Antonin Artaud didn’t want to entertain you. He wanted to infect you. He wanted to burn down the theatre, then climb into the ashes and scream until the gods woke up. His Theatre of Cruelty was never a metaphor. It was a ritual, a possession, a violent reminder that behind every mask of civilization there is a jaw, and behind every jaw, a scream waiting to be released.

In this episode of The Observing I, we do not study Artaud. We survive him. We walk with him through the electric corridors of his mind, through the plague-ridden rituals he called theatre, through his years locked in institutions where his bones were fried with shock and his language dissolved into raw sound. We listen as he curses God. We watch him tear apart language, theatre, art, sanity, and finally himself.

This is not a biography. It’s a descent. A séance. A reckoning with the parts of ourselves we’ve exiled in the name of comfort and coherence. Artaud offers no answers. He offers a scream. A body without organs. A theatre that bites back. His madness is not illness. It is method. Sacred. Violent. Necessary.

Enter only if you’re ready to confront the performance that lives under your skin. The one with no script. No exit. No applause.

You have been warned.

This episode is not clean.

It doesn’t try to sanitize the grotesque or turn philosophy into polite conversation. It doesn’t quote thinkers to make you sound smarter at dinner parties. This episode crawls through the blood, the filth, and the sacred excess of Georges Bataille. A man who tried to turn his life into a ritual and his suffering into something divine.

In this journey, we don’t just talk about Bataille’s ideas. We enter them. We sit inside the madness. From his shattered childhood and aborted priesthood to the moment he wrote ecstasy down like scripture, Bataille’s life was a constant act of sacred disobedience. He didn’t worship God as much as he laughed at Him, bled for Him, and turned every boundary He ever set into a bonfire.

We explore Bataille’s obsession with what he called “inner experience,” where mysticism and eroticism collapse into one long scream. We follow him into his economic theory of waste, where destruction becomes a form of holy resistance to the tyranny of utility. And we confront his radical theology of unknowing — a headless god, a sacred society, and the unbearable silence that follows when meaning finally gives out.

This episode isn’t about learning. It’s about breaking.

If you’ve ever cried and laughed at the same time and had no idea which came first, if you’ve ever felt closer to something divine in a moment of grief or surrender than in any sermon, if you’ve ever looked into the void and thought, “There’s something alive in there,” then this episode was made for you.

Even if you hate him, you might still need him. Because Georges Bataille speaks to the part of you that doesn’t want to be saved. Only seen. Only felt. Only burned alive and reborn into something nameless.

This is the edge of the wound. This is where philosophy stops thinking and starts trembling. Welcome.

You know that nagging feeling, right? That relentless pressure of the "now"? The constant urge to scroll, to react, to optimize for the immediate? We're all in it. Chasing the next hit, the next notification, the next fleeting distraction. Our attention spans are shattered, our patience non-existent. We're living in a world that's forgotten how to truly see beyond the blink of an eye.

This isn't just about being "busy." This is a profound, dangerous amnesia. We’ve forgotten Deep Time. We’ve severed our connection to the vast, flowing reality that underpins everything. We've amputated our future, one instant at a time.

This week, on The Observing I, we're tearing into this short-sighted delusion. We're dragging out an old renegade philosopher, Henri Bergson, who, over a century ago, called out the lie of our clock-based existence. He saw beyond the segmented minutes and hours to the continuous, living, breathing flow he called Duration. It's the time of a melody, not individual notes. The time of a life lived, not just a series of events.

Then, we're strapping his insights to the terrifying demands of Longtermism. This isn't some abstract concept. This is the understanding that our actions today echo across millions, even billions, of years, potentially determining the entire trajectory of conscious existence. It's the unignorable call from quadrillions of unborn voices, demanding to know what we, the living, are doing with this fragile window of existence.

We dissect the machinery that keeps us blind: the relentless demands of economic systems that prioritize quarterly profits over generational well-being. The political cycles that reward immediate fixes over long-term solutions. The information tsunami that actively scrambles our capacity for sustained thought, trapping us in a loop of endless, decontextualized moments. We expose the erosion of collective memory, turning us into amnesiacs condemned to repeat past mistakes.

But here’s the kicker: it’s not just what’s being done to you. It’s the convenient blindfold you pull over your own eyes. The psychological burden of thinking about millennia, the comfort of feeling powerless, the delusion that some "next big thing" will magically solve everything, and the cultural narratives that tell you to just "live for today." You actively resist the long view because it’s too damn uncomfortable.

This episode is about ripping off that blindfold. It's about remembering how to feel the true current of time. It's about recognizing that your fleeting existence is part of something unimaginably vast, and that your greatest power lies not in controlling the immediate, but in shaping the distant future by living with intentionality in the continuous present.

It's time to smash the clock and finally, truly, see the future.

Join Project Mayhem. It's time to wake up.