His violently blasphemous later writings were banned, and
Suppôts et suppliciations (Henchmen and Torturings), his summative late work, went unpublished for thirty years, appearing only in 1978 as volume fourteen (two parts) of
Œuvres complètes: Antonin Artaud (Complete Works: Antonin Artaud, 1956-). In the 1960s his notoriety spread beyond France with anglophone countercultural movements feting him as a drug user, internee, and genius schizophrenic who had seen with unparalleled vision through the straitjackets of rationality and decried man's imprisonment within socially constituted norms. At the same time he was notably championed by several important post-structuralist thinkers (including Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva), who applauded the challenges his work posed to the fundamental categories underpinning the orthodoxies of Western thought. Along with Georges Bataille and Friedrich Nietzsche he was cited as one of a select band whose writings were saturated in a radical and corrosive negativity that modernism could not contain. His work was said to necessitate a rethinking of the linguistic subject. And certainly all Artaud's work is a response to the idea that "language speaks us"--that human beings use a preexisting linguistic structure, one that serves as a repository of cultural meaning and thus determines the social world and individual identity.
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