Following his release from the Rodez asylum, Antonin Artaud decided he
wanted his new work to connect with a vast public audience, and he chose
to record radio broadcasts in order to carry through that aim. That
determination led him to his most experimental and incendiary project,
To Have Done with the Judgement of God, 1947-48, in which he attempted
to create a new language of texts, screams, and cacophonies: a language
designed to be heard by millions, aimed, as Artaud said, for
"road-menders." In the broadcast, he interrogated corporeality and
introduced the idea of the "body without organs," crucial to the later
work of Deleuze and Guattari. The broadcast, commissioned by the French
national radio station, was banned shortly before its planned
transmission, much to Artaud's fury. This volume collects all of the
texts for To Have Done with the Judgement of God, together with
several of the letters Artaud wrote to friends and enemies in the short
period between his work's censorship and his death. Also included is the
text of an earlier broadcast from 1946, Madness and Black Magic,
written as a manifesto prefiguring his subsequent broadcast. Clayton
Eshleman's extraordinary translations of the broadcasts activate these
works in their extreme provocation.
