Antonin Artaud was born in Marseille on September 4, 1896, and died in Ivry-sur-Seine on March 4, 1948. He was a French theatre theorist (The Theatre and Its Double, The Theatre of Cruelty), actor, writer, essayist, draftsman, and poet. Poetry, directing, drugs, pilgrimages, drawing, and radio were "a way of touching, even slightly, the reality that slips away."

"Asylums for the insane are receptacles of black magic, conscious and premeditated, and it's not just that doctors prefer magic through their treatments, which they refine, they practice it. If there were no doctors, there would be no patients, not because of the sick, but because of the society that is beginning, those who live, live dead, and death must also be alive… There is nothing like an asylum for the insane to gently cover up death, and to keep the dead in an incubator." It began in 4000 BC. This therapeutic technique of the modern long death, complicit in the most sinister and infamous magic, subjects these dead to electroshocks or insulin therapy in order to drain these males daily and present them, thus drained, thus fantastically available and empty, to the obscure anatomical and atomic stresses of the state called "bardo": the surrender of the bard of life to the demands of the non-self. The Bardo is the star of death through which the self falls into a flaccid state, and there is, in electroshock, a flaccid state through which every traumatized person passes. This causes them, at that moment, to no longer know, but to horribly and desperately misunderstand, what they were when they were themselves.

I went there and I won't forget it… »

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Audio document recorded in 1946 by Antonin Artaud, for radio, after his release from the Rodez asylum where he underwent 51 electroshocks administered by Gaston Ferdière, head doctor of the psychiatric service of the Rodez asylum where Artaud was interned from 1943 to 1946.

"If our lives lack constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our actions and lose ourselves in their imagined form and meaning, instead of being driven by their force."
— Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 1938.