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Conclusion

Miguel de Beistegui

in Immanence - Deleuze and Philosophy

Immanence is itself not a concept, but an image or a plane that is the condition of thought. Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense may have marked an initial stage on the way to the conquest ... More

Immanence is itself not a concept, but an image or a plane that is the condition of thought. Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense may have marked an initial stage on the way to the conquest of immanence, and the uncovering of the world of anonymous, pre- individual and impersonal singularities. The plane of immanence can unfold only by presupposing a plane of organisation, ruled by functions and forms, and from which transcendence may grow. The plane of transcendence, or analogy, is always shot through with processes it cannot control. Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, Marcel Proust, and Francis Bacon show the point at which their life becomes a life, and the illusion of transcendence dissolves into pure immanence. ‘Immanence: a life’ is Gilles Deleuze's last word on life, and his final celebration of it.Less

Interlude Humanist and Posthumanist: A Dialogue

Simon Palfrey

in Poor Tom: Living "King Lear"

This section is a mock dialogue between Humanist, who speaks for human recognitions, appreciation of the art-object, sympathy, rational balance, and Post-Humanist, who speaks for exploded ... More

This section is a mock dialogue between Humanist, who speaks for human recognitions, appreciation of the art-object, sympathy, rational balance, and Post-Humanist, who speaks for exploded virtualities, a mixture of Artaud, Deleuze and Guattari, and contemporary ecological thinking. Together they offer different takes on the ontology and ethics of playworlds and playlife, and how such things can speak to our own possibilities.Less

Screamlines: On the Anatomy and Geology of Radio

Neil Verma

in The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality

This chapter is a study of the radiophonic scream in radio thrillers and radio art, employing this special type of limit-case performance as an entry point to a theory of radio itself. The argument ... More

This chapter is a study of the radiophonic scream in radio thrillers and radio art, employing this special type of limit-case performance as an entry point to a theory of radio itself. The argument uses four well-known scream performances as key coordinates: Gregory Whitehead’s “Pressures of the Unspeakable” (1991), Arch Oboler’s “The Dark” (circa 1940s), Antonin Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgement of God (1947/48) and Wyllis Cooper’s “The Thing on the Fourble Board” (1948). Taking up the theme of the “anatomy” of the scream as a heuristic when it comes to performing for radio, and the theme of the “geology” of the scream when it comes to scream mediation and preservation over time, this chapter considers the scream as a meeting point between the aesthetic and material pressures through which radio is constituted, inscribed, and theorized.Less

The Promised Land: Toward a Retotalized Theatre

David Roberts

in The Total Work of Art in European Modernism

This chapter examines the total work as the regeneration of sacred theatre. It considers three dramatists of the 1920s: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Paul Claudel, and Bertolt Brecht, together with Antonin ... More

This chapter examines the total work as the regeneration of sacred theatre. It considers three dramatists of the 1920s: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Paul Claudel, and Bertolt Brecht, together with Antonin Artaud’s theatre writings and manifestos for a “theatre of cruelty.” The connections between them rest on inner and outer coincidence: the Catholics Hofmannsthal and Claudel both turned to the world theatre of the Spanish baroque. Hofmannsthal collaborated with the director Max Reinhardt in the Salzburg Festival, and a commission from Reinhardt was the occasion of Claudel’s spectacle Christopher Columbus, with music by Darius Milhaud. Brecht was greatly impressed by the premiere of Claudel’s play at the Berlin State Opera in 1930; his own treatment of the crossing of the Atlantic, the 1929 Lehrstück on the aviator Lindbergh with music by Paul Hindemith, can also be read as his version of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Artaud (1896–1948) and Brecht (1898–1956)—like Mallarmé and Nietzsche—were almost exact contemporaries.Less

Around the absurd I: twentieth-century absurdist practice

Neil Cornwell

in The Absurd in Literature

This chapter discusses absurdist practice during the twentieth century, examining absurdism in the works of some writers, namely Fernando Pessoa, Antonin Artaud and Camus. It notes that these writers ... More

This chapter discusses absurdist practice during the twentieth century, examining absurdism in the works of some writers, namely Fernando Pessoa, Antonin Artaud and Camus. It notes that these writers can be regarded as absurdists, and that they sometimes embrace absurdist qualities. The chapter also clarifies that the use of the word ‘absurd’ does not guarantee that a work is to be considered – with justification – as fully or solely belonging to the ‘literature of the absurd’.Less

Logic

Miguel de Beistegui

in Immanence - Deleuze and Philosophy

This chapter reports the consequences of an extension of immanence for the classical domains of logic. It specifically illustrates the extent to which Gilles Deleuze's account of sense relates to, ... More

This chapter reports the consequences of an extension of immanence for the classical domains of logic. It specifically illustrates the extent to which Gilles Deleuze's account of sense relates to, and differs from, that of logical empiricism and Edmund Husserl's transcendental logic. The ‘logic of sense’ would quite explicitly conflict the imperatives of logical positivism. Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic clearly show the aim and movement of Husserl's thought with respect to the question of logic. It is apparent that the Stoics depict a radical distinction between two planes of being: the real or profound being, force (dunamis); and the plane of effects, which take place on the surface of being, and constitute an endless multiplicity of incorporeal beings (attributes). The distance between Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud is the distance separating a language emitted at the surface and a language carved into the depth of bodies.Less

Introduction

Martin Harries

in Forgetting Lot's Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship

Artaud, Spectatorship, and Catastrophe

Martin Harries

in Forgetting Lot's Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship

Film's challenge to familiar regimes of spectatorship and the increasing centrality of spectacular mass political forms make the 1930s a period of particular pressure in the history of spectatorship. ... More

Film's challenge to familiar regimes of spectatorship and the increasing centrality of spectacular mass political forms make the 1930s a period of particular pressure in the history of spectatorship. Antonin Artaud embodies these antimonies with force and fascination. Lot's wife disappears in “Metaphysics and the Mise en Scéne”—along with other fragments of Sodom—only to surface as the figure of a cultural crisis in the opening of The Theater and Its Double, its preface “The Theater and Culture,” which was probably written after all the other essays that make up the volume. Artaud links the antimetaphysical concerns of the everyday to the body, seen as so much rotting meat. That this charogne may also be translated as “slut” also suggests the consistency with which Artaud anathematized sexuality: the promiscuity and materiality of sex are one of Artaud's consistent targets.Less

I Artaud BwO: The Uses of Artaud's To have done with the judgement of god

Edward Scheer

in Deleuze and Performance

This chapter focuses on Gilles Deleuze's concept of body without organs (BWO), the Deleuzian idea which resonates most powerfully as a concept for and of performance. It provides a detailed retelling ... More

This chapter focuses on Gilles Deleuze's concept of body without organs (BWO), the Deleuzian idea which resonates most powerfully as a concept for and of performance. It provides a detailed retelling of the radio program To have done with the judgement of God, from which Deleuze borrowed the notion of BWO, and suggests that this work and Antonin Artaud's oeuvre as a whole, should not be interpreted as merely symptomatic of schizophrenic experience. It contends that Artaud actively develops a glossolalia beyond everyday language in order to destratify the bodies of his listeners.Less

Choreographies of Affect

Elena del Río

in Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection

This chapter argues for a reconsideration of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Brechtian aesthetics from the point of view of his engagement with the emotions. It looks at Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria ... More

This chapter argues for a reconsideration of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Brechtian aesthetics from the point of view of his engagement with the emotions. It looks at Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant to supplement the formal notion of the tableau as static image with a notion of the tableau as precarious containment of affective force. The chapter uses the ideas and theories of Gilles Deleuze and Antonin Artaud to examine the way crucial aspects of performance such as framing and faciality generate significant points of convergence between theatre and film, and to trace the transformation of the sadomasochistic impulse in the films' narrative into a power of affection.Less

A ‘Third Path’

Martine Beugnet

in Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression

Taking Artaud’s call for a ‘third path’ in cinema as a cue, chapter 1 examines cinema’s intricate history with materiality, sensationalism and transgression. It emphasizes the continuing belief in ... More

Taking Artaud’s call for a ‘third path’ in cinema as a cue, chapter 1 examines cinema’s intricate history with materiality, sensationalism and transgression. It emphasizes the continuing belief in the medium’s unique capacity for combining thought and affect to argue for alternative filmmaking and theorising practices.Less

“The Virtual Reality of Theater”: Antonin Artaud

Samuel Weber

in Theatricality as Medium

In 1933, Antonin Artaud introduced his notion of a “theater of cruelty” by associating the purpose of theater with the necessary cruelty that one can inflict on others. In a ... More

In 1933, Antonin Artaud introduced his notion of a “theater of cruelty” by associating the purpose of theater with the necessary cruelty that one can inflict on others. In a way, Artaud implies that theater teaches us to be cruel. The chapter counters this notion, pointing to the political and cultural importance Artaud gives to theater and his view on war, plagues, and the like. This chapter includes a discussion of the notion of a theater of cruelty, how this notion could influence the thoughts of the audience, and the chapter's critique of this notion. Through this, the chapter introduces the concept of virtualization as the inverse movement of actualization. Also, the chapter also establishes the relevance of meaning as something unaffected by place and space and relates this to the notion of virtuality.Less

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

Kimberly Lamm

in Addressing the other woman: Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing

Chapter 3 is devoted to Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud (1971–72), an epic artwork in which she orchestrated typewritten texts and painted images to seize the monstrosity attributed to white women if they ... More

Chapter 3 is devoted to Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud (1971–72), an epic artwork in which she orchestrated typewritten texts and painted images to seize the monstrosity attributed to white women if they do not stay within patriarchal constraints. The chapter analyses Codex Artaud as a feminist claim to women’s aggressive capacities and all they connect to: sexuality, disorder, insanity, and protest, but also the capacity to represent oneself as other. The reading focuses on Spero’s conflicted engagement with Antonin Artaud’s writings and the fact that though he was insane, he was able to command the patriarchal orders of language to create a mobile range of self-representations. Spero’s engagement with Artaud’s texts produced a form of writing that both emulates and critiques the masculine privileges that make such self-representations of otherness possible, thereby revealing the aggression from which women in western culture have been traditionally barred. To evoke the psychic mechanisms that enforce this exclusion, the chapter turns to Sigmund Freud’s definition of sexuality in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and his articulation of the expectation that women should not indulge in the pleasures of aggression, but should instead create aesthetically pleasing images devoid of shame and disgust..Less

Artaud and the Plague: A Posthumanist Theatre?

Hedwig Fraunhofer

in Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning in Modern European Drama

Artaud’s theatrical vision differs markedly from the representationalism and anthropocentrism of the “dramatic” theatrical tradition. Given the close relationality between theory and practice in ... More

Artaud’s theatrical vision differs markedly from the representationalism and anthropocentrism of the “dramatic” theatrical tradition. Given the close relationality between theory and practice in Artaud’s work, this chapter puts his theatrical practice in conversation with his ground-breaking theoretical statements in The Theatre and its Double (1938), generally considered “the bible of modern theatre”. Sensory perception and affect are central to Artaud’s theatre. As the host of immunological tropes in his theoretical work shows, in Artaud’s theatre affect reaches the intensity of an epidemic. Instead of trying to fend off the anxiety that pervades modernity with dramatic representations, Artaud aims to physically and affectively immerse his audience in the sensory materiality and perpetual movement of the performance, co-producing spectators that experience themselves as physically and ontologically vulnerable. With Artaud’s notion of theatre as plague, the theatre as a performance of the spectators’ bourgeois politeness comes to an end. The immunitarian border shielding the spectators from contagion and violence or cruelty collapses. It is in his view of life as a universal force and in the use of heterogeneous theatrical tools that Artaud arguably becomes posthumanist.Less

Where Does the Body End? Artaud’s Materialsymbolic Theatre

Hedwig Fraunhofer

in Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning in Modern European Drama

This chapter offers a descriptive reading of Artaud’s most famous play, The Cenci (1935), that respects the materiality and temporality of Artaud’s text, while also including a discussion of the ... More

This chapter offers a descriptive reading of Artaud’s most famous play, The Cenci (1935), that respects the materiality and temporality of Artaud’s text, while also including a discussion of the play’s sparse production history. Breaking down immunitarian walls between self and other, Artaud’s theatre of cruelty provides a performative assemblage of human and nonhuman actors or actants, (human) spectators, non-verbal theatrical tools, and forces and energies that transverses the binary distinction between materiality and mind, aesthetic perception and meaning. Together with Brechtian theatre and the theatre of the absurd, Artaud’s use of space and the mythical and ritual dimension of his theatrical vision constitute the end of “fourth-wall realism,” prefiguring the postdramatic, “dialogue-less” theatre of the 1960s to 90s. Inspiring Deleuze’s view of art, Artaud’s theatre brings us to the limits of what our embodied selves can endure and to the limits of representation, opening the horizon of death. In this sense, as the experience of limits, theatre is again what theatre scholar Una Chaudhuri calls “boundary work”.Less