Artaud the Mômo

is Antonin Artauds most extraordinary poetic work of the brief final phase of his life, from his return to Paris from a nine-year incarceration in Frances psychiatric institutions in 1946 until his death in 1948. The work is an unprecedented anatomical excavation carried through in vocal language, envisioning new gestural futures for the human body in its splintered fragments, while also generating black-humor illuminations into Artauds own status as the scorned Marseille-born child-fool, the mômo (a self-naming that fascinated Jacques Derrida in his writings on this work). Artaud moves between extreme irreligious obscenity and delicate evocations of his immediate corporeal perception and his sense of solitude. The books five-part sequence ends with Artauds caustic denunciation of psychiatric institutions and of the very conception of madness itself.







This edition, translated by Clayton Eshlemanthe acclaimed foremost translator of Artauds workpresents the work in the spatial format Artaud intended, for the first time since its original edition in 1947. It also incorporates the eight original drawings by Artaudshowing reconfigured bodies, weapons of resistance and assaultwhich he selected for that edition, having initially attempted to persuade Picasso to collaborate with him.



The editorial material draws on Artauds previously unknown manuscript letters of 1946-48 to the books publisher, Pierre Bordas, which give unique insights into the work from its origins to its publication.