Down with the finger of god and round numbers: surrealist performance and writing of the present

Abstract

According to the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas, Antonin Artaud, the French poet, script writer, actor, and stage director would be 99 years old on December 4, 1995, becoming the first one “redeemed”, in an article in the Sunday column of the Diário 16, from Madrid. Together with other 51 texts-names, it comprises, as a supposed reverse of the homage, a mosaic of references that is later transformed into a book: Para acabar con los números redondos, 1997. In the initial journalistic project of subverting dates and the canon, what stands out in Vila-Matas is the anachronic and performative gesture of evoking a political potency from an alternative medium and from anesthetic crossings with surrealism, making way to read the poetics of the present in its multiple disjunctive relations.