Avant-garde hygiene and contagion: Artaud's ecology in the chemical century

Lavery, C. (2023) Avant-garde hygiene and contagion: Artaud's ecology in the chemical century. In: Hopkins, D. and Persson, D. (eds.) Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde. Series: Routledge research in art history. Routledge: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY, pp. 182-198. ISBN 9781032284996 (doi: 10.4324/9781003309000-12)

Abstract

This chapter tracks the transformations in the trope of what Lavery calls ‘avant-garde contagion’ in Artaud's thinking from his writing on the plague in the mid-1930s to the pesticidal attack on the US agri-military-industrial complex in 1947 – the year of the Marshall Plan. Where theatre is always figured by Artaud as a ‘contact zone’, a space for creaturely transformations and modifications, his aesthetic pharmacy is also a socio-political one, haunted, as it is, in the first instance, by the mustard gas of the First World War and, in the second, by a more complex, staggered ghosting: namely, the chemical contaminants and pathogens that European and US petrochemical corporations used to exterminate various unruly forms of non-human life as well as the spectres of the metabolic and human catastrophe of the Columbian exchange of the sixteenth century. At the root of this complex relation to contagion in Artaud's theatrical thought, there is always a larger microbe to consider: the theological contaminant of God, the paradoxical desire of western ontotheology to immunise itself against ‘infection’ by spreading disease on a planetary scale. Hence, the reason why cruelty, in Artaud's practice, is invariably double but never simply dialectical: a negation of a negation without sublation, the awareness that absolute inoculation is impossible, a futile but destructive chimera.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Lavery, Professor Carl
• Authors: Lavery, C.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts > Theatre Film and TV Studies
• Publisher: Routledge
• ISBN: 9781032284996
• Published Online: 31 July 2023