Daily Inspiration Quote by Antonin Artaud

Artaud treats "literature" like grime: something cultured, prestigious, even self-flattering, but ultimately deadening when it clings too tightly. The verb choice "wash" is an assault on refinement. It implies that what passes for literary life is a coating of other people's phrases and inherited manners, a second skin that keeps sensation from reaching the nerve. This is Artaud in revolt against the idea that art is primarily text, interpretation, and tasteful distance.

The pivot is the blunt hierarchy: "men above all, to be human". He's not praising humanism so much as accusing it of being missing. In Artaud's world, modern civilization has trained people to perform intelligence rather than experience reality. "Literature" stands in for the whole apparatus of cultural mediation: the well-made play, the respectable novel, the intellectual who can name emotions but cannot endure them.

Context matters: Artaud is the dramatist who argued for a theater that hits the body before it flatters the mind. His "Theatre of Cruelty" wasn't about gore; it was about stripping away the polite lie that language alone can carry truth. The subtext is almost medical: words have become symptoms of an illness, a displacement activity that replaces living with commentary.

There's also an ethical sting. "We want" frames this as a collective demand, not a private aesthetic preference. Artaud is calling artists to stop hiding behind craft and start risking exposure - sensation, vulnerability, ugliness, the irreducible fact of being alive. The line works because it doesn't argue; it commands, like someone kicking open the door of a salon and insisting everyone breathe outside air.