Publisher's Synopsis
The first eleven notebooks are filled with fragments of writing and extraordinary sketches: totemic figures, pierced bodies, and enigmatic machines, some revealing the marks of a trembling hand, others carefully built up from firm, forceful pencil strokes. The twelfth notebook, completed two months before Artaud's death in 1948, changes course: it's an extraordinary text on the loss of magic to the demonic-the piece that gives the book its title.
"Artaud matters," wrote John Simon in the Saturday Review years ago. Nearly seventy years after his death, that remains true-perhaps more than ever.