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Radio Works: 1946-48

Radio Works: 1946-48

Current price: $15.00
Publication Date: February 18th, 2022
Publisher:
Diaphanes
ISBN:
9783035802504
Pages:
128

Description

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.

About the Author

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was one of the leading figures of twentieth-century writing, art, and sound experimentation, known especially for his work with the Surrealist movement, his performance theories, his asylum incarcerations, and his artworks, which have been exhibited in major exhibitions at New York’s MOMA and many other art-museums.

Clayton Eshleman (1935–2021) spent many decades on his translations of Artaud’s work. He was also an acclaimed poet and translator of other works, such as those of Aimé Césaire, and was a professor notably at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ros Murray is the author of Antonin Artaud: The Scum of the Soul (2014), as well as many works on queer theory and feminism. She is based in the Department of French at Kings College, University of London.