Artaud and the Gnostic Drama

This study offers a reappraisal of the importance of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) in contemporary critical debate, and examines the intricate parallels between his heretical dramaturgy and the heresies of ancient Gnosticism. Artaud is a figure who, mythologized as an icon of failure and madness, has achieved the pathos of a martyrdom. One of the effects of this myth has been to draw the screen of pathos over the self-mythologizing and self-dramatizing which generate the extraordinary energies in Artaud's vast oeuvre. Using the term 'heresy' in place of 'madness' to designate the impassioned thought processes which escape the terms of orthodox western epistemology, this book situates Artaud, as the most extravagant of heretics, in company with the Gnostics whose speculations served to define heresy in the beginnings of the Christian tradition. Like that of the Gnostics, Artaud's cosmology is inherently dramatic, setting creature against creator, force against form, matter against spirit, pious knowledge against heretical gnosis. Jane Goodall argues that major post-structuralist critics such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, who have enlisted Artaud in their own anti-orthodoxies, have refused to pay attention to the terms of his own heresy. In this refusal, they display an anxiety towards the gnostic drama and its heresies, which mount an assault that may be more powerful than their own upon the founding tenets of western thought.