Success Quote by Antonin Artaud

Artaud writes like a man kicking at the door of polite society, and this line is a refusal to let “care” become another form of policing. His target isn’t just censorship in the abstract; it’s the smug bargain modern culture keeps offering: we won’t fix the world that produces despair, but we will confiscate the tools people use to survive it. The sentence is built as an indictment, not an aphorism. “So long as” makes it conditional and prosecutorial, as if society is on trial and hasn’t met the burden of proof. Until the causes are addressed, it has no moral standing to ban the symptoms.

The subtext is classic Artaud: suffering is real, and expression is not a luxury. “Cleanse himself” is deliberately visceral, almost medical-religious, suggesting catharsis, exorcism, purgation. He’s talking about whatever conduits drain poison from the psyche: art, ritual, intoxication, transgressive theater, even self-destructive habits. Artaud doesn’t romanticize despair, but he refuses to let institutions sentimentalize it either. When authorities outlaw “means,” they’re often protecting order, not people.

Context matters. Artaud lived through war, institutional psychiatry, addiction, and repeated confinement; he knew how quickly “help” can become coercion. His Theatre of Cruelty aimed to strip language down to nerve and body, to force audiences to confront what social decorum represses. Read this way, the quote isn’t a defense of vice so much as a demand for honesty: if you won’t remove the conditions that break people, don’t pretend virtue when you remove what lets them keep going.