198 lines
8.9 KiB
Plaintext
198 lines
8.9 KiB
Plaintext
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Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 7 Num. 94
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("Quid coniuratio est?")
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The following first ran as "Conspiracy for the Day", 09/02-03/93
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
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by Antonin Artaud (1947)
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[Excerpts]
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[Artaud thinks that it is not man but the world which has become
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abnormal.]
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Things are going badly because sick consciousness has a vested
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interest right now in *not* recovering from its sickness.
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This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend
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itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects
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whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
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No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of Greek
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fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision would have been capable
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of seriously upsetting the spectral conformity of the
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bourgeoisie.
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In comparison with the lucidity of van Gogh, psychiatry is no
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better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and
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persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling
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states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous
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terminology. To a man, this whole gang of respected scoundrels
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and patented quacks are all erotomaniacs.
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[Artaud defines a "madman" as] a man who preferred to become mad,
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in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a
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certain superior idea of human honor.
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So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to
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get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become
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its accomplices in certain great nastiness.
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[However, in the case of van Gogh, confinement was not the weapon
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used.] The concerted gathering of men has other means of
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overcoming the wills it wants to break.
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Thus on the occasion of a war, a revolution, or a social upheaval
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still in the bud, the *collective consciousness* is questioned
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and questions itself, and makes its judgement.
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This consciousness may also be aroused and called forth
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spontaneously in connection with certain individual cases.
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Thus strange forces are aroused and brought up, into that kind of
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dark dome which constitutes, over all human respiration, the
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venomous hostility of the evil spirit of people.
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It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people find
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themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of
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certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the
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formidable suction, the formidible tentacular oppression of a
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kind of civic magic.
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In the face of this concerted nastiness, it is not delirium to
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walk around at night in a hat with twelve candles on it to paint
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a landscape from nature.
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Van Gogh did not committ suicide in a fit of madness, in dread of
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not succeeding, on the contrary, he had just succeeded, and
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discovered what he was and who he was, when the collective
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consciousness of society, to punish him for escaping from its
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clutches, suicided him.
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It was not because of himself, because of the disease of his own
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madness, that van Gogh abandoned his life.
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It was under the pressure of the evil influence, two days before
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his death, of Dr. Gachet, a so-called psychiatrist, which was the
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direct, effective, and sufficient cause of his death.
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When I read van Gogh's letters to his brother, I was left with
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the firm and sincere conviction that Dr. Gachet, "psychiatrist,"
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actually detested van Gogh, painter, and that he detested him as
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a painter, but above all as a genius.
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It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it
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is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same
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time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that
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of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass
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of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by
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this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.
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Medicine was born of evil, if it was not born of illness, and if
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it has, on the contrary, provoked and created illness out of
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nothing to justify its own existence; but psychiatry was born of
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the vulgar mob of creatures who wanted to preserve the evil at
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the source of illness and who have thus pulled out of their own
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inner nothingness a kind of Swiss guard to cut off at its root
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that impulse of rebellious vindication which is at the origin of
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genius.
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There is in every lunatic a misunderstood genius whose idea,
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shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was
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the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for
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him.
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Dr. Gatchet did not tell van Gogh that he was there to straighten
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out his painting, but he sent him to paint from nature, to bury
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himself in a landscape to escape the pain of thinking.
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Except that, as soon as van Gogh had turned his back, Dr. Gatchet
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turned off the switch to his mind.
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As if, without intending any harm but with one of those seemingly
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innocent disparaging wrinklings of the nose where the whole
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bourgeois unconscious of the earth has inscribed the old magic
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force of a thought one hundred times repressed.
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And I know that Dr. Gatchet left the impression on history, with
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regard to van Gogh, whom he was treating and who ultimately
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committed suicide while at his house, that he was his last friend
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on earth, a kind of providential consoler.
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And yet I am more convinced than ever that it was to Dr. Gachet
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of Auvers-sur-Oise that van Gogh was indebted on that day, the
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day he committed suicide at Auvers-sur-Oise.
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Was indebted, I say, for abandoning life.
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Dr. Gachet was that grotesque Cerberus, that sanious and purulent
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Cerberus, in sky-blue jacket and gleaming linen, placed before
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poor van Gogh to rob him of all his sound ideas.
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And there took place between Dr. Gachet and Theo, van Gogh's
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brother, how many of those stinking confabulations that families
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have with the head physicians of insane asylums regarding the
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"patient" they have brought them.
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"Keep an eye on him, make sure he forgets all those ideas. You
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understand, the doctor said so, you must forget all those ideas:
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they're hurting you, if you keep on thinking about them you'll
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stay shut up for the rest of your life."
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These are examples of those smooth conversations of good-natured
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psychiatrists which seem harmless enough, but which leave on the
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heart the trail of a little black tongue as it were, the harmless
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little black tongue of a poisonous salamander.
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And sometimes it takes no more than this to drive one to suicide.
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There are days when the heart feels the deadlock so terribly that
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it takes it like a blow on the head with a piece of bamboo, this
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idea that it will not be able to go on any longer.
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For it was, in fact, after a conversation with Dr. Gachet that
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van Gogh, as if nothing were the matter, went back to his room
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and killed himself.
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One day the executioners came for van Gogh, just as they came for
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Gerard de Nerval, Baudelaire, Poe, and Lautreamont.
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One does not commit suicide by oneself. In the case of suicide,
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there must be an army of evil beings to cause the body to make
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the gesture against nature, that of taking its own life. And I
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believe that there is always someone else at the moment of
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extreme death to strip us of our own life.
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Van Gogh was dispatched from the world first by his brother, when
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he announced the birth of his nephew, next by Dr. Gatchet, when,
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instead of recommending rest and solitude, he sent him to paint
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from nature on a day when he knew quite well that van Gogh would
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have done better to go to bed.
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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
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Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et
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pauperem. -- Liber Proverbiorum XXXI: 8-9
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