“Facile”.
Poems by Paul Éluard, photographs by Man Ray of his wife Nusch Éluard. París, 1935.
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Lorenzo Chiesa; Lacan with Artaud
The multiple theoretical overlappings between Artaud and Lacan are marked by the silent eloquence of a bio-graphical half-saying. It is possible to locate only a single place in the entire corpus of Lacan’s writings, seminars and conferences in which he speaks directly of Artaud: in “Raison d’un échec”, Lacan threatens to “sedate” those of his followers who would be inclined to behave like him. Indeed, their sole actual encounter had been a clinical one: Doctor Lacan visited the inmate Artaud in 1938, shortly after his hospitalisation in Saint Anne. On that occasion he declared: “Artaud is obsessed, he will live for eighty years without writing a single sentence, he is obsessed”. This diagnosis turned out to be utterly wrong: Artaud died ten years later; in the meantime, he had written six books and left behind many hundreds of notebooks. At one point in Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, Artaud “has done with” Lacan, half-mentioning him once and for all; he establishes that “Doctor L.” is an “erotomaniac” and thus turns the very accusation of madness against the psychiatrist himself.
Surrealist Phantoms 
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