Ontology and Madness

To treat Artaud's work as the combined effort of thought and life to grasp being within the ubiquity of the world requires situating that pursuit on the level of the ontology of language, stage, gesture and look, that which implies, correlatively, keeping a close watch on any interpretation tending to enclose this poet's fate within the psychological framework of a sick individuality projecting, through the figments of his mind, the discomforts of his body. This interpretive attitude, reinforced by reference to the psychological theories of the time which, by and large, remain ours, is one to which this poet's work is readily compared for the purpose of indicating how vague his understanding of them and, thereby, his degradation, already affirmed on the level of theoretical knowledge. At that point, any possibility of situating Artaud's endeavor outside of the framework of an unhealthy indulgence in the exercise of thought necessarily withers, that which a strictly clinical concern with facts appears, at first sight, to guarantee. A second danger lies in both the superficial interpretation of the terms metaphysical, religious and mystical which reappear frequently in Artaud's writing and the inclusion of his enterprise within the heart of a venerable tradition in which the poet would find attributed to him the aspirations of a mystic, even a conflicted mystic, or of a thinker of other worlds

Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Epistemology · Ontology · Psychoanalysis · Reduction (mathematics) · Computer Science · French Literature and Critical Theory · French Literature and Criticism · French Literature and Poetry · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology