Artaud-Immunity: Derrida and the Mômo

Derrida’s public struggle with the spectre of Artaud began in the 1960s ‘La parole Soufflée’ and ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ and continued forcener le subjectile (1986) and Artaud le Moma (2002). The texts are read as attempts to break with the dominant critical/clinical readings of Artaud inaugurated by Jacques Rivière and as beginnings for a search to secure Artaud-immunity, protection for and against his words and works. It argues that Derrida’s readings of Artaud systematically underestimate the power of his deliberate perversion of Platonism and his intimations of an affirmative metaphysics issuing from the replacement of the idea of the One by that of Chaos. The underestimation of the affirmative drive underwriting Artaud’s work led Derrida to uncover a suicidal motif in Artaud-immunity that would eventually compromise his own understanding of auto-immunity.