What would it mean to consider the last works of Antonin Artaud, including his major radio piece, To Have Done With the Judgment of God—written after his return to language following years of aphasia during his incarceration in the psychiatric asylum of Rodez and upon his return to Paris just before his death—as poetry? Based upon a veritable rhetoric of repulsion and abjection, effecting an obsessive resistance to readability, Artaud utilized numerous tactics to reject the reader: unmentionable blasphemy, putrid scatology, unintelligible glossolalia, hideous violence, abhorrent politics, obscene curses, unfathomable contradictions, bewildering lists, inexorable negations, disorienting syntax, unsettling non sequiturs, undefinable neologisms, uncanny repetitions. Were these writings to be inserted into the French poetic canon, they would necessitate a radical reconsideration of poetry and poetics, indeed of the French language itself, based upon the nihilistic powers of performance and performativity.
Radically Recalcitrant Radio