Shadow Self

There are two texts on Derrida, on Artaud. https://kdoutsiderart.com/tag/antonin-artaud/ - For Artaud the works are intended as weapons, not commodities, but they become commodified in any event. How then to restore, to protect, their existence as “gestures, a verb, a grammar, an arithmetic, a whole Kabbalah…that shits on the other,” to maintain their endurance as “a machine that has breath”? How to preserve the destructive essence (and we should be clear Artaud’s intent was destructive, not merely critical) of Artaud’s project against “the museographic management of its surplus value.” As Derrida puts it: “Will it be possible to do what I am trying to do, to say ‘Merde?’ Will it be possible, either with or without blasphemy, to read and to cite ‘Shit,’ ‘Shit to art,’ to do it then as it must be done, in this great temple that is a great art museum and above all modern, thus in a museum that has the sense of history, the very great museum of one of the greatest metropolises in the new world?” ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’: https://arts3047.wordpress.com/2017/05/08/the-theatre-of-cruelty-and-the-closure-of-representation/ - Whilst Derrida seems to be on the brink of declaring Artaud as a success story that can defy the unravelling of deconstructive theory, he ultimately finds an end to theatre of cruelty using dialectics. The very thing that would seem to make theatre succeed in a mission that texts fail is the thing that undoes theatre as an art form: its existence as transient, finite.