Between Two Logics: Deleuze and Artaud on the Logics of Sense and Sensation

My dissertation takes a look at the critical appropriation of the work of the poet, actor, playwright, and artist, Antonin Artaud, by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. I trace a development in Deleuze's understanding of Artaud primarily from his early The Logic of Sense to his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation by demonstrating how the confrontation with Artaud, in part, helps Deleuze move from a logic of sense to a logic of sensation. I focus particularly on the issue of language and the image of the Body without Organs that Deleuze takes from Artaud's 1947 radio play, "To Have Done with the Judgment of God." I argue that Deleuze's conception of the Body without Organs is not the same as Artaud's conception of it. In looking at Deleuze's early reading of Artaud in The Logic of Sense, I argue that he makes a clinical diagnosis of Artaud based on what he takes to be Artaud's schizophrenic language. There Deleuze reads Artaud as someone who is trapped in the corporeal depths of sensation unable to rise to the surface of sense. Artaud's nonsense (unlike Lewis Carroll's) is thus a failure to achieve sense. While the understanding of schizophrenia develops and expands especially during the period of collaboration with Felix Guattari, I maintain that an element of this clinical judgment never disappears from Deleuze's relationship with Artaud. Artaud, I contend, resists the depersonalizing aspects of Deleuze's philosophy by wanting to maintain a certain sense of self-presence. I show in what ways Deleuze, in spite of the apparent valorization of schizophrenia in the later works, always keeps Artaud at arm's length and tries to separate the man and his works in a way that Artaud will not allow. By doing so, I argue that Deleuze unwittingly repeats the error of the NRF editor, Jacques Riviere, in his correspondence with the young Artaud by failing to grasp the uniqueness of Artaud's personal case and suffering. This suffering is individuating for Artaud. At issue is Deleuze's method of reading a literary author as well as the relationship between philosophy and madness, and Deleuze's aesthetics.