How true do you think it is that Artaud got into a brawl with Hitler?

It’s impossible to verify with certainty, but Artaud told the story that he met Hitler during the period in the early 1930s when he was a cinema actor, working at the Babelsberg studios near Berlin, and met Hitler at a literary/political café in Berlin. In some accounts, Hitler and him have a conversation about the future invasion of France, and Artaud encourages Hitler to invade, since, in many ways, he hated France and the French language. In other accounts, the meeting ends in violent uproar. It’s certainly plausible that they were introduced to one another— or, at least, that Artaud had Hitler pointed out to him — since both of them were great café-frequenters, and the café in question was one used by both political figures and actors, as many of the central and eastern European cafes of the time were. The insistence with which Artaud returns to his encounter with Hitler intimates that they had some contact, however peripheral. But it’s impossible to know.

What do you think Artaud would have to say about the world today in the 21st century?

Artaud predicted a world of “synthetic products to satiation point,” of warfare that takes place entirely through bluff and artifice (in the way that Baudrillard envisaged the first Gulf War), and of natural and ecological cataclysms. He is always a great predictor of future events in his work, announcing apocalypses and even traveling to see them take place (as he did when he traveled to the island of Inishmore, off the mainland of western Ireland, in 1937) and he conceived of the Second World War as an apocalyptic event. So he certainly envisaged multiple destructions for the world, and what he called “black paradises.” But in his work, everything happens simultaneously, with immediacy, and so it doesn’t foresee a linear future.

What would you say is the creative legacy of Antonin Artaud? How is his influence still felt in the 21st century?

Artaud’s work has vital inspiration, as it has since the 1950s, in an infinite number of ways, for contemporary digital artists and theorists, for filmmakers, creative artists, choreographers, performers, travelers, activists — but what is really vital is that young readers engage with Artaud’s work as closely as they can, explore all of its elements, and reflect on it.

Do you consider yourself “radical” by way of comparison with other contemporary scholars?

Perhaps so in comparison with contemporary scholars, but not in comparison with writers such as Georges Bataille; if my books were ever “dangerous,” then Bataille’s are a thousand times more dangerous.

Do you at all consider yourself a scholar of the avant-garde?

One interest I’ve had is to write books about the figures in avant-garde or experimental culture that seized my attention when I was around fifteen years old — and would have liked to have had books about them that read in some ways like the ones I’ve been writing: on Artaud, Jean Genet, Tatsumi Hijikata, and the Vienna Action Group artists, in particular. Most of those books are the result of lengthy archival research and of interviews or contacts with surviving collaborators of the writers or artists in question. After amassing those subject matters, you become a kind of scholar of the avant-garde, even if you hadn’t intended to.

Do you think literature is dead in the 21st century? Did the great passion and anguish that steamed the great modernity of the 20th century finally sizzle out leaving us only with the fumes of post-modernity — and of now? Where are we exactly in the tradition of literature?

Since Jean Baudrillard is now dead, he’s lost the chance to witness what he felt would be the two great moments really worth living for the human species: being able to witness the beginning of the world, and being able to witness the end of the world. If it’s the case, as seems to be convincingly indicated, that ecological catastrophe is likely to bring about the decimation of the planet in our lifetimes and, much more negligibly, that of the human species, then a writing or literature that responds to the sense of acceleration in that process is likely to be an exciting one (if one with only a necessarily short history, sadly).

I don’t think writing is dead or finished or irremediably digitized. The crucial thing about writing is that it should be unprecedented and volatile: unexpected.