“Artaud's Revolution: Nowhere to Turn,” in Romance Notes, Vol. 33, No. 2, Winter, 1992, pp. 109-17.

In the following essay, Schehr argues that Artaud did not consider the transfer of social, economic, and political power from one class to another revolutionary if there was not also a continual subversion of the self, and of the language and grammar which enable its expression.

We owe Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva debts of gratitude for having made Artaud the focus of contemporary literary inquiry. As early as 1967 in “La Parole soufflée,” Derrida reflects on a corpus that extends from Artaud's early work on the theater to the letters written at Rodez; of interest to him is the import of the pre-semiotic at work in Artaud's writing, a concept that informs his view of the theater. In 1972 at Cerisy, Philippe Sollers organized a session on Artaud in which both he and Julia Kristeva...