In the last two years of his life following his release from the Rodez asylum Antonin Artaud
decided he wanted his new work to connect with a vast public audience and chose to record
radio broadcasts in order to carry through that aim. That determination led him to his most
experimental and incendiary project To have done with the judgement of god 1947-48 in which
he attempted to create a new language of texts screams and cacophonies: a language designed
to be heard by millions aimed as Artaud said for 'road-menders'. In the broadcast he
interrogated corporeality and introduced the idea of the 'body without organs' crucial to the
later work of Deleuze and Guattari. The broadcast commissioned by the French national radio
station was banned shortly before its planned transmission to Artaud's fury. This volume
collects all of the texts for To have done with the judgement of god together with several of
the letters Artaud wrote to friends and enemies in the short period between his work's
censorship and his death. Also included is the text of an earlier broadcast from 1946 Madness
and Black Magic written as a manifesto prefiguring his subsequent broadcast. Clayton
Eshleman's extraordinary translations of the broadcasts activate these works in their extreme
provocation.
