Il corpo senza organi dell'opera d'arte: creazione e schizofrenia in Antonin Artaud

After having briefly outlined – according to R. D. Laing’s reflections, pioneer of the anti-psychiatric movement – Antonin Artaud schizophrenia characteristics, this essay focuses on one of his most peculiar traits: his rejection of the anatomical organization of the body, which requires the organs to obey to a hierarchically organized and productively aimed structure. This system was deeply inadequate and outside his psychic life – uncontrolled flow of thoughts and feelings constantly on the run from any structuring centrality – so Artaud aspired to the re-establishing of his body on new basis. And the mean by which he proposed to work this flesh alchemy out is the artistic creation, which is, in Artaud’s opinion, painfully and cruelly inseparable from being. The pattern he used is the body without organs, “immanence’s field of desire” according to Gilles Deleuze words, place of intensity and conflicts, surplus of life unfettered by purpose, so able to create by means of expanding and aggregating heterogeneous elements. This happens into the schizophrenic delirium which, in Deleuze and Guattari’s opinion, shows us a pattern of creation opposite to the western way of thought - the tree model - and this is the more libertarian rhizome pattern: in botanic the rhizome is an elongated and pulpy stem, with surface branches in every direction and underground concretions too; it grows in assemblages incorporating disparate elements, it may be broken in any part of its going on and increasing through new lines of flight, no matters the point of arrival, driven only by the anarchic force of desire. The work of art thus modeled, rather than mirror of a world which it remains separate from, will be intimately linked to the world, having incorporated irrelative fragments. Example of this way of creation, in Artaud’s opinion, is Van Gogh’s painting. His paintings seem authentic bodies without organs, rhizomatic combinations of art and life, graphic mark and matter, chemical colors and organic secretions, in a constant intrusion of the real level into the symbolic one. The 1947 essay by Artaud about the great Dutch painter too (Van Gogh le suicidé de la société) is in turn amenable to the pattern of the body without organs with respect to all levels: the promiscuity, always present, among experienced author and subject of study; disordered structure and without a center which juxtaposes different sections unable to come to a real conclusion; the same verbal material, encumbered by the presence of glossolalias: assemblages of syllables, elementary sounds which – often used by schizophrenics – seem to want to avoid the human voice to make sense with socially recognizable meanings, showing themselves as pure expressions of vocal cords, tongue, teeth and palate: organs finally free from any anatomical organization.