” While institutionalized, Artaud faced a deep struggle with language, with the body, with madness and art and produced literature, critical-philosophical essays and many other texts that cannot fit the categories and genres usually given. This production, which included letters, drawings, poems and notes, has aided the expansion of the limits and the discussion of languages such as literature, theater, visual arts and performance. Artaud truly was a thinker of below and beyond languages, especially the dimension of language, a place of surgeries and stage for a disproportionate delivery of his fervor. Through him, the French language suffered interventions whose lines of flight3 suggest a notion for voice in performance. In this context emerged the first glossolalic manifestations: as an overflow of this struggle with language. During that same period of intense textual production, in which Artaud dared to recreate himself as a Body without Organs (BwO)4, these manifestations of a delirious language, too lucid, incomprehensible, densely creative and philosophical went through him. They underwent a long process of incubation and internal alchemy until their transubstantiation in poetic language. In the work of Artaud something demands to be heard, something arouses a voice. A vocal spectrum seems to populate his Gi l Rober to A lmeida; César Lignel l i – I n s i d e the Swashing Glossolalias of Artaud Rev. Bras. Estud. Presença, Porto Alegre, v. 6, n. 1, p. 71-93, Jan./Apr. 2016. Available at: http://www.seer.ufrgs.br/presenca 72E-ISSN 2237-2660 writings.
Perhaps due to his constant confinement in clinics and nursing homes, he has written excessively what otherwise could be said or experimented in different performance contexts. It is remarkable the aural potential of his work, because when we read it we have a strong feeling that what is written eagerly asks to be yelled, wrought in voice and language; often, an atrocious impulse seems to explode from his writings and drawings, making the language inspire sounds. In an interview, Jacques Derrida comments on this aural character of the Artaudian texts: “To read him should imply resurrecting his voice, to read imagining him utter his texts. I know of no other author whose act of uttering is so present in his writings”5 (our translation). This also means reading him using the ears, grasping a possible voice in his speech. Reading him aloud also as a resource of experimentation with reading. And in this vital and cruel need to say, uttering the word to realize it in the material word, Artaud will operate a conflict that, overflowing the language, will flow into glossolalia.”
This section offers a nuanced examination of Antonin Artaud’s complex connection with language, psychosis, and art. Artaud’s institutionalisation triggered a fundamental fight with language, which, along with his bouts with lunacy, spurred his creation of literature, essays, letters, paintings, and poetry that defied traditional categorization.
His work pushed the frontiers of artistic expression in fields such as literature, theatre, visual arts, and performance, implying a rethinking of the function of voice, notably via the manifestation of glossolalia. Artaud’s writings are seen as having a powerful auditory potential, requiring to be read aloud and reflecting an urgent, visceral aspect that goes beyond the written language.Artaud’s journey culminates in the phenomenon of glossolalia, which represents a transformative process in which his struggles with language give way to a form of ecstatic speech that defies rational comprehension, allowing readers to engage with his texts on a visceral and experiential level.
