Wit & Attitude Quote by Antonin Artaud

Artaud turns the psychiatric ward into a stage where the real madness is bureaucratic, not clinical. The line is structured like a confession, then detonates into a threat: he insists he never had suicidal “obsession,” yet the ritual of psychiatric “conversation” manufactures the urge. That reversal is the point. Psychiatry, in Artaud’s telling, doesn’t cure desire for death; it scripts it, arriving each morning like a priest of normalcy whose very presence tightens the noose.

The cruelty lands in the last clause: he wants to hang himself because he cannot “cut his throat.” Suicide appears less as self-hatred than as displaced violence, the only remaining agency in a system designed to strip him of it. Artaud’s genius is to make the reader feel the trap: even the fantasy of resistance is policed, so the body becomes the only available weapon and the only available victim. It’s not a clinical report; it’s a sabotage of clinical language, hijacking “obsession” and “visit” to show how institutional calm can be experienced as assault.

Context matters. Artaud’s life ran through institutionalization, electroshock, and the early-20th-century confidence that the mind could be disciplined into social usefulness. As a dramatist who wanted theater to hit like an exorcism, he recoils at psychiatry’s conversational mode: talk as containment, interpretation as domination. The quote’s intent isn’t to romanticize suffering; it’s to indict a culture that mistakes compliance for health and calls that mistake care.