The revolutionary forces of any movement are those capable of unbalancing the fundamental state of things, of changing the angle of reality. [1]

The narratives of Artaud's work are constructed from deeply individual and heterogeneous material, designed to probe diverse and complex issues such as the origins and systems of perception.

It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit . . . so what is this Body Without Organs? – But you're already an it, scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic; desert traveller and nomad of the stepps. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, fight-fight and are fought – seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous defeats; on it we penetrate and are penetrated; on it we love. On November 28th, 1947, Artaud declares war on organs "To be done with the judgement of God", "for you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ"
~~ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari [2]

The sky has gone mad.
~~ Antonin Artaud

Artaud's project is conditioned with vivid incisiveness. A multiplicity of stratagem is used to dissect what Artaud thought was the infinite potential of human substance. Throughout its trajectory his work examines/locates the space from image to text and back, investigating the vacillations borders between them colliding each element against the other until they have been exhaustively tested. Artaud interrogates the subjectivication/identity of the fragmented but transforming body within chance and necessity, within damage and reconstruction. The lucid and charged body-in-movement which Artaud projected remains a figures emphasizing re-animation and the reassertion of eclecticism.

For Artaud "cruelty" embodies in one word all his creative preoccupations and personal sufferings. Resisting the superficial resonances of blood and murder attached to the word, believing the notion of cruelty could communicate a remaking of worlds. Artaud produced many images. Cruelty could encompass all conscious and intentional action. He included several of the multiple definitions of cruelty from 1932 in his collection of theatre essays "The Theatre and its Double". Cruelty "means rigour, application and implacable decision, irreversible and absolute determination". [3] Cruelty encapsulated the fundamental intrinsicality between life and death.

Above all, cruelty is lucid, it is a kind of rigid direction, submission to necessity. No cruelty without consciousness, without a kind of applied consciousness. It is consciousness which gives to the exercise of every action in life its colour of blood, its cruel touch, since it must be understood that to live is always through the death of someone else.
~~ Antonin Artaud [4

In "Van Gogh the Suicide of society" [5] Artaud declared his belief in the "authentic madman". He wrote: "it is a man who has preferred to become mad, in the socially understood sense of the word, rather than betray a certain superior idea of human honour . . . a madman is also a man whom society does not want to hear and whom it wants to prevent from speaking intolerable truths". [6] Artaud argued that "madness" was largely defined by language; instituted by particular mechanisms within society/community/nations as an instrument of exclusion/silence, used against insurgent elements. Artaud equated the idea of the mind with the vulnerability of the unconscious and religious spirituality. The volatile animate body he imaged would negate the functions of the mind to create an autonomous, mind-less body. The body would be powered by its "own" intentions ("a tree of walking will") [7] stripped down to bone and electric nerve, facilitating the explosion of its organs.

Fight Club is a complex and multi-dimensional film. It is a film in which something is always lurking just out of sight: a spectral wraith; the real identity and motivations of the alleged narrator (or narrators); the key to understanding its enigmatic and multi-layered narratives, all of which dissolve under the scrutiny of closer observation. It is an experimental film that is at once a genuinely disturbing/exciting brutal drama, a black satire on the nature of the contemporary condition and a meditation on film form.

Fight Club opens inside the psychoneurotic centre of the protagonist's brain – a computer-generated vision of neural pathways in the cerebral cortex. The film is primarily about thought – the deterioration of thought, the construction of thought, therefore it is appropriate that the title sequence should be initiated in this manner. Firstly there is a semi-dark space that appears simultaneously confined and limitless, the details essentially biomorphic. The passage is smooth enlivened by flashes of light, pumping music and titles superimposed over the brainscape. Suddenly acceleration and the view reveals the mechanism of a gun partially inserted into a mouth.

Directed by David Fincher, written for the screen by Jim Uhls, and based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club impelled by a cataclysmic force fuses the kinetic/numinous imagery that haunts its frustrated and confused protagonist with visual representations of his mental states. Fight Club pairs Edward Norton as a beleaguered corporate drone with Brad Pitt, his anarchic, nihilistic antithesis Tyler Durden. ("Self-improvement is masturbation. Self-destruction is the answer" is Tyler's slogan.) Tyler the "doppelganger"/alter ego (the one who carries the weight of being evil) is the embodiment of pure id – the catalyst that allows you to see your own destiny.

Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls maintain considerable fidelity to Palahniuk's novel in disrupting narrative sequencing. Fight Club is innovative in its method of appearing like the projection of an agile, associative train of thought that can reverse, flow forward and switch tracks within an instant. The effect partly the result of a voice-over that remains starkly distanced from the main sound levels and disconcertingly muted as if it were running through the narrators interior thought patterns, the film retains the dark humour and manic prose style of the novel and Norton delivers this oblique, possibly unreliable narration with bleached out naturalism.