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artaud.1947

¬ Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu was recorded in the studios of French radio between 22 and 29 November 1947, whith the sound effects recorded later and added to the final tape. The broadcast was scheduled for 10:45 PM on Monday, 2 February 1948, and was widely announced. But at the last moment, the day before, Wladimir Porché, the director of French radio, prohibited the broadcast. Serving as the conscience of the French public, he rationalized this suppression by arguing that the French people should be spared, or indeed protected from, Artaud's scatological, vicious, and obscene anti-Catholic and anti-American pronouncements.

¬ In immediate response, Fernand Pouey [director of dramatic and literary broadcasts for French radio] organized the selection of a sort of aesthetic jury to consider the issue. Approximately fifty artists, writers, musicians, and journalists met at the offices of Radiodiffusion française for a private audition of the tapes on 5 February 1948; among those present were Raymond Queneau, Roger Vitrac, Jean-Louis Barrault, Jean Cocteau, René Clair, Paul Eluard, Jean Paulhan, Maurice Nadeau, Georges Auric, Claude Mauriac, and René Char. The opinion was almost unanimously favorable; Porché nevertheless persisted in his interdiction. Pouey quit his job in protest; the tape was not broadcast, only to be given a private audition at the Théâtre Washington on the evening of 23 February 1948 (to be broadcast on French radio only thirty years later); on 4 March 1948 Artaud died.

-- 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.