The following first ran as "Conspiracy for the Day",  09/02-03/93
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
by Antonin Artaud (1947)
[Artaud thinks that it is not  man but the world which has become
Things are going badly because sick consciousness  has  a  vested
interest right now in *not* recovering from its sickness.
This  is  why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend
itself against the investigations  of certain superior intellects
whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of  Greek
fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision would have been capable
of   seriously   upsetting   the   spectral   conformity  of  the
In comparison with the  lucidity  of  van  Gogh, psychiatry is no
better than a  den  of  apes  who  are  themselves  obsessed  and
persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling
states   of  anguish  and  human  suffocation  but  a  ridiculous
terminology.  To a man,  this  whole gang of respected scoundrels
and patented quacks are all erotomaniacs.
[Artaud defines a "madman" as] a man who preferred to become mad,
certain superior idea of human honor.
So society has strangled in its asylums all those  it  wanted  to
its accomplices in certain great nastiness.
[However, in the case of van Gogh, confinement was not the weapon
used.]  The  concerted  gathering  of  men  has  other  means  of
overcoming the wills it wants to break.
Thus on the occasion of a war, a revolution, or a social upheaval
still  in  the  bud, the *collective consciousness* is questioned
and questions itself, and makes its judgement.
This  consciousness  may  also   be   aroused  and  called  forth
spontaneously in connection with certain individual cases.
Thus strange forces are aroused and brought up, into that kind of
dark dome which constitutes,  over  all  human  respiration,  the
venomous hostility of the evil spirit of people.
It  is  thus  that  the  few rare lucid well-disposed people find
certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by  the
formidable  suction,  the  formidible  tentacular oppression of a
kind of civic magic.
In the face of this  concerted  nastiness,  it is not delirium to
walk around at night in a hat with twelve candles on it to  paint
a landscape from nature.
Van Gogh did not committ suicide in a fit of madness, in dread of
not  succeeding,  on  the  contrary,  he  had just succeeded, and
discovered what  he  was  and  who  he  was,  when the collective
consciousness of society, to punish him  for  escaping  from  its
clutches, suicided him.
It  was not because of himself, because of the disease of his own
madness, that van Gogh abandoned his life.
It was under the pressure of  the evil influence, two days before
his death, of Dr. Gachet, a so-called psychiatrist, which was the
direct, effective, and sufficient cause of his death.
When I read van Gogh's letters to his brother, I  was  left  with
the  firm and sincere conviction that Dr. Gachet, "psychiatrist,"
actually detested van Gogh, painter,  and that he detested him as
a painter, but above all as a genius.
is  obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same
time bearing the stamp  of  the most incontestable madness:  that
of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of  the  mass
Medicine was born of evil, if it  was not born of illness, and if
it has, on the contrary, provoked  and  created  illness  out  of
nothing  to justify its own existence; but psychiatry was born of
the vulgar mob of creatures  who  wanted  to preserve the evil at
the source of illness and who have thus pulled out of  their  own
inner  nothingness  a  kind of Swiss guard to cut off at its root
that impulse of rebellious vindication  which is at the origin of
There is in every lunatic  a  misunderstood  genius  whose  idea,
the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for
Dr. Gatchet did not tell van Gogh that he was there to straighten
out  his  painting, but he sent him to paint from nature, to bury
himself in a landscape to escape the pain of thinking.
Except that, as soon as van Gogh had turned his back, Dr. Gatchet
turned off the switch to his mind.
As if, without intending any harm but with one of those seemingly
innocent disparaging  wrinklings  of  the  nose  where  the whole
bourgeois unconscious of the earth has inscribed  the  old  magic
force of a thought one hundred times repressed.
And  I know that Dr. Gatchet left the impression on history, with
regard to van  Gogh,  whom  he  was  treating  and who ultimately
committed suicide while at his house, that he was his last friend
on earth, a kind of providential consoler.
And yet I am more convinced than ever that it was to  Dr.  Gachet
of  Auvers-sur-Oise  that  van Gogh was indebted on that day, the
day he committed suicide at Auvers-sur-Oise.
Was indebted, I say, for abandoning life.
Dr. Gachet was that grotesque Cerberus, that sanious and purulent
Cerberus, in sky-blue  jacket  and  gleaming linen, placed before
poor van Gogh to rob him of all his sound ideas.
And there took place between Dr.  Gachet  and  Theo,  van  Gogh's
brother,  how many of those stinking confabulations that families
have with the  head  physicians  of  insane asylums regarding the
"patient" they have brought them.
"Keep an eye on him, make sure he forgets all those  ideas.   You
understand,  the doctor said so, you must forget all those ideas:
they're hurting you, if  you  keep  on thinking about them you'll
stay shut up for the rest of your life."
These are examples of those smooth conversations of  good-natured
psychiatrists  which seem harmless enough, but which leave on the
heart the trail of a little black tongue as it were, the harmless
little black tongue of a poisonous salamander.
And sometimes it takes no more than this to drive one to suicide.
There are days when the heart feels the deadlock so terribly that
it takes it like a blow on  the head with a piece of bamboo, this
idea that it will not be able to go on any longer.
For it was, in fact, after a conversation with  Dr.  Gachet  that
van  Gogh,  as  if nothing were the matter, went back to his room
and killed himself.
One day the executioners came for van Gogh, just as they came for
Gerard de Nerval, Baudelaire, Poe, and Lautreamont.
One does not commit suicide by  oneself.  In the case of suicide,
there must be an army of evil beings to cause the  body  to  make
the  gesture  against nature, that of taking its own life.  And I
believe that  there  is  always  someone  else  at  the moment of
extreme death to strip us of our own life.
Van Gogh was dispatched from the world first by his brother, when
he announced the birth of his nephew, next by Dr. Gatchet,  when,
instead  of  recommending rest and solitude, he sent him to paint
from nature on a day when he  knew quite well that van Gogh would
have done better to go to bed.