Through the Digestive System

Abstract

Artaud’s obsession with digestive processes is well documented, and becomes gradually more exaggerated throughout his work. Perhaps the most memorable instance of this occurs in ‘La recherche de la fécalité’ (‘The Pursuit of Fecality’), in the 1947 recording of Pour en fnir avec le jugement de dieu, where Artaud gets his old friend and theatrical collaborator Roger Blin to scream the words ‘LE CACA’ with an unrivalled intensity. His cahiers are teeming with texts about defecation, farting, burping, gurgling, regurgitation, vomiting and other digestive activities. Julia Kristeva, in ‘Le sujet en procès’ (‘The Subject in Process’), characterises Artaud’s non-semanticised phonemes as the language of expulsion, drawing from Hegelian negativity to expand her theory of the semiotic, non-symbolic ‘chora’ that replaces the unitary subject with a conception of subjectivity as a process.¹ Jacques Derrida, in ‘La parole soufflée’, draws attention to the fact that Artaud had intestinal cancer when he died.² This information, Derrida writes, should not be given the status of a biographical reference, but rather what he designates as a new status, yet to come, which is ‘celui des rapports entre l’existence et le texte, entre ces deux formes de textualité et de l’écriture générale dans le jeu de laquelle elles s’articulent’ (‘that of the relations between existence and the text, between these two forms of textuality and the generalised writing within whose play they are articulated’).³