After years spent in asylums, Antonin Artaud created the radio play “To have done with the judgement of god” which was banned the day before its scheduled broadcast as inflammatory, obscene and blasphemous [1947]. Artaud desired to cancel out the whole process of mediation and signification and sought ways for the work itself to reach the body directly.

W/HOLE immerses the listener in a metonymic state of embodiment that encapsulates Artaud's impalpable idea of the “body without organs” and his attempt to think the unthinkable: how the body is mind and how the mind is also a body. Artaud's language is fragmented, and the desire it carries for physical transmission and transformation sutures the pieces together in the listener's body to regain its exaggeration. By inserting a metal rod through a hole in the wall and resting the mouth on it, the listener opens or closes the escape passage of the voice, offering it the bodily continuum “which robs me of the words that I have found, which reduces my mental tension, which is gradually destroying in its substance the body of my thought”.

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.
Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.
To have done with the judgement of god (1947-8)
[Final lines]