
Latremoliere , Dequeker, would have noticed it. We would
have examined him from a neurological standpoint. If Artaud
had complained regularly, Latremoliere would have tried
to locate it at the precise place indicated by Artaud, and injected a
calming agent, which he didn't do . . . .
SL: Artaud still gave some striking descriptions.
GF: Who hasn't had a migraine now and then?
SL: So you think he was being manipulative?
GF: Of course .
SL: Did you give in to that?
GF: No. And his health didn't decline any further. I never saw

Artaud in withdrawal, ever. I'm still talking about his state while
he was at Rodez , which has nothing to with what happened to
him later on at Ivry.
SL: Artaud contracted meningitis at a very young age .
GF: Many people have meningitis when they are very young;
lymphocytic meningitis, benign meningitis. It's an illness that
doesn't have after effects.

1 80

SL: And laudanum?

GF: Ah, that brings us back to his return to Paris and to the lvry
clinic. At lvry laudanum won out because of the bad will and
stupidity of the people there .
SL: You weren't in favor of Artaud returning to Paris.
GF: I was in favor of it, but Artaud knew very well that I had
two essential conditions: first, that he have enough money to live ;
and second that there be a clinic taking care of him, to make sure
he was eating well and that his hygiene was being monitored.
Because Artaud was always an extremely dirty person. I heard this
from those who toured with him while he was an actor, and who
tried to avoid him. It was torture to share a room with Artaud , it
smelled so bad.
SL: He didn't take care of himself.
GF: Oh my God, he didn't shower. He never changed clothes . He
smelled like feet, it was unbearable. So, you know, when an actor
is confined to share a dressing room with a guy like that, it's hard.
S L : Why didn't you release him earlier?
GF: I would have if they'd given me the same guarantees .
SL: To me , Latremoliere seemed convinced that you opposed his
departure . . . . Were there other reasons holding you back?
GF: I knew that in Paris he would mix with some bad company
and have a relapse . How could it have been otherwise , given that
dreadful environment?
SL: Those were your people too .
GF: Mine too , but that's not to say they weren't dreadful.

181

SL: Latremoliere wasn't dying to release him either. He said to me:

how are we supposed to let someone go when we're not sure he
won't cause trouble.
GF: I agree with him. He caused quite a bit of trouble in Paris .
Anyway, at Rodez I still had to tell him now and then, "If you
express your feelings about me like that I won't be able to release
you any earlier because you're attracting attention to yourself. "
SL: Attracting attention to oneself isn't a psychiatric condition?
You thought Artaud presented a social danger.
GF: No, no .
SL: You never thought so?
GF: Never, never. Artaud would have been incapable of having
a terrorist organization around him, to use the latest fashionable
word . And Artaud would never have tried to hurt anyone.
SL: He was capable of sensational actions. He shattered glasses at
La Coupole . . . .
GF: That wasn't very dangerous. Better to break glasses than
somebody's head. I saw fights at the bar at La Coupole between
Robert Desnos and Youki where they threw wine glasses at each
other's faces . That was much worse . . . .
SL: Yet in 1 959, in the first issue of La Tour de Feu , you insisted
on the fact that Artaud had chronic delusion, and that, I quote,
"this delusion rendered him violently anti-social , a threat to public
order and public safety. "56 People have been locked up for less.
And you even added , 'Tm voluntarily using ready-made phrases
here, phrases from law and daily life which society has assembled
for its own legitimate self defense . " Defending society . . . against
Artaud? I thought paraphrenia wasn't a danger to anybody. . . .
Were you trying to provoke Artaud's new friends? You weren't easy
on his family either. You also wrote , "Above all , I blame Artaud's
56. La Tour de Feu, op. cit. , p. 2 7 .

1 82

family for having underestimated his work while he was alive

and for having misunderstood his genius . " You didn't pull your
punches back then . . . .
GF: All that was so long ago . No one cares about that anymore .
Artauds new friends were a miniscule group ; they aren't the old
pillars of Surrealism, the maj ority of whom I pride myself on
having gotten to know. Artauds old friends write to me ; they call.
Sometimes it makes them laugh. But at one time it was serious . . . .
SL: And no one among the first generation of Surrealists blamed
you for subj ecting Artaud to electroshock against his will?
GF: They thanked me . Almost all the Surrealists, like Michel
Leiris, like Dominguez , Desnos, were overj oyed and sent me
letters saying, "He's finally writing."
SL: The accusations began shortly after his return . . . .
GF: What do I care, what do I care. If you only knew the life
I led . . . . I was accused of so many things. In 1 949 when I was
living in Bayonne, I was given a five-year suspension and a prison
sentence by a criminal court.
SL: For what you did to Artaud?
GF: No, for something else . At that time the law that treated
concentration camp prisoners as war victims hadn't been passed
yet. They had still not created the subj ective syndrome and the
asthenic syndrome of camp deportees that currently exist and
are now clearly established under the law. I gave them a pension
that was equal to that, then the state indicted me for falsifying
certificates . And I won in appeals court. It felt all the more
victorious because I was up against a character I was terrified of,
Tixier-Vignancourt, an extreme right-wing attorney. I can't stand
right-wing or extreme right-wing people . People like Le Pen really
scare me right now. I live in mortal terror of nee-fascism. What
can you do? I can't force myself to change.

1 83

SL: Did the Germans occupy Rodez during the war?

GF: Absolutely, they occupied Rodez completely. But I was always
extraordinarily lucky. Every day someone would come to me and
say, "I'd like to sleep here . I can't go to the hotel , the Gestapo are
following me . " "Fine , go upstairs. " It was very dangerous. So one
day someone being paid by the Gestapo came to my house. The
Germans got him to work for them for morphine. And everyone
in the network whose name we gave them ended up getting taken
away. I was spared, but the others . . . . Thats something I really
regret. So, yeah. I feel real remorse about that. I sent 400 people
to their deaths that day. So you know, when you've been through
things like that, you know, pfff.
SL: Was Artaud aware of what was happening in the world at that time?
GF: No. He never read the paper. He had only barely begun to hear
Hitler speaking on the radio . He thought only of his delusions.
And they were still the same paraphrenic delusions too , but from
multiple angles , since he reinvented them every day, adding new
forms , new interpretations , new proofs that they were true, etc.
He expressed them violently from time to time , that's all.
SL: But a delusion doesn't j ust pertain to one person alone : it

always turns outward . When he embarked for Ireland, Artaud was

in a state of "permanent fulmination," announcing the destruction
of the world by fire .
GF: That's a typical paraphrenic delusion with a fixation involving
theological fantasy.
SL: No doubt, but a current always passes between the electrodes .
So what was passing through that theological fantasy?
GF: Artaud gave you details about the way in which he was
attacked by diabolical forces .
SL: Artaud was describing how he felt attacked by forces from
hell. Making himself out to be a victim of conspiracies, sorcery

1 84

and betrayals was a way of putting the fate of the world onto his
own shoulders. Christ had already tried that, and with a certain
amount of success. We call that Christianity. Artaud said he had
cut himself off from the world "so that all the world's force might
gather within me . "57 So the whole world had been swept up in his
delusion. It must be said that the world was doing all it could to
realize its own delusions . So what did Artaud do? He refused to
side with royalists, revolutionaries, patriots, Right, Left, Fascism ,
Communism, Republic or Democracy-all the confrontations
pushing the world toward catastrophe . Theological delirium
became one with political delirium.
GF: You must know about his letter to Hitler? I published that.
SL: Yes. But in 1 943 Hitler was the Fuhrer of Germany, and

therefore of the world: the man who would crush history under
his boot for the next thousand years. Artaud had no trouble seeing
the Antichrist, the great destroyer in Hitler. It was destruction on a
cosmic scale that Artaud was wishing for at the time . Thats why in
one of his curses, he invited Hitler and his army to "roll over Paris,"
which was, he said, already full of his puppets . . . . He wasn't wrong.
GF: I only published the first few pages of that letter. Its such a
delusional text that it doesn't seem like it would be of interest to
anyone.
SL: Delusions have always seemed interesting to me , especially

those about Hitler. They're more interesting than Hitlers own

delusions . . . .
GF: I wrote a psychopathology of Hitler in a leftist magazine called

Marianne, where I used to have a weekly column on psychiatry.

That article was published three months before the declaration of
war. Then when the Germans arrived in Paris, I burned everything
I had at my house , all my archives . . . . But I detected elements of
hysteria in him, and elements of epilepsy-I knew my man quite
well.
5 7 . Antonin Artaud , Les Nouvelles revelations de l'f.tre, Oeuvres completes Vil, (Paris,
Gallimard , 1 967), p. 226.

1 85

SL: According to your criteria, Hitler's delusion would be more

paranoiac than paraphrenic. But you can also find plenty of
theological fantasies. After all , he had dreamed o f becoming a
priest, like Stalin. The reasons Hitler put forward for invading
new territories like the Sudetenland, Lebensraum, etc. , were no
doubt perfectly credible for those who wanted to believe them.
The paranoid person after all, is beset by a reasonable madness .
He simply goes too far. He's better adapted than others to the
machinery of society. . . .
GF: Very well adapted but very dangerous. Among the three

delusions I named-paranoid, schizophrenic, and paraphrenic

it's the only one that poses a real threat; it's the only one you'll find
in someone at a criminal court or interned in an asylum.
S L : In The Needfor Roots , the philosopher Simone Weil touched on

the fate of a young unemployed man, a failed painter, wandering

the streets of Vienna alone . It was right out of Mein Kampf. . . . Mein
Kampf was a permeable delusion , I suppose you'd call it.
GF: Artaud's dedication to Hitler is not. Do you want to see it?
Here , read it out loud, if you don't mind. So I can get a better
sense of it. I have a formal diagnosis : it's paraphrenia . He really
gets excited toward the end.
SL: [reads] In connection to all these warnings, I could tell you that
something of the Antichrist was originally kindled in a man living
somewhere in the Indes a few months ago (1 943) . And the great
majority of the present worlds ills come from that hotbed, which has
been simmering for years now. Everyone living in England bears the
responsibility for it, and the guilt is epitomized in particular by a certain
number of persons in the upper echelons of its police administration,
who clearly saw, perceived and recognized where and on whose watch
that evil spirit had installed itself and had begun to arise; they killed
that man, but did not want to kill that evil spirit . . . . But even more than
them and their superiors, England itself was familiar with it-in its
antichristian synagogues and temples. And thats why the Antichrist
and I mean the Antichrist in person-is alive today, kindled from the
corpse of this dead man; and the hour is not far off when we will see

1 86

his outward manifestation, in bodily farm, at the head of his armies,

once he has sufficiently sowed disorder in hearts and minds at his own
discretion and in his own way.
GF: So explain to me of what interest a text like this could possibly
be in a literary context.
SL: What interest? It corresponds precisely to what Artaud had

announced in Heliogabalus in 1934. Heliogabalus , the black priest,

the crowned anarchist, systematically pursuing the perversion and
destruction of all the values that had guided the Roman Empire,
who met his dishonorable demise in the sewer among blood
and excrement. Heliogabalus is jarry's Ubu character, but on a
planetary scale . In the same way, Artaud saw Hitler as the man
who would push the world into its absolute perdition.
GF: Artaud clearly saw that Hitler was planning to attack England.
SL: England was France's maj or enemy at the time, and it was
no coincidence that Artaud saw the Antichrist rising within the
confines of the British Empire . Artaud's delusions conveyed, pell
mell , all sorts of piecemeal elements from the Petain propaganda
and the virulent racism that were going around during the
Occupation-"treacherous Albion ," the Jewish police , the traitor
freemasons , etc. Artaud immediately understood that this conflict
was one of cosmic proportions. 'This isn't war," he exclaimed at
Ville-Evrard when the doctors left the asylum to go off to the front,
"it's apocalypse ! " Theological fantasy had dovetailed with History.
GF: So what, you think that should be published , that stuff?
SL: Why not? I mean, how far are we willing to go?
GF: I argued with Adrienne Monnier because in her Cahiers she

published a crazy letter of Artauds. A letter of no interest . So I said

to Monnier: "From now on I'll keep the letters Artaud writes you . "
SL: You decided i t was unpublishable?

187

GF: Yes. What good was it to exhibit Artaud'.s "madness?"

SL: Why? Is madness shameful?
GF: No, but it could make you ashamed if you do a lot of stupid
things. And then how can you expect people to listen to the
important things you've said?
SL: The problem with Artaud is that we never know what's part of
the work and what isn't.
GF: You mean whats part of the work and what's part of the illness?
SL: Yes, if we can make such distinctions . You think the dedication
to Hitler is a kind of aberration, but it contains all the ongoing
misfortunes of the planet. . . . Being delusional at that time was the
least of his problems . . . .
GF: I wish I could say it related directly to what was happening in
the world at the time , but it's a text that never seemed particularly
brilliant to me .
SL: For me it seems , on the contrary, illuminating. You just have
to think of Celine, the right-wing anarchist turned collaborator
and anti-Semite as the war approached , who eventually ended
up wandering around Germany during its defeat under the Allies'
bombs; the only great writer to have described the war from the
inside . It seems to me there is something comparable in Artaud:
apparently isolated, cut off from the world, and yet one of those
who experienced most intensely, in mind and body, the horror
that had consumed Europe in blood and fire .
GF: Maybe it could be published in a facsimile edition . . . .
SL: To me this seems extremely interesting. If Artaud's madness
were just turning in circles, it would have nothing to tell us. But
since he projects it onto a character he calls Antichrist, the role
Hitler had just assumed, it shows there is no real fundamental
difference between History and delirium. Joyce said History is a

1 88

nightmare from which we must awake . Could madness be that

awakening? Madness is exiting the self so that the entire world
may inhabit it.
GF: There are magazines that would be thrilled to publish a
handwritten copy of that dedication to Hitler.
SL: It doesn't surprise me at all that Celine and Artaud are constantly
skidding across history, and even landing on the bad side. The great
writing-delusional, prophetic-is that without barriers.
GF: Yes, that's what I'll do: publish the handwritten version of the
letter to Hitler. . . .
SL: Why not?
GF: And Napoleon? I published a special issue that was very violent,

dedicated especially to Napoleon. I made him out to be impotent

its very weird-or half impotent. I found some authentic letters from
women he'd slept with. They're very specific. They say Napoleon's
sperm dripped like milk; extremely pure sperm . . . .
SL: In the letter to Hitler, did you sense in Artaud a kind of
contemporary mental detachment?
GF: Yes , it was at that time when, even in letters to his friends, we
noticed the appearance of absolutely abstruse letter associations
and formulas .
SL: Glossolalia . . . . ls that a common phenomenon among your
patients?
GF: For me it's a sign of aggravation, a sign of a breakdown. At
that point its doubtful the patient will improve .
SL: So there are remissions, relapses . . . .
GF: With sick people , things never progress regularly. There are

ups and downs . . . .

1 89

SL:

And glossolalia, for you , is a low point.

GF: You can't throw the word glossolalia around. It's a word that
should be used sparingly My colleague from Liege , Bohon, did a
study on it that took him I don't know how many years. It was an
enormous thesis, an extraordinary book; one of the most beautiful
books ever written on the language of madmen .
SL: Do you consider Artaud's glossolalia a language of a madman?
GF: I don't think it's very interesting. I tried to read some of it and
to admire it as others do , but I couldn't. I'm talking about texts
he wrote at Ivry, among the last, the very last, on Kabbalah, etc. It
doesn't dazzle me , I admit. There was a lot of echolalia, glossolalia,
lots of things that I didn't understand at all. That's no reason to
rej ect them, but still . . . . In those texts I hear recriminations and
howling, but I can't even follow them from one paragraph to
another. I don't know if you can explain them to me .
SL: What did your colleague Bohon say about it?
GF: That glossolalia isn't a symptom in and of itself, like
stereotypy is for paranoiacs . You have to break it up; there are so
many varieties. Bohon studied all types of glossolalia worldwide ,
even studying their etymology through psychoanalysis. It's an
absolutely remarkable thesis by professor Jean Bohon that must
date from around 1 9 5 5 - 1 9 5 6 .
S L : Was i t published?
GF: Yes , in Belgium. Bobon's son is now the chair at Liege ; the
chair no longer occupied by the father.
SL: You mean professor Bohon?
GF: You have to find his thesis for your university Jean Bohon.
B-O-B-0-N.

1 90

SL: It seems as though you don't like Artaud's final period that he
spent in the lvry clinic. What is that clinic like?
GF: It's a private clinic j ust outside Paris . Artaud was allowed
to leave , to wander wherever he liked as long as he returned
at a certain time. Those who were in charge and who held
the wallet of the association-Dubuffet, I believe , was the
treasurer since he was the richest-paid the appointed
price for his stay. But Artauds life must have been extremely
disorganized there. Who knows if he even ate the meals
provided to him by Dr. Delmas? I don't know. And then, who
knows what his friends were feeding him . . . .
SL: Your idea throughout this whole time was to protect Artaud . . . .
GF: Yes, in a more active sense. With a true doctor, a true
psychiatrist. Whereas Dr. Delmas was an idiot. In the guardroom
or common area of Sainte-Anne, since there were so many
psychiatrists who had clinics in the suburbs of Paris who were
all named Delmas, we had to make up names for them. We said ,
"Oh he went to eat at Delmas' house. " "Which one?" "Dickhead
Delmas . "
S L : And h e was the one taking care of Artaud . . . . D i d you give him

instructions?
GF: I never corresponded with Delmas . It was impossible to
correspond with him. We sent him files, the way we normally
do , by way of friends-observations about what had happened ,
etc. In all my life, I never called Delmas. I consider him to be a
psychiatrist of such mediocrity-Achille Delmas.
SL: ls he still around?
GF: No, he died. And his assistant had huge difficulties under the
Resistance for being a collaborator. It's just an awful place . It's the
most horrifying clinic in the Parisian region- the most horrifying.

191

SL: Artaud stayed there for a few months and he worked a lot. The
photos I've seen of his room at Ivry are full of striking drawings .
Do you attribute any importance to Artaud'.s drawings?
GF: Not much, no . They can be appreciated. The abstract ones
as well . . . But these drawings, I must say, don't interest me . I'm
obviously not an art critic.
SL: Still , you are an expert in, lets say, pathological art.
GF: There was something I described that was repeated worldwide ,
which I call "heaping." How the artwork of a madman is heaped.
Not leaving one tiny space unused. All of Wolfi'.s paintings are
heaped. All schizophrenic paintings .
SL: Artaud's as well?
GF: Artaud doesn't have the style of a schizophrenic. He has his

own style .
SL: In the end do you wish he had never left Rodez?
GF: Maybe he would still be alive ; he would have continued

writing . . . .
SL: But he wrote a tremendous amount after returning to Paris ,
blazing works like Van Gogh. He never would have been able to do
anything comparable had he remained at Rodez . . . .
GF: Yes Van Gogh is, all the same , a beautiful book. There aren't
any of those arcane expressions. The text unfolds majestically.
SL: Artaud isn't very sympathetic toward psychiatry.
GF: Why be sympathetic toward psychiatry? It's a despicable
science. If you only knew the malpractice I continue to see even
today, in 1 984-l'm shocked every single day.
SL: You're director of a department of psychiatry.

192

GF: Yes, but I'm constantly fighting against my colleagues ;

constantly struggling. Constantly exposing truths that I drive
home in a scathing manner. I call some of them sons of bitches,
even at symposiums and conferences .
SL: It could be said that Artaud identifies with Van Gogh.
GF: He does . "I have Van Gogh's genius and they're subjecting me

to the same miseries . . . . " Van Gogh is Artaud .

S L : So then who is Dr. Gachet?
GF: Well, we are . We're even more antagonistic toward psychiatry
than he is. You have no idea how we speak about psychiatrists
who don't take care of their patients ; the animosity we feel toward
them. Even worse than what Artaud spoke about. We despise
them; we don't visit them and we don't allow them to work with
us.
SL: Who is "we?"
GF: The psychiatrists who work and do research, who make an
effort to improve the lives of their patients. That's not all . Three
quarters of psychiatrists do it-like dentists-for the dough.
And they know absolutely nothing. Their diploma is a means for
acquiring wealth, that's all .
SL: It seems to me that Artaud reproaches Gachet for treating
him by "flipping off his thought switch" with his cunning speech.
Gachet claimed to be Van Gogh's last friend on Earth and "a kind
of Heaven-sent sympathizer," all while envying and despising his
genius. And for a terribly sensitive person like poor Van Gogh
(or Artaud) , it's being exposed to this type of treatment, and not
electroshock, that makes one lose hope in life . . . .
GF: On my train back to Rodez from Paris, Artaud embraced me
in the aisle and said , "All the same , it's thanks to you that we're
now on this train today, that I'm coming back, that I'll be released,

1 93

that I'll be able to j oin my friends, that I'll be able to pursue the life
in the theatre that I aspire to . " On the train.
SL: Did you see him again after that?
GF: Never.
SL: Did you stay in touch?
GF: Very, very little.
SL: So it was a clean break.
GF: Totally clean break-which is what his new Parisian friends
wanted . He had a round trip to Paris and he never came back. He
was held back by that small group that I describe, perhaps, with a
little too much kindness .
SL: Who were these people?
GF: Everyone who surrounded him: the Lettrists, Paule Thevenin,
Marthe Robert, Robert Lebel and many others. It was a new
generation of Surrealists , that's all. In fact not much remained of
the movement, which was already dissolving. The real Surrealists
like Bedouin or Jose Pierre , remained attached to Breton.
SL: And you accuse them of getting Artaud laudanum.
GF: Not only them. We know perfectly well that the psychiatrists
at the Ivry clinic gave laudanum or other toxic substances to all
their patients. It was a clinic known for giving drugs to addicts . . . .
SL: What are the effects of laudanum?
GF: Its a drug that puts you in a considerable daze, but doesn't
induce hallucinations. And it's a drug that, from a psychical point
of view, has absolutely devastating effects .
SL: What sort of effects?

1 94

GF: Terrible constipation. I'm inclined to believe that the diagnosis

Paule Thevenin extracted from professor Mondor is wrong.
Mondor must have seen spots on Artaud's x-rays and said , "It's
cancer. " But it was accumulated fecal matter, caused by laudanum.
SL: Artaud was completely blocked.
GF: For sure . And they left Mondor's triumphantly with the kind
of prescription you give a quasi-friend, so laudanum, and the trick
was done. There is no link between the dosage Artaud had taken
up until that point and the dosage he was taking in his final days .
Artaud was deliberately intoxicated by his entourage .
SL: ls this why you found yourself in open conflict with Artaud?
GF: No, not with Artaud. That came later, under the influence
of his new friends in Paris ; the little school that formed around
Artaud who had definitely never read him, and who passed him
off as a great man . They were the ones, and not the old group,
who made up this religion of Artaud against the man who took
care of him. Artaud himself never criticized me . The criticism
he addressed to me had been whispered to him by his friends ,
who needed to pit him against me . Its they who accused us of
subj ecting him to the electric chair.
SL: Celine speaks of modern society as "scenery of electric
chairs . . . . " Artaud had a front row seat.
GF: Now we know that accusation was false and whispered by
others. His friends needed him on their side to get them laudanum,
because they drank it too . So when Artaud found some , he shared
it with them . . . .
SL: I'm very tempted to believe you .

1 95

IV ALL PARAN O IAC S

FALSE WITN E S S E S

Sylvere Lotringer: You never told m e how you met Artaud.

Paule Thevenin: No, and I won't say anything.
SL: Ah! It's a secret.
PT: No. People are false witnesses.
SL: And you?
PT: I also consider myself a false witness and I don't speak about

it. During a recent symposium I refused to speak about my

relationship with Artaud. What I say could be false .
SL: It could also be true. That's the risk you run .
PT: I refused t o speak.
SL: One can't always be pure .
PT: No. Frankly it j ust doesn't interest me . . . .

199

SL: Words are also false witnesses; nothing is more false than
a dictionary. Words are not things . That's no reason to refuse
to speak. You know, it's not the truth I'm after-though it must
exist.

PT: Have you tried to see that woman I told you about who doesn't
want to give up her letters? I don't know if she's dead, I'll have to
call her. She wants to burn them; it's insane .
SL: Could they shed light on things?
PT: Not at all. I've never found anything enlightening in what

anyone had to say about Artaud .

S L : Nothing a t all? Nothing that anyone has said?
PT: Only exceptional people like Breton or Michel Leiris, people

who were Surrealists at the same time as Artaud . They were

capable of appreciating someone , of speaking about his texts .
Breton supplied details that resembled a valid approach, but not
the others. jean-Louis Barrault only ever spoke nonsense.
SL: That doesn't leave us with many people. What about Roger
Blin?
PT: Blin was kind of crazy. He also liked telling funny little stories

about Artaud; that was the side of Artaud that pleased him. He
fictionalized.
S L : Few people suspect Artaud of having had a sense of humor. It

doesn't fit with the image of the cursed poet.

PT: That's because people don't know how to read. You only have

to take a glance at Sidekicks and Supplications . [She reads] : " . . .

and the artichoke beat off while the virgin was taking a crap" Or
[she reads without much conviction] : "Because the children of the
principle mise en scene are not in the sound, but in the cunt,
which is not in the original principle of the attic, but in a terrifying
mastication." If you don't think thats humor. . . .
200

SL: It's not exactly funny, its much worse . We always take
an affected attitude with Artaud as if he's to be pitied. But he
complained enough for us to spare him. Artaud wasn't crazy; he
knew what he was doing. It wasn't Artaud who invented Christ,
but he played the role perfectly. We forget that Artaud was an actor
and especially an actor of himself. So people don't know what to
make of him. They feel a kind of sacred terror before him . . . .
PT: It's not sacred terror, it's imitation. False imitation. For

instance , that's my problem with Jacques Prevels My Life and Times

with Antonin Artaud. In it, Artaud is always perfectly serious and
dramatic. Like Prevel, not Artaud. Artaud had an outrageous sense
of humor.
SL: His humor is like the plague: it causes the mask to fall.
Incidentally, there's a moment in the book when Artaud applauds
and says to Prevel, 'This would be perfect for a theatrical scene."
He was no fool. Prevel got him drugs , that's all . Nietzsche said
that what's exquisite is being moved upon seeing tragic characters
collapse and being capable of laughing about it. Artaud was capable
of laughing about his own collapse .
PT: The work I do on Artaud's texts allows me to understand him.
The rest of it I absolutely don't believe. I don't think Latremolieres
discourse teaches us anything whatsoever about Artaud.
S L : That wasn't my intention at all. Still, they were i n constant

contact. They weren't the same obviously, but Artaud always

rubbed off on others, maybe because he was missing from his
own place , as Jacques Lacan said so well . Latremoliere had this
idea that he was the Dr. L that Artaud insulted throughout his
Van Gogh. And incidentally he wasn't modest, despite what he
says . Anything not to be mediocre-a nobody. So , was he the
famous "Dr. L?"
PT: No, it was Lacan . Artaud told me himself while writing

Van Gogh.
SL: Lacan! Are you sure?
201

PT: Absolutely. Who is Latremoliere? Nobody. But Artaud asked

me not to tell anyone .

SL: Did you ever meet this Latremoliere?

PT: No , I never saw him. And he said I was a schemer or
something. [She shrugs . ]

SL: Maybe h e was intrigued by the role you played with Artaud.
It intrigues me, too . An entire life , j ust like that, devoted to his
oeuvre-it's not ordinary. How did this come about for you? Did
you already know Artaud before his return to Paris?
PT: No, I won't say anything. [She sighs. ] It's not a secret, it's not a

secret. I just don't want to talk about it.

SL: To me, Latremoliere seemed pretty paranoid himself. . . .
PT: Everyone who deals with Artaud is paranoid. Thats why your
whole thing doesn't work. The photographer I sent to photograph
his drawing had never worked under such conditions. She told
me the drawing was in terrible shape. So now he's put it in a safe?
All the characters she encountered were absolutely psychopathic.
The psychiatrists, too . Another psychiatrist had one of Artauds
drawings. He never answered me because he'd gone mad. It was a
total film noir. I sent a friend to his house , we held secret meetings,
the woman took the drawing out; it was absolutely appalling. I
don't have to thank him, I don't need to send him the book when
it comes out. . . . There wasn't one single thing, not one . It caused
problems with everything-everything. It's this attitude people
adopt when it comes to Artaud. It even shocked the publisher.
He'd never seen anything like it.

SL: Latremoliere sent me insulting letters . Ferdiere , on the other

hand , was extremely friendly. Hes no less paranoid, necessarily.
PT: He's mad , he's mad . . . .

SL: Basically, they're all mad , Artauds madmen .

202

PT: Moreover, he understands nothing of Artauds texts and he

doesn't like that.

SL: How did you convince him to publish Artaud's letters that
were in Ferdiere's possession?
PT: I made footnotes explaining each time that this document was

in Dr. Ferdiere's hands . In the end he was furious; he acted high

and mighty But he didn't hand it all over-far from it.
SL: He showed me the famous letter to Hitler. . . .
PT: He doesn't have it. Ferdiere had the books that Artaud

dedicated to him and published before his internment at Rodez ,

but Artaud never sent him a single book after he left. Afterwards ,
never. The letter to Hitler? jean Digot58 has the same one. They
copied them . I don't know which one is the original . So that's what
Ferdiere shows people. Now and then he reveals little tidbits to
me, but for that I have to make the trip , go see him and have lunch
with him. Artaud kept copies of the letters he sent. He recopied his
letters , then ripped them in two and deliberately kept the pieces
in a bag. I found some of them. I guess it's a mnemonic thing . . . .
SL: Artaud often asked his correspondents never to share the
letters he'd sent them. He then published them himself. After all ,
he was a man of letters .
PT: I found correspondences where I saw the ripped letter but not
the sent letter, so I pieced them together, which wasn't hard. But
ultimately he never kept them. He was someone who kept all this
in a room where . . . .
SL: Those bottom feeders who plucked up the scraps of his soul. . . .

Artaud's sister accuses his friends of having helped themselves to

his manuscripts after his death.
PT: No such luck; his manuscripts were already at my house and
had been for a long time . There were three that he'd brought over
58. Jean Digot was a poet from Rodez.

203

in their entirety, specifically so that his sister wouldn't take them.

He'd taken precautions.
SL: His sister seems to support the hypothesis of a suicide rather
than cancer.
PT: Ferdiere denies it only because he wishes he'd thought of

it himself. When Artaud complained of certain pains, Ferdiere

must have thought it was to obtain opium and he didn't look any
further. But actually, I took Artaud to Professor Mondor and he
told me, "Given who this person is, given the consequences it may
have , I'll take the x-rays out so you can have them. They're up in
my attic . " I got the x-rays from Mondor.
SL: Artaud's sister, Marie-Ange Malaussena, had come to see him
the day before . . . .
PT: Not the day before , but two days before, or three days before.
And it was obvious that there was nothing left in Artaud's room.
SL: All the drawings were gone , too?
PT: Everything. He had removed it all himself.
SL: Was he suspicious of his sister?
PT: Definitely, and with good reason. He had my brother come

pick up one of the suitcases-I didn't tell him to . He gave him the
suitcase. And he said, "If something happens to me , I don't want
any of my manuscripts to be here . "
S L : Did h e defy his family?
PT: Those who claimed to be his family.
SL: They were his family. Marie-Ange Malaussena explained how
attached Artaud was to his mother. She even followed him to Paris
to look after him.

204

PT: When he had nothing left to eat he went to his mother, that's
true. But at the same time he had a ferocious hatred.
SL: Was it as simple as that, or was it ambivalent? There is always

ambivalence in those kinds of very close relationships . . . .

PT: It was not ambivalent. He had nothing in common with

them. He said it very clearly No one in his family looked after him
during his stay at Rodez. Ferdiere always noted this .
SL: Ferdiere dissuaded his sister from visiting him and even from
sending packages.
PT: He never went to pick up the packages, and the sister didn't
want. . . . No, she never sent any packages. And they were furious
when he was released from Rodez. Artaud got out without his
sister. When Artaud was at Ville-Evrard, an old friend who had
known Artaud for a long time went for a walk with the mother
and brother to convince them to take him out. Because he thought
Artaud would survive j ust fine outside , and he was right. And they
refused.
SL: Marie-Ange Malaussena blames Artaud's death entirely on

those who took him out of Rodez.

PT: That's completely absurd . Cancer. . . .
SL: But he didn't die of cancer. . . .
PT: No , he didn't die of cancer, but he would have in the

following two months. Artaud wanted to leave for the South ,

he wanted me to go with him . I'd rented a house for him
in Antibes . Mondor had me come to his office and he said,
"You don't know what a cancer victim is like in the last
stages. " It's true that I was very young at the time . "You won't be
able to handle it physically. "
SL: The pain . . . .

205

PT: No, I had gone to med school, but there were physiological

details I didn't know about, that was what he was alluding to . One
can't take that on alone . It's true that it's very difficult, especially
in that situation. He must have taken too strong a dose of chloral
hydrate, and he died of a heart attack. He j ust blacked out.
SL: Was he conscious of having cancer?
PT: When Mondor gave him a letter that allowed him all the opium

he wanted at the clinic, he must have known what it meant. He

didn't die from cancer, but it was inoperable . It was something he
had endured for a long time .
SL: He must have already had it at Rodez.
PT: In his letters from Rodez, he complained several times of
bloody stool. Which proves he was already seeing signs.
SL: It was all he ever did.

206

V. E P I LO G U E

QyIET DAYS IN IVRY

I arrived at Ivry late . The cop hadn't given good directions and I
passed the clinic twice before realizing it was directly behind the
town hall. A caretaker with an apoplectic complexion dozed in
front of the pavilion. He somehow got to his feet by leaning on his
cane and asked me to wait for him in front of the gate . I watched
the flies buzzing in the sun, while inspecting the massive building
that stood beyond the gate , seemingly an old hunting pavilion.
That's when I noticed an old woman in black, frozen like a rock in
front of a stone bench; only her hands clutching a letter seemed to
be alive . The concierge finally arrived with a young nurse . "Marie
will lead you there ," he said, shaking his stump in the direction of
the park. Marie nodded absently
We crossed the park, Marie walking ahead. It was strange to
find myself suddenly amid these magnificent trees , barely out of
the racket of the metro . "ls it far?" I asked for no other reason than
to break the silence. Marie turned around and I could see she had
tears in her eyes. "It's this way," she said , and she bit her lip . The
rest of our walk was excruciatingly slow. We walked along a thick
wall covered in ivy and I was on the verge of asking her again
when, just in front of us, I saw the pavilion .
Marie stopped, apparently incapable of going further. "You can
go in without knocking, monsieur. " She forced a gentle tone . I
barely had time to thank her before she'd turned on her heels .
211

Her white apron flapped back and forth between the trees and
she was out of sight.
The pavilion seemed abandoned and yet incredibly peaceful.
A dark gray sweater had been tossed on the bench as if someone
had just left. A large unfinished painting was lying there : the
mummified head of an old Indian with long hair in whom I
immediately recognized Artaud.
He was resting on his back, his mouth wide open. I sat by
his bedside in the fake Louis XV armchair and waited. The room
was full of framed drawings leaning against the walls and stacked
up by the fireplace next to a Euripides volume or a bundle of
papers . On the table near the window I could see a paper basket
overflowing with light blue school notebooks and a large ax stuck
into a chopping block. I got up quietly and took a few photos of
the room. I didn't dare photograph him in his sleep ; he seemed
defenseless and slightly repugnant. His toothless head j utted out
of the bed like a fish out of the river. I closed my eyes and took
the photo .
The window looked out on the park; I moved toward it and
caught my breath. He reminded me so much of my father. That's
when I noticed a cracked tree on the ground nearby. "There is no
force of nature, Mr. Lotringer," Artaud had told me the last time
we met two days earlier on the terrace at Les Deux-Magots. "When
thunder explodes over your head you can bet there is thought
somewhere . " I looked at the body stretched out before me and
decided to take a stroll through the park. The heat was far more
tolerable in the shade . At times I could even feel a breeze .
When I came back he was still stretched out on the bed , but
his head was propped up on a pillow and tilted backward. He
could have been awake but his eyes were visibly closed . His
tightly pressed lips looked like scar tissue. Suddenly I noticed that
someone else was in the room. The man was seated in the opposite
comer, his arms crossed on his chest . I wondered if he had been
there the whole time . His thick white beard and his shaved head
gleamed in the light. He looked like God the Father and maybe
he was . The man looked through me and left the room. I noticed
he was wearing blue paj amas under his yellow and black sweater.

212

"Oh, Mr. Lotringer," said a voice , "What time is it?"

I was startled and spun around . It was Artaud.
I replied that it was almost noon and he went back to sleep .
His position looked so awkward I feared he might fall to the floor.
"You're still here?" he asked me an hour later, and he extended
two fingers in my direction . I noticed that he hesitated to offer his
whole hand. He was probably scared of attracting bad luck.
"Did Marie lead you here?"
I nodded.
He stretched himself out and with two index fingers he felt
around behind his ears for a specific point as if he were looking
for a light switch.
"May I ask you something personal, Mr. Lotringer . . . . Have you
had a sexual encounter recently?"
I didn't know what to say.
Again he shut his eyes and spoke in monotone: "It's something
you must avoid at all costs; it can be bad for your mind."
H e remained silent a moment and then added dramatically,
"Can you imagine anything more revolting than being pregnant?
It's as if you're covered from head to toe by huge genitals . "
I said something vague and uncrossed my legs. I realized it
might be time to leave .
"Don't leave yet," he said. He had read my mind . He then
closed his eyes and became completely immobile , his face twisted
in pain. "I have a great deal of sadness ," he said, "and I don't really
know why. Maybe because I'm out of cocaine . " He shot me a
quick, penetrating glance . "Do you do cocaine , Mr. Lotringer?"
"No . "
"O r heroine , or opium, or morphine?"
"Sorry. "
He sighed .
"I better go ," I told him, "Its getting late . "
I stayed b y his bed.
I was slightly embarrassed.

213

"Something horrendous happened to me , Mr. Lotringer. I have

eczema on my testicles and there is a black and yellow pus oozing
out. The odor is unbearable . "
"I a m s o sorry," I said, a s if i t was my fault.
He wrapped himself in his sheets as he would in a toga and
stumbled over to the fireplace. "By the way," he declared, "If you
see Marie on the way back don't mention anything. "
"About what?"
"About pregnant women. You see she wants a child by me ,
Artaud."
"You can count on me , monsieur," I told him. I was feeling
more and more uncomfortable .
He held out his whole hand.
"I see a forest; and in this forest I see several minds moving about,
and among them there are some who are terribly threatening, and
others, like yours, Mr. Lotringer, whose friendship comes from a
terribly far away place . "
I shook his hand and left the room.

2 14

This translation is dedicated to

Sabrina Seelig and Davor Diklich
-Joanna Spinks

Univocal Publishing
1 2 3 North 3rd Street, #202
Minneapolis, MN 55401
univocalpublishing. com
ISBN 978 193756 1 4 1 3

Jason Wagner, Drew S. Burk

(Editors)
All materials were printed and bound
in April 20 1 5 at Univocal's atelier
in Minneapolis, USA.
This work was composed in Trajan and Berkeley
The paper is Hammermill 98.
The letterpress cover was printed
on Crane's Lettra Fluorescent
Both are archival quality and acid-free .

111 1 111 111 1 11 1111 111 1

9 78 1 937 56 1 4 1 3

Those who are mad like Antonin

L 1 h. L

Artaud, are they just as mad as he

!\ t Z I

contagious, and everyone, from his

1\ l ! I_)

was? Madness, like the plague, is

psychiatrists to his disciples, family,
and critics, everyone who gets close
to Artaud , seems to participate
in his delirium. Sylvere Lotringer
explores various embodiments of

this shared delirium through what

Artaud called "mental dramas"
a

series of confrontations with his

witnesses or "persecutors" where

we uncover the raw delirium at
work, even in Lotringer himsel f.

Mad Like Artaud does not intend to

add one more layer of commentary
to the bitter controversies that have
been surrounding the cursed poet's
work since his death in 1 948, nor
does it take sides among the different
camps who are still haggling over
his corpse . This book speaks of the
site

where

"madness"

itself

is

simmering.

>.

,1

'