Artaud: Terminal Curses

The work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) remains a constant source of seminal inspiration, astonishment and provocation across contemporary visual art, film, performance, choreography, digital media, and critical theory, througout the entire world.

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 preeminent 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 manifestions, his visualization of a ruined and supplanted natural and urban world, his intensive confrontation between text and image, and his reflections on the fluctuationg parameters of life and death.  Those preoccupations retrospectively illuminate Artaud’s earlier Surrealist work and theories of film and performance.

With 24 pages of illustrations, this eye-opening and original book will be of major significance for all readers interested in the extreme zones of art, literature and media, as well as providing critical new revelations for those engaged with Artaud’s work.