Narrator: Fight Club wasn't about winning or losing, it wasn't about words, the hysterical shouting was in tongues like a Pentecostal Church . . . When the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. Afterwards we all felt saved.

In Artaud's perception, the human body is a wild/flexible but flawed instrument that is in the process of being formulated. The body is confined/limited by society/subjectivity which leave it fixed and inert, smothered to the point of terminal incoherence and inexpressivity. In his work Artaud developed ideas and images which explore the explosion of the useless body into a delirious mesmeric new body with an infinite capacity for self-transformation. This imagery recurs throughout Artaud''s work, forming the core of an anatomical reconstruction from the material of abject fragmentation. In his drawings of the human face (the only authentic element of the anatomy for Artaud) Artaud endeavoured to obliterate the body's weaknesses and return it to a vivid manifestation of turbulent movement and experiential existence. The facial features in his drawings – hard bones/concentrated eyes – challenge and reformulate the visual experience through the dynamic of their individual creativity. [26]

The narrator in Fight Club can only define himself in terms of male, consumer, insurance worker, insomniac, but he feels that he has lost any sense of self. He is confined by the mechanisms society adopts for categorization. In a pivotal scene the narrator initiates the projection of external states of identity.

Tyler Durden: Hey man, What are you reading?

Jack: Listen to this. I am an article written by an organ in the first person. I am Jack's medulla oblongata without me Jack could not regulate his heart rate, blood pressure or breathing. There's a whole series of these. I am Jack's nipple. I am Jack's colon.

Throughout the narrative of the film this becomes an increasingly pertinent motif: "I am Jack's smirking revenge"/"I am Jack's cold sweat/"I am Jack's broken heart"? I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

The narrator expresses a constant desire to externalise a consciousness that exists via an-other state. Experience, levels of perception are mediated by a secondary more physical incarnation. A doubling entity which is ultimately a presentation of the undefinable.

Artaud's drawings from the Rodez period (1945) addressed the deep sense of his disrupted body. Artaud drew fields of human dissection and torture, filled with splinters and spikes, cancers and broken, bleeding bodies. In these drawings he split and broke the human body – grinding it with crayons into the surface of the paper – as a substance to be collapsed and then reformulated from zero. The body's inner space was extracted and exploded with great velocity into the world. Surrounding the principle figures in these works, other forms/objects fell vapourized through space. In drawings titled "The being and its foetuses" and "Never real and always true" the figures appeared acutely disjointed, manipulated with precision to occupy a space of dismemberment. Sections of metal, insects, child-like female faces, internal organs, spilled out in painful dispersal across the scorched surface of the paper. Superannuated machinery and propeller shapes intersected with incandescent human shapes and lacerated faces. As the drawings developed Artaud often surrounded and penetrated them with phrases from an invented rhythmic pre-Babel language, which he continually elaborated, inserting it as an enraged incantation into his work.

In a Deleuzian construct Artaud's drawings produce images of sensations and forces. Artaud makes patent an experience of the body that leads one beyond the phenomenological "lived body" to the chaotic "body without organs". The body in Artuad's work is always in a process of becoming other – becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-imperceptible – and the systolic and diastolic rhythms that play through his compositions are those of "a non-organic life" a power/"puissance" more profound that the lived body "and almost unliveable". Artaud is illustrating sensations in the sense that he depicts the un-organized and non-organic sensations of the body without organs.

The rhythms in Artaud's drawings are those that flow between the background field and the human figure surrounded by that field. A systolic force moves from the field to the figure, enclosing/constricting the figure. A diastolic force passes from the figure to the field as the body mutates in an intensive deformation. The encircling force of the field isolates the figure, disconnects it from any latent narratives and consequently empties it of purely figurative/representational content. The expanding force that issues from the figure induces a contorted athleticism in which the body is seized by a convulsive effort to escape itself. The entire series of spasms in Artaud - love/vomiting/excrement – always the body that attempts to escape itself through one of its organs to rejoin the background field. [27]

The spasmodic deformations that scorch the body are particularly evident in Artaud's self-portraits for the face is the most heavily coded zone of the body and hence the point at which the effects of diastolic forces are most pronounced. Artaud's project is to show the head beneath the face, the body of sensation, as opposed to simple representation. These traits form a process of a general "becoming" of the body, "a zone of indiscernability/undecidability" between identity and its double, an interactive process of disorganization whereby the recognizable features of the human face assume various mutant shapes/contours. The tension between the representational face and its mutative head manifests itself as a struggle between structural bone and malleable flesh, moving across the skittle framework.