The Healing Practices of Language: Artaud and Deleuze on Flesh, Mind and Expression

Both Antonin Artaud and Gilles Deleuze have diagnosed our Western European civilization with symptoms as sick, sluggish and worn-out. We live in a world where we do still not know what the body is capable of and still hold to a paranoid and narcotizing fixity within body, mind and language; we live in an age where the vital and healthy link between man and his body is broken. Alluding to Artaud as a genuine initiator, pioneer and physician in the process of healing the broken link between man and his body, Deleuze contends we need a belief in this world, which is a commitment and conversion to absolute immanence. This chapter firstly discusses Deleuze’s conception of the healthy link between man and his body after which it investigates in what way Artaud’s writings engage with the vitality of our body and how his linguistic devotion to absolute immanence will give us reasons to believe in this world, this life and this body.