Abstract

GONZALEZ FERNANDEZ, Francisco. «I want to wake them up»: the cabinet of doctor Artaud. Humanidades (Montevideo. En línea) [online]. 2019, n.6, pp.95-128.  Epub Dec 01, 2019. ISSN 1510-5024.  https://doi.org/10.25185/6.4.

Artaud's life was a constant journey through mental health institutions that left a profound impact on his artistic sensibility. Since he got in touch with the medical establishment and with his own psychiatrists, he appropriated their language and techniques, to the point of conferring the poet with the role of therapist for an ill and decadent society that could only be cured and healed by a functionally cruel art. Surgical procedures, plague and electroshock are some of the metaphors he utilized to illustrate the way to wake the audience up from the mesmerizing slumber caused by diabolical doctor Calgary or his avatar, Adolf Hitler. The fürher figure, who Artaud always said to have met in person, was for him a sinister double of sorts that seemed to have distorted his own ideas about the Theatre of Cruelty. In the face hypnotic spectacles that persuaded audiences to accept a hygienist, racial and eugenic politics of a cruelty not known before, Artaud looked into Medicine to provide the tools to heal a collectivity that had lost its sense of life and whose individuals sleepwalked around the world.

Keywords : Artaud; theatre of cruelty; film; Hitler; psychiatry; electricity.

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