4.

BODY-GENESIS OR CATASTROPHIC TIME -

AROUND TANAKA MIN, HIJIKATA AND ARTAUD
, ' )

In the_h~gttining, some!hlng catastrophic happens, in the body, in the world,

in my,f!eldi\becoming almo~\invisible, imperceptible, whereas everything is
extre1nely alive, present, flti1ctuating. 1.
"' \, ~ {·\:...'-'-~\A.' V\. ~
And then, everything collapses. Everything moves, disperses, rushes away.
.,.\. - '\ ·c...........~ ( t-.
«I no longer want to think except with the body:' I '
0./\,'( rJ -e....
There is «an infinite monstrous flesh': I have to cut up this expa11seof infinite
and mo11strous flesh, to fit the size of my mouth, my vision. But above all I 1nust
resist temptation, the temptation to create a form.

Yes, I have to give some un-formality to this formlessness, some informality,

some contours to this monstrosity, but not a form, never a form.
ll\.,,.. -~c~~..( C. "-

The world ~eems extremely and excessively alive to me. But the worst thing
is that I myself am as alive as it... •

I am retracing what I have read in Cla~ice Lispector's The Passion according

to G. H. Since I am retranslating what I rfad in Japanese now into French, I may
I .
be giving you back a Lispector who is completely foreign to you.
~' , ..: • t ~ I v\ r ' ,t ·, ,

I have a reason for starting with this quotation and this allusion to a
singularly catastrophic experience, which made a profound impression on me.
You vvill see why.

I would like to say that I am particularly interested in a dance and a presence

of the body that takes place in a certain catastrophic dimension of life and
being. You encounter a body, you discover a body, the body is suddenly there,
detached from the person, from speech, from context, meaning, history,
?1\-1 ~ ,-,__e,.,_landscape. In this catastrophe, a body is always strange and a stranger with its
elusive, inexhaustible, irreducible opacity. The body can signify sometl1i11gby
making signs, gestures, mimes with all their variations. But the reality give11
••

BODY-GENESIS
OR CATASTROPHIC
TIME· AROUND TANAKA MIN, HIJIKATAAND ARTAUD

55
 • ,_ I ( °&
there through the body breaks vvith signification. The body is this indescribable
rupture. The body is this strange begin11ing and r~newal'that can call just about
everything - thought, narration, signification,(}<;o:111munication, history - into
question: it introduces a catastrophe into the flow of time. The body as rupture
'implies a broken fig1:t1eof time, of history. It is not surprising that certain arts
•
intensely connected to the body evoke a broken, baroque image of history, in
,• short a catastrophic figure of time ...
I ,-vould like thus to speak about the body, in a certain way, from a certaiJ.1
point of view, about what happens between dance and the body, about the
dancing body, the dance that discovers the body, or certain aspects of tl1e body
that are invisible in everyday life. This is also about the body that calls dance
:
into question and the dance that calls the body into questio11. It is not 011ly 1

about the body of a dancer, but about the body that is our body in life - but
we are obliged to reconsider what this "our" means, what the nature of this
relationship is, this belonging bet:ween the body and us, what place the body
occupies in the life that is "ours».
1
When I saw Tanaka Min perform for the first time, twenty years ago, I was l
confronted with a body that lived in another time, a geological tin1e where
a biological body slowly awakens, where a petrified seed is in the process
of invisibly flowering. And then this same body lying on the ground only
transforms itself very gradually, gets up as gradually as if it were retracing
the vast evolutionary time that would ~ventually produce the human species,
walking upright on two feet. Before me was an u11known figure of the body
l
vvith a strange temporal flow. I was discovering the body in the vastness of the
time that passes through and fills it. I was grasping not only the presence of
an unknown· body, but the measureless time that enabled the evolution of life,
or at the very least all the fluctuations of the formless human body, opened
up to a non-human infinite time, opened up to the animals, plants, n1inerals,
molecules, to the cosmos, but which cosmos?
Certainly Tanaka Min has not still remained in the same dimension since that
period. He has introduced tales, stories, emotions, sensations, memories and
even landscapes, but the core of his performance would be incomprehensible
if we didn't place all of these elements within tl1is infi11ite tin1e that passes
,,

BODY-GENESIS
OR CATASTROPHIC
TIME· AROUNDTANAKA MIN, HIJIKATAAND ARTAUD

I •
56
through tl1e dancing body. The movements, elements or materials are there
to be opened onto this infinite time beyond measure, which has witnessed
the genesis of the body and all of its metamorphoses since remote prehistoric
time. But iliis is not the reason I will try to place Min's dance within a slightly
mystical or cosmic perspective by giving it the image of a wide open Nature
that would go well beyond Huma11ity.
What counts is above all not the image, but what happens between images.
It is not even movement or movements, it is time in person wiili all these
aspects of petrification, coagt1lation, crystallization and decon1position. The
slo,,vness of its almost invisible gestures certainly work the body that opens
itself to everything virtual in time. This is not the place to present a small theory
on the philosophy of time, which would 11ecessarilyrequire deep and patient
reflection. But when we reflect on time, we can at least realize straight away
what is virtual in time, what is irreducible to the time marked by our plodding
watches and clocks. There is an indivisible, irregular aspect of time, irreducible
in any case to the pre-established units that often consist in translating tim.e into
spatial terms. There is ilie time lived not jL1stby one individual, or by humanity,
but by being before humanity.
In this sense there is something catastrophic in time, without needing to
mention all of the catastrophic events that happen in historical tilne. And I
want to say that a dancer's gestures can ,vork this time in such a way that its
body enters a dimension that calls into question all the conditions that define
the habitual reality of the human body. A body that's detached from all the
sensory-motor, expressive, practical determinations can find itself exclusively
formed from the pure, virtual and invisible time that has nevertheless become a
little palpable. This body and this ti1ne are on tl1e boundary between the visible
and the invisible. Tanaka Min led me to discover this boundary.
In one sense the body is a completely banal fact or phenomenon. There is
no more ordinary form of beiI1g tl1a11the body since nobody lives without a
body. Even the most spiritual being would need a body in order to be spiritual,
spiritually corporeal. But the body is never a pure object, il1 ilie sens·e that at
the same time as we have a body, we simultaneously are this body itself. Our
body is the subject that is indivisible,. inseparable from ourselves, to the point

BODY-GENESIS
OR CATASTROPH!C
TIME· AROUND TANAKA MIN, HIJIKATAAND ARTAUD

•
' . 57
 where it will never be fully subjected to our observation, our thought, our gaze.
Philosophers like Gabriel Marcel or Jean Wahl were very conscious of this
double aspect of the body. .

What thinl<s is what is not thought qua body, what is conscious is the
t1nconscious, thus the body is this double reality that is both subject and object,
both my infinite outside and my inside as bottomless abyss. "To dilate the body
1
of my internal 11ight" is an unforgettable phrase of Anto11in Artaud's.

There is a dimension that only the body can harness, especially because the
body comes from this dimension that_thought cannot have a commanding view
over, as it can if an object is separated from it. The body is this intersection of
the visible and the i11visible,the inside and the outside, what touches and what
is touched. It is neitl1er a thing, 11ora11idea, but ,vhat makes a thing and an idea
exist for us. TI1e body is this convolution, this circulation, this intertwining,
this folding of my interior and my exterior, between the self and the world,
visibility and opacity, this chiasm that Merleau-Ponty developed a case for in
some beautiful pages of The Visible and tfie Invisible, defining it as something
that provides the basis of sensible being in the world, which n1akes this chiasm
a sort of pre-established harmony of being.
•
Not everyone however is always able to live the reality of the body as the ,

expression of a certain pre-established harmony. The body is often lived as a

catastrophic experie11ce. One of tl1e neurophysiologist Oliver Sacks' patients
put it thus: "Something terrible has happened, I can't feel my body. It's a strange
feeling. It's like I have lost the body': 2 It can tht1s happen that we lose or empty
out the body. In Japanese, it is significant that the word "karada;' which means
the body, is necessarily linked ,vith the emptiness signified by "kara;' which
also means a container for the soul. But there is of course a11other type of
catastrophe of the body, another catastrophic experience of the body.

Such a catastrophe is terrible, intolerable and cruel, but it can be singularly •

positive. It can make us break with the straight, continuous, visible line that
determines the world and our life.

1 From To Have Done with the fudgment of God.

2 "TI1eDisembodied Lady'; Chapter 3 in Oliver Sacks, The1\tlanWho Mistook His Wifefor a Hat (New York:
Sununit Books, 1985).

BODY-GENESIS OR CATASTROPHIC TIME· AROUND TANAKA MIN, HUIKATA ANO ARTAUD

58
 •

Hijikata Tatsumi, who created a new kind of dance in Japan in the 60s, was
far from being someone who simply revitalized dance as an already existing
genre. He above all needed to find a means of survival for his deeply singular
experience, and for that he had to experiment with the body and at the same
) time perception, thought and la.nguage. Nothing is spared. In his experiments
and explorations, which always revolve around the question of the body, he
called many things i11toquestion sin1ultaneously, so n1uch so that the creatio11
of a 11ewdance is for him only one part, important all the same, one of the fruits
of all that he explored and experimented wtth.
His writing is precious as a trace of the full itinerary of his explorations and
experiments. He often describes the corporeal memories of the child he was,
rediscovers and relives this body that was infinitely open to everything, air and
wind, lights and darkness, breaths and looks, the life of insects a11dani1nals,
smells and mold. Memories of the sick body or the body of handicapped
people feature prominently. This is not about an ode to childhood nostalgia.
By reviving all the events that visit the body of the child, Hijikata tries to
recreate a body that's singt1larly open to the outside. And by delving into this
open space, he attempts to bring about a revolution (one of his monumental
performances is called The Revolt of the Flesh) that wot1ld destroy all the
boundaries that determine the for1ns and contours of social, rational, 1noral
or sentimental life.
We know today that there have been revolutio11aries whose aim a11dcause
,-verefirmly based on the idea of social justice a11dhuman freedom, but there
have also been insurgents who were revolutionary in a different way, whose
passions are above all due to a hatred of ,-vhat boxes in vitality, what mutilates
tl1e life of the body, hatred of what impedes the "dilation of the body of my
internal night", namely the dilation of the opacity and openness specific to the
body. Hijikata, Artaud, Pasolini, Jean Genet belong to this breed, partisans of
the singular life of the body. Hijikata had a great love for them. There is also
Spinoza, one ·of the first philosophers who affirms the body as the power to
affect and to be affected, the absolutely fluid body made up of infinite particles
in constant variation. This philosophy was wholly dedicated to defending life
against the powers ar1d institutions of death.
••

BODY-GENESIS
OR CATASTROPHIC
TIME· AROUND TANAKAMIN, HIJIKATAANDARTAUD

59
..
 This is what Hijil<ata wrote in 1969: "The dances of the world begin by
standing upright. But I start with the fact of not being able to stand up. I was
in a dead end. I was not a seeing body that pisses unconsciously before tl1ings
happen. The situation of this landscape is like a mystery that has turned into
an insect, but they aren't the articulations of a skeleton that would remain
after the indiscernible speed leaves the body. I headed in the direction of the
native soil of the body. Certainly this folded body demonstrates a form that
could be used to regain strength, but this is because it has formed itself with a
crack, when the passion attached to a shamanism dries up by exhausting itself .
•
The bodies of the adt1lts who surrounded the child were of the same kind:' 3 I
Hijikata defined his dance (butoh) with this well-k:nown formula: "the corpse
that risks its life to stand up". "Not once has tl1e flesh named what lies within
it. The flesh is thus simply obscure", he says.4 Hijikata's writing is at a first
glance illegible, so much does it dislocate standard, commt1nicative Japanese.
It dislocates itself as it takes on an extraordinary density and sensibility, the
experiences and thoughts of the body, retracing the "crack" of the body it has
just defined ... The experience of the body for him is above all the experience of
this crack. His thought is profoundly co11nectedto this crack.

From the beginning of the 70s, Hijikata takes a long break from his practice
as a dancer, and then as a choreographer, without ever going back to them
because of his death. His last creative work is a book called Sick Dancer,
whose subject is suggested by the author in the following way: "by openly
exteriorizing everything that has been hidden underneath, I would like to get
closer to the world my childhood lived': 5 All of this indicates that there were
things that were a little more important to Hijikata than dance. Da11cehadn't
existed previously. It was necessary both to invent dance and rediscover the
body. As his formula says, «wl1atwill happen if we drop a ladder deep i11toour
own bodies and climb down it?"6

3 Tatsumi Hijikata, Zensyuu (Complete Works of Tatsumi J-Iijikata), vol. I (Tokyo: Kawade Shobou Shinsha,
1998), pp. 233-234.
4 Zensyuu, I, p. 234.
5 Zensyuu, I, pp. 148-149.
6 Zensyuu, I, p. 11.

,..

BODY-GENESIS
OR CATASTROPHIC
TIME-AROUND TANAKAMIN, HIJIKATA
AND ARTAUD

60
 - \ I

\
0
'
Something singular in his singular experience of the body made him dance.
Dancing was necessary in order to understand and express the singularities
lived by the body. But this lived experience keeps dilating, keeps going beyond
dance. Hijikata is extremely sensitive to everythi11g that is settled, fixed,
-r
formalized and weighed down in the arts and for1ns of expression, dance is not
n -
, special in tl1is reg_\rd. Everything that is expressed, even with care and sincerity,
can betray what had to be expressed, by making it explicit, exteriorizing it. He
, '->-• {l.. sought something thro11gh dance that exceeds dance. This something goes
,,
~ ,-._ .
,· ,, beyo1'1ddance, b11tthis something is indifferent to this overcoming. Dance is
,~ there to question this somethi11g,this gesture of going beyond. L:/t.P. p ~ ~
t
c...~ --- -- - - - -
, '.'), His writing is full of perversities that faithfully track this complex movement,
•
and mark all of his creative works and experiences. I adored his perversity and
I -
his 'humor. ' , , • ' ,. I"

He plic~d many things in doubt: "our eyes are perhaps lost in virtue of
being eyes':7 "Mr. Takiguchi's hands constantly transgress the realist functions
of hands': 8 It was Merleau-Ponty who said: "you need more than a hand to
touch:' 9 An organ is never entirely defined by its partial and organized
function. Merleau-Ponty the phenomenologist wanted to say that the body,
which is never an object, will never be reducible to its visibly and locally
_...(, _,..• ~ >"-..V-,...(

determined functions. It is a tnickness that exists before tl1e division between

subject and object. Hijikata, another philosopher of the body, also calls the
orga11sand its functions into question, the eye that sees, the hand that touches.
In a way he finds himself inside and in front of a chaos tl1at excludes tl1e
functionally determined organs. This chaos is a depth where nothing would
yet be discernible, where it would only be possible to gauge what appears in
this chaos of the depths.
Hijikata says in an interview: "as soon as man leaves his mother's womb,
he no lo11gerhas the means to measure his size and his weight. He therefore
cannot measure the length of his body. He is with everything he cannot
I
__.L.,.,-,1.L .. - ~

7 Zensyuu, I, p. 271.
8 Zensyuu, I, p. 265.
9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visibleet /'invisible(Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 180-181.

'.

BODY-GENESIS OR CATASTROPHIC TIME· AROUND TANAKA MIN, HIJ1KATAAND ARTAUD

61
lt1 n certain ,"lay. Dance is an attempt to measure this measureless depth, this
fif 1 l 111anentflt1ctuation that we can11ot help but measure without asking what
•111nlity
or forn1 is.
l lc can't avoid rt1nning the risk of destroying dance as a form of expression.
ITljilcatacould be freer in his writi11g than in dance, especially si11cehe could
11Gt1dand contort words, always pt1shing them a little beyond their limits. The
11r1dy couldn't be risked i11the sa1ne way.
I was lucky enough to witness an interesting conversation between Hijikata
flllll 'Tanaka Min. One day Hijikata said to Min in a tone that was botl1 friendly
t.t11d provocative: «the fact of being born is already an improvisation, why are

y,1ui1nprovising dance?"
We la1ow that Min started to dance and trained himself outside of the butoh
l111c of descent clearly created by Hijikata. It was when Hijikata had moved
uwny from dance, and Min's perfor1nance had already developed an original
u.11,lexceptional style, that they met. I am saying tl1at the relationship that
r11istsbetween these two exceptional Japanese artists is spiritual rather than
~c11calogical.And what I appreciate in both dancers is that da11ce for them is a
wnyof posing a question that goes considerably beyo11d the dimension of the
1,pcctacle or even the art of narration, expression, or esthetics.
1-3t1t
to return to the question: why improvise when birth is improvised? I
1lIi11l<
this is a 11otinsignificant question. There is the singular will to do birth
civeragain, to achieve a seco11dbirth. And this is not simply abot1t a desperate,
111.'gative,pessimism, hateful of life. Hijikata often expresses himself in an
ul1nost joyous way: "I was born, already destroyed, I was broken at birth, I was
l,or11with a crack:' 12 The butoh dancer must be.like a corpse that gets up. And
It is 11otonly Hijikata who says these sorts of things about birth and makes it a
IJ<>werfulbasis for creation.
I was struck one day reading the quoted words of Samuel Beckett in
l 011versationwitl1 Charles Juliet, and it wasn't Beckett bt1t Jung the psychoanalyst
who l1ad said them first in relation to a young patient. Beckett heard them at a

Il <:ited from author's memory.

BODY-GENESIS
OR CATASTROPHIC
TIME. AROUNDTANAKAMIN,HIJIKATA
AND ARTAUD

63
 lecture he attended. The phrase by Jung in question is this: "in the end, she had
never been born".It is obviously disturbing. Beclcettseems to take up this phrase,
displacing tl1e context somewhat. Beckett's formttla is just as disturbing but in
another ,-vay.I was struck by it, especially since it starts one of the enigmatic
and an1usi11gtexts that make up For to end yet again: "I gave up before birth, it
is not possible otherwise, but birth there had to be, it was l1e,I was inside, that's
how I see it, it was he who wailed, he who saw the ligl1t,I didn't wail, I did11'tsee
the light ..." 13 So I 1nyselfwas not born, in tl1eend I was never born, whereas l1e,
tl1is other person was born in my place. Birth is not even improvised.,it is the
refusal of improvisation, the refusal of the fact of being born, being created. The
refusal to be born with innateness, wiili everything that's innate. Because man
is born, but born innate. T11atis what is terrible, intolerable for some.
Antonin Artaud wrote precisely on this question: "I am an innate ge11ital,if
you examine this closely it 1neans that I have never been fully realized. There
are i1nbecileswho believe they are beings, innately beings. But I am one who in
order to be must flog my iru1ateness:'14
An innate genital is thus somebody who tries to give birth to themselves,
to have a second birth in order to exclude tl1eir innateness. Because if I a1n
innate, 1 have never bee11born. In the end, I was never born. In Beckett's
works, this self wl10 was11'tborn, who refuses birth, writes about the other
who was born. It's hard to say whether this si11gularrefusal of birth, this will
to a second birth, is a s.igi1of pessimism, certainly it is an jntense and oddly
creative pessimism. And tl1estory of an "innate genita]" is the story of a body
tJ1atquestio11sits body born with all its functions and organs, the hand that
touches, the eye that sees, and so on. From ilie beginning Artaud declares a
singular war agaiJ1sttl1e organs and for "the body withoul organs''. I think
this experience of the bod)r is of prunary importa11cefor understandi11gwl1at
happens not only in the performing arts, but also in writing and thought. In
his u1tique way, I-lijikata articulated this searcl1 for ·the second birtl1 and the
body that exc1t1desthe organs.
13 Samuel Beckett, "r gave up before birth", in For lo end ye/ agai11and other fizzles (London: Calder, 1976), p. '15.
14 Translated djrectly from French: Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres co111ple1cs, vol. 1, p. 9. Cf. Collected Work.~of
Arta11d,vol.l, (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), p. 19.
A111oni11
BODY-GENESIS
OR CATASTROPHIC
TIME·AROUNDTANAKA
MIN.HIJIKATAAND
ARTAtJO
64
The beginning is always a complicated question. How to begin? Because
when you start, if there is nothing before you, you can,t even start, but if there
is already something before you start, you can 11everreally start. JJ1short,
yot1can never begi11anything at all, it is always someone other than you who
begins. Another who you are una\vare of begins behind you, while you don't
exist, or when you don't la.1owit's beginning. You can never be 011top of the
beginning. Does Artaud, who says "I am an innate genital", express a will to
completely dominate tl1ebeginning, birth? Yesand no. Rather than don1inating
the beginnil1g,what matters is to recreate the body t11athas tl1epower to begin,
to rid ilie body of consciousness, uf your project or tl1eproject of another who
tries to master the body. If you cannot begin, neither can another begin, it's the
body that begins wiiliout wanting to dominate, as an "innate ge11ital'~
1-[annahArendt was one who sometimes reflected a great deal on beginnings
In the political area, in terms of "fom1dation:' The most dy:i1amicpolitical
1111..'.founded on public thought, first invented by the ancient Greeks, is for
J\1•cndtprofou11dlyconnected to the power and sitt1ation of beginning. For
I11•1, I he revolution is ultimately less importai1t than tl1ebeginning. Revolution
l•i lfH) n1ucl1about returning to something, sinlulating a beginning witl1 the
d,11111nnnce of reason, whereas in the beginniI1g there is debate, dialogue,
11111111"1recognition between parties, recognition of difference. The politics of
hrnl 1111111glhus consists i11creating and recreating the beginning as something
I111 Ii rcscn1blesan "innate genital''.
I I I 11s rt-Iurn lo the qt1estionposed at the beginning tl1rot1ghthe performance
11 I 11111k.1Min. It was about the body and time. A special aspect of the body
1 , .11 11singular figure of time. The body is always tl1ere bt1t,as I-Iijikatasays,
11 1 11111t' It.is ( he flesh named what lies within it:' The body can be present and
I 111,111d \'Vl\cn it is prese11t,it departs from the continuot1s line of flowing
I LI I 1 111 I11cd by action, signification, the economy, the representation of
I 111ltl J\11othcrtirne emerges through the crack of this broken line. Time
11I Ill\ 1,,.,11 t' nny more, it doesn't flow anymore either.
t11 t•I \1111111!11/\rtaud's very powerful obsessions was that his body was
I 111 1111,1111,110111nanipulated by God. But what he wanted to do was not
I 1111 1'11., ,11110111aton,rid himself of ilie automaton, his own paralyzed
I NI I1 (111 CAIA5TROPHIC MIN,HUIKATAAND
TIME·AROUNDTANAKA ARTAUD
65
body. What he wanted to do was to rebuild or discover anotl1er automaton has ended up giving room in being to something which wasn't life, and which
that would generate itself by following forces, flows, and time, another time. has become mind within hlm:' 15
The orga11s are offensive insofar as they represent and articulate the orders
A whole mad war that Artaud carried out in l1islife fundamentally concerns
that determine the auto1naton of God. This is why Artaud lias to wage a battle
this sort of faking of life and the body, or of the life of the body. The body
against tl1e organs his whole life. It is a n1ad war, singular and singularly
is without organs, which means an unlin'lited and fluctuati11g expa11se, a
universal, if we give a little thought to· all the routines and apparatuses that
continuous variation without fixed form which is lived as time more than space.
objectify and reify the reality lived by the body. This war "to have done with
This time ot1tside of all spatial determinations, in order "to stand upright within
the judgment of God", is above all inspired by the qt1estion of the body, the
011eselfat every moment': traces a catastrophic line that coils arotmd a body
question of the innate genital, the self-birth tl1at excludes the detern'lination
that is barely visible, but extremely present and palpable. Such a body lives and
not of what comes fron1 the other, but whicl1 comes rather from all of tl1e
carries out such a time, whereas for a long ti111ewe have bee11too preoccupied
visible or invisible institutions and technologies for managing the body. What
with space, with territory, its organizations a11dits organs.
is called biopolitics is not unrelated to a meticulous syste111of managing the
time of the body. There are multiple and very extensive networks of various
forces that everywl1ere penetrate the Lifeof tl1e body.
As for History, it is in some ways ai1 in1age of time, but ti1ne is not History.
There is something catastrophic in the ti1ne that overflows History. A11dthe
body as pure genesis e11velops this time within tl1e folds of tl1e flesl1. Time
opens up with this body rid of its organs, this automaton that has been
recreated according to life's intensive and fluctuating flows. Life and the body
are one and Lhesame thing in the end, bt1t in order for them to be truly equal
to eacl1 other, for the body Lobe worthy of life, it needs to be discovered in its
own force of genesis, its own Lime. Because the body is thls uniqt1e existential
and even political site over wJ-1ichalJ the determinations of life pile up, gather,
bend .. It is a battleground where visible and invisible forces i11tersect, life and
death, where networks, powers, all the social "cochon neries" come together.
Artaud denounces the whole "illusion of life" in an extre1nely lucid way. •

"It is the whole world that is 110longer consciotLS and that no lo11gerknows
what it is to live, because to live is to sta11d upright withln oneself, at every
moment, with dedication, and this is tl1e effort that contemporary n1an no
longer wants to make. He prefers the automaton of the limbs to carry out the
work of his own self. - And the one who was not even a spirit has only ever
profited from the weakness of beings to give l1imself the illusion of life. By not
choosing oneself and by giving 011eselfup to the attractions of non-being, man I • l\111oninArtaud, "L'ame theatre de Dieu", Cahiers de Rodez, Fe-Apr l945, Oe1111res
co,npletes,vol. XV, p. 20.

BODY-GENESIS
OR CJ\TASTROPI
IICTIME AROUNDTANAKA
MIN,HIJIKATA
ANDARTAUD BODY-GENESIS
ORCATASTROPHIC
TIME·AROUNDTANAKA
MIN,HUll<ATA
ANDARTAUD

66 67