All those by whom Artaud believed himself bewitched convincingly displayed a total lack of interest in him. Had Artaud had only to marshal the departments of his body against a common outside enemy, his life might have been long and tolerable and of no interet to anyone today. But the hordes of miasmas beseiging him were equally an effect of bewitchment and creatures of his own flesh and will. No part of his being wasn't actually or potenially part of theirs. In fact his discovery makes sense not only of work but also of leisure, the nihilism of 'relaxation', the difference between two dog and pony shows, bodily experience then and now.
Production is sociable, coercion spreads itself too broady and thinly to be located.
Desperately I search the eyes of every friend and stranger for clues about an unknown, unlimited demand. As poets opt out of the agony of composition, it becomes everyone else's daily drudgery. Estranged from every set of rules which might have explained my effects to me, shown me how I was seen, I force the larvae of anxiety prematurely into silent syntax, so that as a set of definite hypotheses, a reluctantly willed 'body image', they can at least be delimited and doubted. Ferdiere forbade Artaud's convulsions on pain of electric shock, while cajoling him to write down and identify with their orphaned verbal complement. Giorgio Agamben alludes to the same range of defensive tics when he writes that in the twentieth century Tourett's syndrome has almost disappeared because its symptoms have become the norm.