French Literature Reviews - 2026

Antonin Artaud, Works
Theatre and Performance

Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres, edited by Evelyne Grossman, Gallimard, coll. "Quarto", 2004, 1792 p., 35 euros.

This volume contains, in chronological order: all of Artaud's major books: Correspondence with Jacques Rivière, L'Ombilic des Limbes, The Nerve-Meter, Fragments of a Journal of Hell, Art and Death, Heliogabalus, or the Crowned Anarchist, The Theatre and its Double, The Cenci, Revolutionary Messages, The Tarahumara, New Revelations of Being, Artaud the Momo, Here Lies preceded by Indian Culture, Suppôts et Supplications, Van Gogh, The Man Suicided by Society, To Have Done with the Judgment of God. A very extensive selection of scenarios and miscellaneous texts, including many that are out of print or previously unpublished: "Ten years since language departed...", "The Human Body", "Alienating the Actor", "Theatre and Science", "Letter Against the Cabala", "The Human Face", "The True History of Jesus Christ", "Paris-Warsaw", "Why Am I Sick...", "There is in Magic...". More than 200 letters, some of which are unpublished. An abundant iconography: Élie Lascaux, André Masson, Jean de Bosschère, Balthus, Man Ray... alongside numerous reproductions of Artaud's drawings, manuscripts, and notebooks.

"I reply that we are all in a dreadful state of hypotension, we do not have an atom to lose without the risk of instantly reverting to a skeleton, whereas life is an incredible proliferation, one hatched atom lays another, which immediately causes yet another to burst forth. The human body is a battlefield to which it would be well for us to return. It is now nothingness, now death, now putrefaction, now resurrection. To wait for some apocalypse from beyond, for the bursting of some beyond before deciding to take things back into our hands is a scoundrelly joke. It is now that we must reclaim life."

Artaud, 1946.

This Quarto edition brings together Antonin Artaud's major books in chronological order, including The Theatre and its Double, The Cenci, and Van Gogh, The Man Suicided by Society. Alongside these texts, the volume features an extensive selection of scenarios and miscellaneous writings, incorporating works that were previously out of print or unpublished. Readers also find more than two hundred letters, alongside an abundant iconography that includes reproductions of the author's drawings, manuscripts, notebooks, and works by artists such as André Masson and Man Ray.