French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Jugnon, Artaudieu
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas
A. Jugnon
Artaudieu
Editions Lignes
ISBN : 978-2-35526-046-9
68 p.
11 euros
Publisher's presentation:
“So we have this on the shelf: a Jesucry to our misfortune. Poor Artaud, he went through hell with Jesucry, through his hair, his nerves, his mouth, and his arse (as he says and writes: for him, it's the same hole).”
“We do our shopping: which means, in other words, we don't overcomplicate things. No glorious Jesucry, no after-death Jesucry, none of that here, no Jesucry of the resurrection of the body; on the other hand, an empty tomb, yes, that we have. An absent body is a dead body, not a transubstantiated body in the slightest, not a body back from some tropical getaway, of the ‘back from the dead’ variety. The dead—we don't know them here.
That is exactly what Artaud didn't want: for it to return from the dead, for dead meat to come back down here and gnaw the bones on his back, the meat of being on his spine. The collective meat returned from the mass grave of lost illusions, thwarted desires, poorly digested miscarriages: we must resolutely leave that meat in the catacombs, we must precisely let the dead bury their dead.
[...]
I can now speak of this idea, it is mine: Artaud ripped Christianity out of his gut. Artaud demonstrated the truth of a philosophy that searches for the bone. Artaud is a Descartes who wouldn't shit his pants before the Holy Roman Catholic Church. For Artaud, the Holy See of the Holy Father is a clogged toilet, it's where shit can never happen, where it has been holding back from shitting for two thousand years. That is where Artaud must shit. Him alone. To make others shit. In the literal sense. We must all release Christianity from our insides.”
Alain Jugnon maintains that philosophy is “done” just as much and just as well—even more and better, in truth—outside of philosophy as within it. In Lautréamont, Bataille, or Céline, for example. Here, essentially, in Artaud. Everywhere, in truth, where the experience of thought supplants thought as such, resituating and restoring it. Everywhere, but perhaps nowhere more than in Artaud, the experience of thought indeed supplants thought. A painful, harrowing experience to which Jugnon lends himself, which he makes his own, a thousand leagues away from any exegesis. Drawing upon the writing of the one who undergoes and is this experience; shaping a writing that, in turn, is and undergoes this experience.
Alain Jugnon positions philosophy outside traditional academic boundaries, locating vital intellectual experience in the uncompromising works of figures such as Lautréamont, Georges Bataille, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. In this text, the author engages directly with Antonin Artaud, whose revolutionary approach to writing and the body challenges institutionalized religion and metaphysics. Rather than offering a detached academic exegesis, Jugnon adopts an experiential method that mirrors Artaud's own painful confrontation with bodily existence, language, and spiritual authority, demonstrating how radical literature becomes a primary site for philosophical transformation.
This essay will particularly appeal to readers interested in twentieth-century French literature, avant-garde poetics, and the intersections between literature, philosophy, and radical theology. It addresses fundamental questions concerning how artistic creation confronts institutional dogma, strips away cultural illusions, and exposes the material reality of the human body. Scholars and enthusiasts of Artaud's legacy will find in Jugnon's study a compelling continuation of the writer's violent yet liberating assault on conventional thought, offering a fresh lens through which to evaluate the enduring power of transgressive literature.