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PARTISAN REVIEW
tized interpretation of birth. The (hypothetical) origins of an obsession in–
evitably get lost in our enactments of it. Artaud's horror of being born may,
after all, be the retroactive effect on his memory of birth of a view of defeca–
tion, as a loss of self. But such casual origins are in fact impossible
to
locate .
Artaud's hatred of derivation and repetition exist nowhere apart from his
performances of that hatred; there is no unperformed source from which all
versions of the theme proceed .
Artaud's most urgent need is to abolish the space between the self and
the world and that between the self and its owp history, to save the self from
any extensions or,
to
use a Derridean term, any dissemination which would
scatter and destroy presence. Artaud's ideal, in Derrida's striking phrase,
is a "Corps-propre-debout-sans-dechet." Without "dechet" (waste or resi–
due): nothing must fall away from the body. But since the very shape of the
body includes a certain falling away from itself, Artaud lives in terror of
"the articulated body," of anatomical extensions which decentralize our
physical being. And we can now see the most profound logic of Artaud's
mistrust of verbal language: words articulate the self, they substitute a system
of spaced repetitions and differences for pure presence. (Beckett, as I've
shown in
Balzac to Beckett,
pursues the same chimerical ideal. The "char–
acters" in the novelistic trilogy move toward silence, immobility, and even,
in
L'Innommable,
a body reduced to-or perfected in-the shape of a ball
with no extensions at all.)
Psychology is the attempt to systematize the self's loss of pure presence.
It
considers all behavior from the point of view of other behavior; the psy–
chological interpretation of repetition and difference assumes the derived
nature of
all
human activity. The antipsychological bias of Actaud's program
for the theater is therefore a logical and crucial aspect of his passionate anti–
pathy toward all derivation. It's true that Artaud's rebellion, as Derrida has
shown, is ambiguous and even self-defeating. Artaud rejects a "metaphysics
of difference" which argues for the ontological inferiority of the phenomenal
world by referring that world back to an underived cause which alone en–
joys the privilege of full, nonreferential presence. But he keeps the cult of
presence. Instead of recognizing that to abolish transcendence is also to lose
the hope of any self-contained, .. nondisseminated" presence in the universe,
Artaud transfers the locus of perfect presence from a metaphysical reality
to the phenomenal world itself, indeed to his own body (the "Corps-propre–
debout-sans-dechet' '). And to his thought; in one of the texts of
L 'Ombilic
des limbes,
Artaud spells out his notion ofwhat thought should be :
. .. for me thinking
is
something other than not being completely dead ,
it means connecting up with oneself at every moment, it means ·that we
