Artaud’s Plague Theatre: Catharsis as Performance

Abstract

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, I intend to reread “The Theatre and the Plague,” one of Antonin Artaud’s most famous essays on theatre included in The Theatre and Its Double. In this manifesto, Artaud started sketching out his new vision for theatre, the Theatre of Cruelty, which he would begin experimenting with in the mid-1930s but would only later fully put into practice after World War II and his return to Paris in the late 1940s. In “The Theatre and the Plague,” Artaud compares and even assimilates theatre to plague. By doing so, he revisits the philosophical concept of catharsis in a transgressive manner and revamps it for the contemporary practices of performance and body art. This text corresponds to one of Artaud’s first and many interventions in the field of psychoanalysis. It helps us reflect on epidemics by highlighting their psychic effects while bringing to light certain overlooked medical truths. This staging of epidemics opens new venues for performance beyond traditional settings such as Artaud’s body art: intermedia therapeutic rituals aiming at the transformation of the body.

Keywords:

• Theatre
• epidemic
• catharsis
• Antonin Artaud
• performance
• body art

Notes

1 See Anaïs Nin, The Journals of Anaïs Nin, London, Owen, 1966, 1, pp. 191–192.

2 Ellen MacKay already noted Artaud’s resemblance to a coroner (in Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England, The U of Chicago P, 2011, p. 88).

3 See Plato, Republic, translated by Christopher Rowe, Penguin, 2012, pp. 975–976.

4 See Anat Matar, Modernism and the Language of Philosophy, Oxfordshire, Routledge, 2006, pp. 45–69.

5 See Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London, Hogarth Press, 1953, 20: pp. 260–264; pp. 19–22.

6 See Sylvère Lotringer, Mad like Artaud, Univocal, 2015, pp. 176–177.

7 See Ellen MacKay, p. 85.

8 See Amanda Di Ponio, The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles: Artaud and Influence, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, p. 6.

9 See Antonin Artaud, Collected Works, Oxford, Calder and Boyars, 1968, 2:28.

10 Both Jennifer Cooke (in Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 44) and Ellen MacKay have respectively made a case for the plague’s theatricality and the plague as performance.

11 See Jane Goodall, “Cure and Care,” Antonin Artaud and the Modern Theatre, Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1994, p. 55.

12 See Walter Pagel, Paracelsus; an Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, Basel, S. Karger, 1958, pp. 172–173.

13 See Edward McSweegan, “Infectious Diseases and Mental Illness: Is There a Link?” Emerging Infectious Disease Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1998, pp. 123–124; Robert Yolken and Torrey Fuller, “Are Some Cases of Psychosis Caused by Microbial Agents? A Review of the Evidence,” Molecular Psychiatry, Vol. 13, No. 5, 2008, pp. 470–479.

14 Ian Sample, “Warning of Serious Brain Disorders in People with Mild Coronavirus Symptoms,” The Guardian, 8 July 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/08/warning-of-serious-brain-disorders-in-people-with-mild-covid-symptoms. Accessed 29 Oct. 2020.

15 I use parasite in a metaphorical sense. According to the site of the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “[a] parasite is an organism that lives on or in a host organism and gets its food from or at the expense of its host.” Hence, while all pathogen agents are not parasites, I suggest that these categories are more porous than it seems and are interconnected. For a consideration of host manipulation by parasites, see Herbison, Lagrue, and Poulin (“The Missing Link in Parasite Manipulation of Host Behaviour,” Parasites & Vectors, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2018, p. 222).

16 This is an apparent paradox which Artaud’s body art shares with those commented by Amelia Jones (“‘Presence’ in Absentia,” Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4, 1997, p. 12). I concur with her that such a relationship to repetition, recording and technique bolsters the challenge of institutional art, traditional practices and media separation while allowing for a greater liberty of expression and diffraction of the self.

17 Antonin Artaud, Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper, Museum of Modern Art, 1996, p. 78.

18 Amelia Jones, Body art/performing the subject, U of Minnesota P, 1998, p. 39.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maxime Philippe

Maxime Philippe is an Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Languages at Shanghai University. He is a specialist of theatre, Francophone literature and critical theory. He has written several articles about Antonin Artaud’s re-appropriation of art-therapy in his performances. He also wrote on Proust, on Édouard Glissant and on Caribbean ecocriticism. His most recent article for South Central Review discusses the necessity to re-read Proust.