Artaud - French Literature

Letter Against the Kabbala


...Is there anyone who can't see that it is just this (by now inveterate) framework of numbers and letters which has at last asphyxiated and ancestrally damned mankind?

To what advantage and whose profit, by virtue of whom and what?  And that is why we are today confronted with a humanity in such an advanced state of spyphilization, it cannot perceive that it is this very grammatical method that has made a scourge of all the so-called great ideas of civilization and culture that man himself bends to, as to an iron yoke which prevents him from advancing.

Civilization is here
and culture there.

As for your way of thinking about them, man, it will always have to be grammatical, numerical, arithmetical, acoustical or not at all.

Which means that science, taken as the genital repository of all elements permitting life and being, is in the hands of a certain number of Jack-offs, a very select party which, in addition, shits all over any other parties who may not measure up to their particular and sectarian way of thinking; and who started off by locking arms and holding hands and electing themselves as a very select party, and established this somber group which (though nobody any longer knows, or can even yet suspect, this) is at the bottom not only of all wars, all famines, all restrictions of nourishment, all revolutions and all anarchies, but also of all epidemics, of all physiological deficiencies, of the born man, of all dietary scurvies, of all spontaneous generations of deaf-mutes, and of those born blind, mongoloid idiots and incarnate morons who often have nothing wrong with them other than a certain excess of dermis and epidermis by which their wires get crossed and their mental electricity cannot properly be grounded;

and it is always on the Kabbala, be it as it may, on the Zohar, the Sepher Yetzirah, the Upanishads, the Puranas, and the Ramayana, that this unknown and somber group bases the continuing persistence of its misdeeds...

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