Abstract
The thesis investigates the concepts of the French writer Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), who is often studied for his theatre work or for his sensational life story – addiction, madness, and intense literary personality. This thesis counteracts the clichéd image of the mad poet by presenting him as a serious thinker of four key conceptual problems: thought, metaphysics, body and theatre. I examine each of these individually, but I also link them to each other to form “the problem of Artaud.” The term “problem” refers equally to Artaud’s difficult life and to his complex concepts, ideas and writing. I examine: first, Artaud’s difficulty with the image of thought and what it means when he writes “I cannot think”; second, his demand that society reinvents a metaphysical system relevant to everyday life; third, his conceptualisation of a body that resists the constraints of the everyday body dominated by science, religion and capitalism; and fourth, his intensive and vivifying engagement with a theatre that can affect a modern apathetic public. The final aim of the thesis is to show Artaud’s ideas and writings are as pertinent today as when he first created them.