Abstract

Antonin Artaud's entire career was spent struggling with what he called an "unlimitable temptation of Being." In this dissertation, we have tried to define the different uses of the notion of Being in Artaud's work, to set out the structural issues in ontology that interest him and to show Artaud's relation to certain thinkers and styles of thinking we know to have influenced him. Our aim has been not to show an overall coherence in his thought, but to set out a number of recurring issues, while remaining respectful of that "real object" that his thought represents over time. ;The first chapter attempts an overview of the theoretical understanding Artaud had of the problem of ontology. The second chapter sets out his historical acquaintance with philosophers of Being from Heraclitus to Nietzsche. The third chapter provides a closer reading of three texts from the early twenties, a moment when the intimate experience of his own mind led Artaud first to question the nature of "Being." The fourth chapter deals with the text which initiated his Le Theatre et son double period, "Sur le Theatre Balinais." This text is particularly interesting because it brings Artaud's ontology out of the limbes of psychological experience and into the domain of the public debate on ontological issues such as objectivation, field theory, the anthropological role of ontology, and the monism-dualism problem. ;We choose to close with "Sur le Theatre Balinais" because studies that focus on ontological issues in Artaud tend to emphasize a handful of texts written during the surrealist period and after 1946, neglecting what is implied in other equally important periods of his life. Secondly, the extremely rich intuition Artaud had at this moment was to feed his entire masterpiece, Le Theatre et son double, a work which seemed to exhaust Artaud's theoretical interests and end what is commonly thought of as his "productive period" for theory