I Abandon Myself To The Fever Of

[nietzsche's] Definition Of Cruelty Informs Artaud's Own, Declaring That All Art Embodies And Intensifies The Underlying Brutalities Of Life To Recreate The Thrill Of Experience ... Although Artaud Did Not Formally Cite Nietzsche, [their Writing] Contains A Familiar Persuasive Authority, A Similar Exuberant Phraseology, And Motifs In Extremis.

The Actor Is Merely A Crude Empiricist, A Practitioner Guided By Vague Instinct.

We Must Believe In A Sense Of Life Renewed By The Theater, A Sense Of Life In Which Man Fearlessly Makes Himself Master Of What Does Not Yet Exist, And Brings It Into Being. And Everything That Has Not Been Born Can Still Be Brought To Life If We Are Not Satisfied To Remain Mere Recording Organisms.

How Hard Is It, When Everything Encourages Us To Sleep, Though We May Look About Us With Conscious, Clinging Eyes, To Wake And Yet Look About Us As In A Dream, With Eyes That No Longer Know Their Function And Whose Gaze Is Turned Inward.

The Theatre Of Cruelty Has Been Created In Order To Restore To The Theatre A Passionate And Convulsive Conception Of Life, And It Is In This Sense Of Violent Rigour And Extreme Condensation Of Scenic Elements That The Cruelty On Which It Is Based Must Be Understood. This Cruelty, Which Will Be Bloody When Necessary But Not Systematically So, Can Thus Be Identified With A Kind Of Severe Moral Purity Which Is Not Afraid To Pay Life The Price It Must Be Paid.