Antonin Artaud et la traversée du miroir : les glossolalies comme détournement de la psychanalyse

Glossolalia, parts of an invented language that Antonin Artaud begins to include in his writings after 1943, are closely connected in their inception to his translation into French of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass . During this experience of translation, the mirroring situation of the art-therapy process in which Artaud is participating, allows him to oppose psychiatric practice and to challenge the definition of the subject that it tries to impose on him. Moreover, glossolalic parts reflect ironically psychiatric symptomatology, which draws from psychoanalytical theory. Both through his artistic experimentations and through his experience of psychiatric treatment, Artaud actually gained a relative knowledge about psychiatric and psychoanalytical theories. Therefore, this article argues that, in his comments about his translations, about his glossolalic parts or about his creative practice, he parodies these theories whose misconceptions he exposes and that he contradicts.