French Literature Reviews - 2026

É. Grossman, Artaud. L'aliéné authentique.
Writers: Biography, Letters and Memoirs

Évelyne Grossman; Artaud. L'aliéné mélancolique, Editions Farrago; Éditions Léo Scheer, 169 p. 15 Euros.

To be an authentic madman...: a strange expression through which Artaud, at the end of his life, evokes man's resistance to death and nothingness. "I am not at all Antonin Artaud from Marseille," he writes then, "but Antonin Artaud of eternity." One of the questions this book explores is therefore the following: what does it mean for the thought of modern literature that a subject, a direct heir to Rimbaud and Mallarmé and a very distant contemporary of the Surrealists, can declare himself infinite and seek to write himself into infinity? How are we to read this immeasurable gesture that rejects any notion of the Author in order to assert himself as Other? It is this theatrical, poetic, and political spatialization of a becoming-other in writing that Artaud calls, let there be no doubt, alienation. Feeling oneself to be an animal, a stone, a tree, the sun—or God, as Artaud experienced—is by no means the exclusive domain of "primitives," children, mystics, or the mad. For a few writers, philosophers, and poets, this was first and foremost an experience traversed within writing: an extreme, shattering experience of the inhuman within man.

Évelyne Grossman is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary French Literature at Jussieu (Université Paris 7 - Denis Diderot). A specialist in literary theory, she has devoted numerous works to the oeuvre of Antonin Artaud, whose texts she is currently preparing for publication in the Quarto collection (Gallimard).

The figure of Antonin Artaud occupies a singular place in twentieth-century French letters, often associated with the radical edges of Surrealism and the avant-garde. His work frequently challenges traditional boundaries between the self and the world, pushing language toward an expression of the inhuman. Readers interested in the intersection of poetic expression and the limits of subjectivity may find this exploration of Artaud's self-conception relevant.

Évelyne Grossman examines Artaud's concept of alienation as a theatrical, poetic, and political spatialization of a becoming-other. This framework explores how Artaud’s identification with non-human entities—such as animals, stones, or divinity—functions as a resistance to death and nothingness. The text considers the tension between the finite nature of the human subject and Artaud's assertion of an infinite existence.