FREE YOUR MOUTH

Artaud, Deleuze and Bodily

Ethics
 … experience shows that there is nothing which
men have less power over than the tongue.

Spinoza EIII P2 Schol.

http://www.epc.buffalo.edu/sound/mp3/sp/artaud_antonin/artaud_jugement.mp3
 Have Done With The Judgment Of God
(1947)
• Delivering man from his
“automatic reaction” and
“restoring his freedom” is the
task of man who has lost its
faith in God, yet has not fully
realized the consequences of
this new type of ‘life’ this has
started.
• The human being needs to
“remake his anatomy” in order
to remove the sickness that
has been haunting him. Only
then, by scraping out its body,
by becoming a ‘body without
organs’, man can open itself
up to the desires and appetites
that are truly essential to him.
• See Nietzsche: “We are not
getting rid of God because we
still believe in grammar"
(Reason, 5).
The Illness of Theatre/the Illness of the
West
• The Judgment of God in fact equals the over determination
of language at the expense of the body

• The Christian, literate God has robbed us from our bodies

(by stressing their uselessness) in order to organize them
according to His Judgments, His Language, His Organs.

• Semiotic structures have cut us loose from the world

(Artaud: the soil).
Have Done With The Judgment Of God
(1947)

• The BwO is a materialist ethics,

that searches for connections
between the unknown of the
body and the unconscious of
thought

• Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty

emphasizes on the dominance of
language over the body in
theatre. The Judgment of God is
a bigger argument. It allows us
to : “Rethink body, subjectivity
and social change in terms of
movement, affect, force and
violence – before code, text, and
signification.” (Massumi: 66)
Artaud: Find your Organic Culture!

• We need to rethink our

senses in order to escape
these regimes. Not the
movements of the body as
in theatre.
• Massumi: Proprioception
and Viscerality
• Here: the speech act
colonizes the mouth, and it
is there that the relations
between the body and the
world are scattered.
• In theatre it was the body,
in everyday life it is the
mouth, taste and smell, that
needs to be freed.
 In Everyday Life:
Find your Organic Culture= Find Taste
and Smell
“I should say that
human affairs would
be much more
happily conducted if
it were equally in the
power of men to be
silent and to speak;
but experience
shows that there is
nothing which men
have less power over
than the tongue, and
that there is nothing
which they are less
able to govern than
their appetites.”
(Spinoza: EIII P2
Schol.)
Free your Mouth! Free Taste and Smell

• Taste and smell have never

stopped to be of the greatest
importance to us, but they have
been overcoded.

• “…when from a long-distant past

nothing subsists, after the people
are dead, after the things are
broken and scattered, taste and
smell alone, more fragile but more
enduring, more unsubstantial,
more persistent, more faithful,
remain poised a long time, like
souls, remembering, waiting,
hoping, amid the ruins of all the
rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the
tiny and most impalpable drop of
 Overcoding Taste and Smell in our
Everyday Lives
1. When infants start developing their vision and begin to
talk especially their sense of smell seems to become less
important,
2. All mass media extend the body according to language
and vision, neglecting and even overcoding taste and
smell. It alienates us (Marx).
3. Advertisements obscure our desires/appetites by
combining Vision and Language.
• Micropolitical revolution is resistance that starts with
taste and smell, with a reconnecting to the world, the soil.

* Nietzsche’s Grammar (GOD) at work

Find your Organic Culture

* Nietzsche’s Grammar (GOD) at work