The aim of this article is to explore Antonin Artaud's use of the body in performance, as "a place of all human transformation, liberation and independence » (Barber, p72) Artaud's immense influence on theatrical practice continues to arouse interest and debate. Calling for an end to rational drama, his iconoclastic work pushes the boundaries of critical thinking through a continuous flow of construction and destruction. In Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision, Bettina Knapp offers an explanation for Artaud's popularity long after his death: "In his time, he was a man alienated from his society, divided within himself, a victim of internal and external forces beyond his control. …The tidal force of his imagination and the urgency of his therapeutic quest were ignored and pushed aside like the ravings of a madman. …Modern man can now respond to Artaud because they share so many similarities and psychological affinities. In the same book, she also claims that Artaud was incapable of adapting to society, its patterns and its rules. He built an entire world of artistic production around his illness and nourished this world of madness and illness in order to heal himself through his art. Theater became his medicine and relief at a time when he was completely alien to the reality around him. For Artaud, all there is is the body in itself: “The body is the body, alone it exists” (McKeon, 1977, p59). In his Theater of Cruelty, he maintains that the organs are enemies of the body and that reality remains to be invented because the organs of the body are not yet defined. (Sontag, 1976)Due to its soft nature, the body is exposed to constant insults and attacks, pain and injury. In his radio play "Ending the Judgment of God", he explains that what happened...... middle of paper .......3, 1977.Antonin Artaud, Theater of Cruelty in: Selected Writings. ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Complete Works, 1976. Antonin Artaud, Ending the Judgment of God in: Selected Writings. ed. Susan Sontag, 1976; copy online at: http://www.megabaud.fi/~karttu/tekstit/artaud.htm (December 2003)Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: towards a corporeal feminism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1994.Jacques Derrida, Le theater of cruelty and the closure of representation. trans. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, 1978. Antonin Artaud, Theater and its double. trans. Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Press, New York, 1958. George E. Wellwarth, Drama Survey, Vol. 2, February 1963, pp. 276-287. David Williams, a collection of theatrical cases. ed. Peter Brook, foreword by Irving Wardle, Methuen, London 1988.