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In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

Antonin Artaud

When I think about myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new space. I am on the moon as others are on their balconies. I participate in planetary gravitation in the fissures of my mind.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Gravity Mindset Myself Participation Planet Seek Thinking
To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Break Creation Language Life Order Theatre Touch
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Cruelty Decision Strict Theatre
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Conscious Crime Drugs Experience Fundamental Poetry Public War
So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Asylum Greatness Protect Protection Refusal Society
We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Consciousness Day Death Force Necessary Ourselves Philosophy
Those who live, live off the dead.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Death Live One Liner
I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Conversation Hang Morning Myself
The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Art Ideas Mistake Ourselves Poetry Power
I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Creation Diagram Mindset Myself Soul
I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this–I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Angel Human Live Need Pain Strength Swallow Understand
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Built Exception Hell Paint Writing
I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Essential Forget Language Myself Mysterious Possible Talk
So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Cleaning Despair Elimination Failure Himself Human Right Try
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Enough Life Myself Stage Tragedy
There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Genius Head Himself Life Preparation Shine Solution Understand

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

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In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

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