You Are Quite Unnecessary, Young Man!

[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 Theater, Which Is In No Thing, But Makes Use Of Everything - Gestures, Sounds, Words, Screams, Light, Darkness - Rediscovers Itself At Precisely The Point Where The Mind Requires A Language To Express Its Manifestations.... To Break Through Language In Order To Touch Life Is To Create Or Recreate The Theatre.

For The Lost Are Lost By Nature, All Your Ideas Of Moral Regeneration Will Make No Difference, There Is An Innate Determinism, There Is An Undeniable Incurability In Suicide, Crime, Idiocy, Madness, There Is An Invincible Cuckoldry In Man, There Is A Congenital Weakness Of The Character, A Castration Of The Mind.

If Our Life Lacks A Constant Magic It Is Because We Choose To Observe Our Acts And Lose Ourselves In Consideration Of Their Imagined Form And Meaning, Instead Of Being Impelled By Their Force.

Artaud Sought To Remove Aesthetic Distance, Bringing The Audience Into Direct Contact With The Dangers Of Life. By Turning Theatre Into A Place Where The Spectator Is Exposed Rather Than Protected, Artaud Was Committing An Act Of Cruelty Upon Them.