Materiality and Spiritless Holes: Artaud between Blanchot and Derrida

Abstract

Through Blanchot’s and Derrida’s reading of Artaud’s work, this article argues that an anthropic decentering of writing enables the redefinition of a non-dialectical and nonsubstantial materialism which does justice to the impersonal and organoleptic character of art, given that it does not reduce it to the human representative horizon. The conceptual path we follow intends to point out that Blanchot (on Le livre à venir) and Derrida (on Forcener le subjectile) retrieve a certain logic from Artaud’s works which implies a reconfiguration of the notion of surface and concomitantly forces a new ontological and aesthetic approach. The latter reveals the need to maintain a distance from the modern horizon in order to offer a space for the materials’ inorganic power without depriving it of animation and, at the same time, to vindicate the living without yielding it to human requirements.