Cruelty and Desire in the Moder Laurens De Vos

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.Differentially based dualities always leave a residue that cannot be expressed by linguistic means.Artaud feels the unbridgeable gap between forces and forms as a severe assault on his very being.In the early stages of his career, he does try to—literally!—come to terms with the words that inadequately shape his thoughts, to which his correspondence with Jacques Rivière attests.Although he experiences this compromise as a self-humiliation or self-denial, he also expresses his awareness that he has no other option but to accept language, with all its flaws.I suffer from a horrible sickness of the mind.My thought abandons me at every level.From the simple fact of thought to the external fact of materialization in words.Words, shapes of sentences, internal directions of thought, simple reactions of the mind—I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being.Thus as soon as I can grasp a form, however imperfect, I pin it down, for fear of losing the whole thought.I lower myself, I know, and I suffer from it, but I consent to it for fear of dying altogether.(SW, 31)If, then, the Oedipal stage and the concomitant symbolic castration turn this pretextual being into a linguistically modified subject, he is at the same time deprived of something previously belonging to his self.In the mythical dimension of the real characterized by a flawless and presymbolic unity there are no categories or differences but only what we might describe as the pure, undifferentiated dynamics of life.No distinction can be discerned here between signifier and signified, between subject and object.As human beings we have the privilege to participate in this linguistic system that functions independently, no matter whether we are there or are not born yet or dead already; “language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it” (Lacan 2001, 163).The system of language operates outside of us and is, therefore, utterly other.In the linguistic structure of A, the causal relationship between object and sign is cut off, while its arbitrariness is restrained by what we have called the solidification of meaning, denoted by Lacan with s(A).In the “discourse of the Other,” the ex post facto assignation of signification results from the momentary fixation of signifiers.Yet the compromise of a solidification of meaning would not suffice for Artaud and he felt the gap increasingly more gnawing.His pessimism about linguistic shapes capable of rendering his thoughts understandable continued to grow.However, it lasts until 1936 before he dares to give in to what he has been calling the void.In the early poems he sent to Rivière he expresses his fear of the yawning gap.Artaud’s writings of this period testify to a soul terrorized with the fear of insanity.Approaching too closely the void that simultaneously magnetizes him as a result of his dissatisfaction with society might lead to the dissolution of his self, paradoxically in the very search of this self.With his journey to the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico in 1936 and his participation in the consummation of the hallucinatory peyotl plant, which was thought to contain the tribe’s sun god, Artaud eventually took the risk of looking in the gyrating black hole of the abyss, and a few months later wrote about this experience that offered him “new revelations of being” (OC VII, 145).From now on he was willing to take the final step into the void, and leave behind the world that had been betraying him all along.For a long time I have been feeling the Void, yet I have refused to throw myself in the Void.I have been a coward like everything else around me.When I believed that I was refusing this world, I now know that I was refusing the Void.For I know that this world does not exist and I know how it does not exist.What I have suffered from till now is having been refusing the Void.The Void which was already in me.(OC VII, 149–50)The void of which Artaud speaks appears as the absence of the real, while the world he is living in is composed of appearances and chimeras.His whole life, starting with his very name, consists of a concatenation of labels pinning him down in a discursive system in which he feels an alien.Instead of participating in the whirling stream of life, he crystalizes in a web of signifiers that has stolen him from himself, and like a parasite has taken over from himself.This world, then, is a mere façade inhabited by shiny happy people for as long as they believe in the falsity of its reality.It is the blue pill in The Matrix.From the moment of his symbolic castration, though, he has been burdened with a void, a gap that has been lodging in him ever since and that he cannot shake off.It is something from outside that has become his most intimate part, yet Artaud cannot possibly accept this lack.To erase the void, he feels he must plunge into the void and again merge with that part that he has been robbed of.“I must take it to an end.I must at last break with this world which a Being in me, this Being that I can no longer call[cet Être que je ne peux plus appeller]—for if it comes I will fall into the Void—which this Being has always been refusing” (OC VII, 150).I have added part of the French original, since I consider the use of appeller quite important in this respect.The twofold meaning of the word, which recurs in the English call, renders both Artaud’s attraction to the void and aggravation about the fulfillment of this attraction.On the one hand, Artaud feels the difficulty of calling upon this extimate Being from which he has been alienated, knowing that when it comes he will fall victim to the abyss of the real [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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