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artaud.1946

¬ In May 1946 Artaud returned to Paris after nine years of incarceration in insane asylums, where during the last sixteen months at Rodez he produced the Cahiers de Rodez (XV-XXI), notebooks documenting the deliria of those years, as well as the material, psychological, and spiritual conditions of his confinement.

¬ He returned a sort of tragic poet laureate, whose public celebration took place on 13 January 1947 as the famous lecture/poetry reading that he gave at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, attended by many of the most notable figures of the French cultural scene, including Gide, Camus, and Breton. Here he transfixed the audience by reading the poems contained in Artaud le mômo, the texts of which were interspersed with his idiosyncratic glossolalic outbursts and incantations. This period also saw the creation of Van Gogh le suicidé de la société (Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society), which, as we shall see, evoked Artaud's estimation of his own treatment by society and prefigured his own fate.

-- Allen S. Weiss: Radio, Death and the Devil (in: Wireless Imagination, edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992, pp.271-272).

1933:	Antonin Artaud donne à la Sorbonne une lecture intitulée "Le Théâtre et la Peste".
1946:	"Operation Crossroads", première démonstration publique de l'arsenal atomique américain depuis Nagasaki, soumet 42'000 soldats à des doses de radiation élevées (Atoll Bikini, Pacifique Sud).
1947:	22-29 nov: Antonin Artaud enregistre "Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu" (dans les studios de la radio française).
1948:	Claude Shannon introduit le terme de "bit" (Binary digIT). Norbert Wiener publie "Cybernetics". Pierre Schaeffer compose "Cinq études de bruits".
1948-50:	Burroughs écrit "Junkie" à Mexico City.