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Notes
1 Jacques Derrida, ‘To Unsense the Subjectile’, in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1998), p.77.
2 Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p.158.
3 Antonin Artaud, quoted in Jacques Derrida, ‘To Unsense the Subjectile’, p.41.
4 As Derrida points out, there is a powerful association (but still a significant difference) between the thrownness of Artaud's subjectile and Heidegger's Geworfenheit. For Heidegger, the very nature of being qua being is a function of thrownness, and Derrida's thought addresses (and critiques) this; but such a notion of thrownness is substantially different from, if not the opposite of, Artaud's subjectile thrownness which, as we shall see, is not a function of phenomenological reduction and therefore truly radical (in the sense of fundamental, back to roots). Derrida's jacere, along with all of its objects, subjects, abjects etc. remains enthralled to the Heideggerian constrictions on the nature of thrown being. This will be discussed further when we arrive at the phenomenological reduction and the problem of Derrida's framework regarding Artaud's subjectile.
5 Artaud makes no distinction between ‘text’ and ‘drawing’: both are ‘writing’. Therefore I will disturb good sense from time to time here by referring to Artaud's ‘work’ with this compound word. In fact, starting in 1945 Artaud calls the subjectile ‘written drawings’; I want to take it one step further.
6 Paule Thévenin, ‘The Search for a Lost World’, in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1998), p.14.
7 These ‘sorts’ are ‘writing’ in a larger sense: no longer writing for ‘meaning’ or to ‘convey a message’, but writing to act for and by itself – to have and to display physical force. The writingdrawing-as-sort is itself a projectile, emanating from the desire, as Derrida points out, to capture something between subject and object. The sort is in many ways a sortie, a departure or exit not just from ‘self’ but from ‘subjectivity’ at all. When Artaud says in a letter to André Rolland de Renéville that ‘what is called the subjectile betrayed me’ (Paule Thévenin, ‘The Search for a Lost World’, p.16), he is indicating not that the subjectile revealed him (‘betrayed’ his presence) but rather that it operated and operates beyond any sense of the ego (in French, moi); this is an energetic and energizing act of treason by the subjectile, but one that draws away from the egoistic and the subjective. One might also notice here that the ‘’ is the parergon for the ‘s[upp]ort’.
8 Paule Thévenin, ‘The Search for a Lost World’, p.16.
9 Antonin Artaud, quoted in Paule Thévenin, ‘The Search for a Lost World’, p.16; its citation says simply ‘text of February, 1947’.
10 Space is always trembling, if not always verser dans le vide, falling into the void.
11 Antonin Artaud, quoted in Paule Thévenin, ‘The Search for a Lost World’, p.17; see note 5 (emphasis added).
12 Artaud often referred to his counterfigure ‘self’ as ‘Art-0’, ‘Art = Zero’.
13 Derrida, as usual, deliberately invents a neologism to describe the subjectile's activation or activity, yet does so with a quasi-infinitive, creating a word, forcener, that itself oscillates between transitive and intransitive; like the subjectile, forcener betrays all attempts to make it obey the law. Forcener maddens, deranges, frenzies, makes ecstatic – disturbs: the subjectile is a disturbance in the force. If Mary Ann Caws was unhappy with Forcener le subjectile as ‘Unsensing the Subjectile’, which she confesses, I am more so. Derrida's Artaudian subjectile activates all the senses – though from the ‘position’ of the other – making ‘unsensing’ a curious choice. Of course, Caws means that the subjectile is made mad, deprived of sense (of reason), not of the senses. In terms of ‘subjectile vision’, ‘unsensing’ makes little sense. I will return to this ‘unsensing’ later, in discussing the subjectile as ‘a machine that breathes’, where Caws' translation makes more sense. In the meantime, perhaps disturbingly, I have let Derrida's French title stand.
14 Jacques Derrida, ‘To Unsense the Subjectile’, p.61.
15 Or, as we shall see, a kine-matic one.
16 Jacques Derrida, ‘To Unsense the Subjectile’, p.62.
17 Jean-Michel Olivier, Interview: ‘Jacques Derrida: Artaud and His Doubles’, trans. Stephen Barker, 2009, < http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/olivier.html> [10/05/2009].
18 Jean-Michel Olivier, Interview: ‘Jacques Derrida: Artaud and His Doubles’.
19 In addition to Artaud's self-designation as Art-0, his other most common name for himself was ‘Artaud l'abîme’.
20 Jean-Michel Olivier, ‘Jacques Derrida: Artaud and His Doubles’ (Interview).
21 Jean-Michel Olivier, ‘Jacques Derrida’.
22 Jean-Michel Olivier, ‘Jacques Derrida’.
23 Jean-Michel Olivier, ‘Jacques Derrida’.
24 The Derrida of The Truth in Painting comes much closer to Artaud in this regard, since for Artaud the support is parergonal and the subjectile-as-force passing ‘through’ it, often literally, creates a passe-partout that Derrida explores in Truth but less in Forcener.
25 Jean-Michel Olivier, ‘Jacques Derrida’.
26 Jean-Michel Olivier, ‘Jacques Derrida’.
27 Michael Speaks, ‘Folding Toward a New Architecture’, in Bernard Cache, Earth Moves, trans. Anne Boyman (Boston: The MIT Press, 1995), p.xii.
28 Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p.160.
29 This is now not a binary, since ‘force’ for Deleuze is merely a word given to simplify the fact that force is always multiple.
30 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp.149-50.
31 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p.102.
32 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.102.
33 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.102.
34 Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, p.277.
35 Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, p.204.
36 Antonin Artaud, Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, trans. Helen Weaver, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976), XIV, p.57.
37 Antonin Artaud, 84, nos. 5-6 (1948):
The body is the body
it is alone
it has no need of organsthe body is never an organis
morganisms are the body's enemies.
38 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p.28. Once again, Derrida's notion of the subjectile, since it is linked to an historical subject as a function of experience, is subject to ‘the archon of the archive, the table, what carries the table and who carries the table, the subjectile, the substrate, and the subject of the law’ (Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, p.79). My suggestion, like Deleuze's, is that this subjectile is actually not Artaud's.
39 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, p.84.
40 Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, trans. Anne Boyman, ed. Michael Speaks (Boston: The MIT Press, 1995); and Bernard Cache, Terre meuble (Orléans: HYX, 1997). The publication history of the book is itself one of disturbed space. The original (unpublished) manuscript, written in French in 1983 simply as Terre meuble, was first published in 1995, in an English translation. In 1997 an ‘expanded’ (without attribution but presumably by Cache) version of the original manuscript, still entitled Terre meuble (still without a subtitle in French), was published in Orléans by HYX. The 1995 and 1997 texts are very different, the later French text including a good deal of material not in the English version. I have made use of both here, indicating which I am using. To further irony of disturbed space in terms of this double-book, citations from Terre meuble are my translations. I am indebted to Daniel Moorhead for introducing me to Cache's work and for many deep insights into its significance in the current framework.
41 Bernard Cache, Terre meuble, p.10.
42 Bernard Cache, Terre meuble, p.10.
43 Jacques Derrida, Antonin Artaud: Dessins et portraits (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p.62.
44 Bernard Cache, Terre meuble, p.24.
45 We will see how important this is with regard to the ‘atomic tension’ between the ‘subjectile’ and the ‘objectile’ in Cache, and how his distinction between the two leads us both in-to Stiegler and back-to Artaud.
46 Jacques Derrida, ‘To Unsense the Subjectile’, p.81.
47 Bernard Cache, Terre meuble, p.24.
48 Bernard Cache, Terre meuble, pp.34-35.
49 …which he will augment in the following chapter of Terre meuble by investigating vectoral weightlessness which, though he makes no direct reference to Artaud, must be seen as ‘above the page’.
50 Bernard Cache, Terre meuble, p.46.
51 Bernard Cache, Terre meuble, p.52.
52 Bernard Cache, Terre meuble, p.65, 66, 67.
53 Bernard Cache, Terre meuble, p.70.
54 Bernard Cache, Terre meuble, p.132, 134.
55 Bernard Cache, Terre meuble, p.142, 146.
56 Jean-Michel Olivier, ‘Jacques Derrida’.
57 Jacques Derrida, ‘To Unsense the Subjectile’, pp.92-93.
58 A great deal could be said here about the ways in which Derrida explores the drawing hand in Mémoires d'aveugle.
59 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p.31.
60 Jacques Derrida, ‘To Unsense the Subjectile’, p.88.
61 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 2: Disorientation, p.88.
62 Jacques Derrida, ‘To Unsense the Subjectile’, p.113.