Subjectile

The subjectile is subject and object together. Although it is paradoxical, the Subjectile can be defined: it is subject and object together. The subjectile is also a theory, not a fact. As a theory the subjectile is a tool that can be employed to analyse art objects to generate hypotheses concerning the relationship between subject and object in art. Antonin Artaud mentions the subjectile three times in his writing. Jacques Derrida, in his essay, To Unsense the Subjectile (download .pdf) states ‘All three times, he is speaking of his own drawings, in 1932, 1946, and 1947.’. The first time Artaud used the word was in a letter to André Rolland de Renéville, ‘Herewith a bad drawing in which what is called the subjectile betrayed me.’ In 1946, ‘This drawing is grave attempt to give life and existence to what until today had never been accepted in art, the botching of the subjectile, the piteous awkwardness of forms crumbling around an idea after having for so many eternities labored to join it. The page is soiled and spoiled, the paper crumpled, the people drawn with the consciousness of a child.’ Finally in February 1947, ‘The figures on the inert page said nothing under my hand. They offered themselves to me like millstones which would not inspire the drawing, and which I could cut. Scrap, file, sew, unsew, slash, and stitch without the subjectile ever complaining through father or through mother.’