Fragments of Ektos/Modernism’s Delirium (Post I)

Deterritorial Investigations

Ektos – Greek: outside, beyond the outside, exterior, outside of beyond, besides, except.

“Since the end of the eighteenth century, the life of unreason no longer manifests itself except in the lightning-flash works such as those of Holderin, of Nerval, of Nietzsche, or of Artaud – forever irreducible to those alienations that can be cured, resisting by their own strength that gigantic moral imprisonment which we are in the habit of calling, doubtless by antiphrasis, the liberation of the insane by Pinel and Tuke.” – Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization¹

In his interesting yet problematic account of Foucault’s life, James Miller describes the scene and setting of a small Parisian theater in late January, 1947. In the presence of surrealists (Andre Breton) and men of letters (Andre Gide) and others of the arts, Antonin Artaud took to the tiny stage with a handful of papers, poems scribbled across…

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