In ARTAUD: TERMINAL CURSES, Stephen Barber explores the newly-revealed set of 406 notebooks which Artaud used in the final years of his life in Paris, after his release from a decade of asylum-incarceration, to carry through his projects for corporeal transformation and social refusal.
Artaud's notebooks are designed as an autonomous work in their own right, through which he distils his pre-eminent preoccupations: the envisioning of a new, organ-less human anatomy (crucial for Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical work), his conception of the time and space of gesture, his raw fury against society and all of its manifestations, his visualisation of a ruined and supplanted natural and urban world, his intensive confrontation between text and image, and his reflections on the fluctuating parameters of life and death. Those preoccupations retrospectively illuminate Artaud's earlier Surrealist work and theories of film and performance.
This eye-opening and original university-level text will be of major significance for all readers interested in the extreme zones of art, literature and media, as well providing critical new revelations for those engaged with Artaud's work.