Awkwardness of forms, childishness of language: Artaud and Bataille

Abstract

Among the watchwords of the modernist period, the most radical watchword is that which advocates rupture considering all the correctness of this expression. The free treatment applied by Artaud to what he calls the “pitiful awkwardness of forms” would allow both the use of the violent and ironical graph against the support of representation and the abuse of language by all sorts of changes and violations of syntax. This attempt awakes for a “meticulous infantilization”, so to speak, of the citational, referential and reverential knowing: assumed primitivism in the visual arts; a capricious and tangled play of the sign in the literatures. This essay will focus on two places of claimed formal awkwardness and alteration (Bataille and Artaud) in order to evaluate the fortune of ideographic writings displaying no calligraphies and graphs organized on corrupted supports. Thus, considering similar procedures of transgression in text and image, which includes everything from the bricolage of the literary self-portrait to the multiple depositions of graphemes, this essay aims at revealing those resembled procedures in some of their prerogatives, right where they actually contribute, each one in its own way, to the drift of the transitive languages.