"While critics have long focused on Antonin Artaud as the epitome of the suffering and martyred artist and on the 'liberating' aspects of his work, argues Kimberly Jannarone, the time has come to situate him within a fuller historical, political, and cultural context.
Hearing, Glennie insists, is not just a single-sensory process restricted to sound waves detected by the ears but a whole-body phenomenon in which one can touch, feel, and respond to sound as vibration. In her essays and public speeches, Dame Evelyn Glennie, the virtuoso percussionist, calls attention to the audiohaptic nature of vibratory perception. After all, there is more to sound than hearing indeed, there are whole frequency ranges that cannot be humanly perceived. This is a diminishment of our perceptual faculties and a reduction of our cognitive understanding. We sometimes forget about the tactile dimension of sonic apprehension, or else we have conditioned ourselves not to notice it. If you stand in a bell tower while bells are rung, the sound of the tolling can vibrate through your body. People who live near train lines may feel the rumble of passing trains underfoot. Rave-goers hear affectively: the dance music pulses through them with vibrational force, promoting communal ecstasy. If one hears affectively, one hears in such a way as to be physically moved or disturbed hearing affectively means experiencing sound viscerally, not just with one’s ears but one’s whole body. What does it mean to hear affectively? If one hears effectively, one hears well, or at least well enough, relatively speaking. The French Artaud begins at the asylum in Rodez. Much French criticism takes Artaud's madness and uses it as a touchstone for discussion of his legacy.
Derrida has argued that Artaud's projects, by their nature, by his nature, cannot succeed: They betray him the moment they begin to be articulated they cannot stand upright the minute they leave his body. The French school of criticism has plumbed the depths of the paradoxes of Artaud's oeuvre, examining the impossibility of reconciling the inadequacy of expression with the need to express. Each major trend in Artaud scholarship has reinforced the image of Artaud as a brilliant/mad theoretician and inspirational writer but a failed theatre practitioner-worse, one doomed to failure. Artaud's work has occupied a cultish space in both French and English criticism for several decades. It is ironic that the works of Antonin Artaud, who called for the rejuvenation of theatre as such, come to us today not on their own, but through an unusually dense filter: a peculiarly persistent critical/theoretical apparatus doubles his own writings and practice.
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