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A Derridean Perspective on Poststructural Theater

In: English and Literature

Submitted By cleopat
Words 476
Pages 2
In an attempt to challenge the western tradition of theater, Antonin Artaud shows a clear innovation regarding issues of spectacle, representation, thought and so on. Derrida‘s reading of the Artaudian insights initiates a project of scrutiny and exemplifies processes of negating and affirming. Jacques Derrida, in his essay, "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation", raises the overarching question, whether a poststructural theater is possible or not.
Theater is known for the necessity of being performed in front of spectators instead of being limited only to reading. This very nature of theater encounters many changes in regard to matters about whether the writing of the text should precede its performance or vice versa and whether it is supposed to communicate its meaning to spectators’ minds or senses. Artaud's theatrical spectacle comes to sort out these problems. In an essay entitled ’’ This Extreme and Difficult Sense of Spectacular Representation’’: Antonin Artaud’s Ontology of ’’ Live’’, Deborah Levitt concludes that the peculiarity of this spectacle resides in its aim to ’’speak to the senses of its spectators’’. This tendency bears within itself the germs of a poststructral belief toward language. In fact, language is no longer the medium of instructing the minds as a result of the skepticism that poststructuralists show to the linguistic field. Thus, Artaud stands ahead of the group saying that theatre has not to work on our mind but rather on our senses. In this respect, it is relevant to draw on the conception of theatrical language for Artaud : it is not verbal, but rather visual. This new shape of language goes along with Artaudian concern of embarking on his objective ’’to arrest on our sensibility’’ (Derrida). It is only through this visual language that ’’Artaud embeds visibility in a ‘pure sensibility’’’, in Levitt’s words. However, this interest in sensibility and senses is not at random, but it can be explained by the belief that the primary aim of theater of cruelty is to shock. More precisely, everything should put and enacted on stage in order to shock the spectators, and herein lies the entymology of theater of cruelty which depends much on the two components of stage and spectator. Perhaps it is logical to reach such conclusions since the first thing Artaud forgrounds from the beginning is that ’’theater will no longer be governed by a text’’ (Levitt). Indeed, the decentralization of writing gives priority to a whole body of speech which has been largely discriminated on the one hand, and falls under the headings of the Derridean project of removing any center on the other hand. This premise makes Antonin Artaud ‘’the object of a passionate admiration’’ for Derrida, but this does not negate the possibility of being his ’’painful enemy’’ as the two theorists seem not to go in the same direction about how a poststructural theater would be

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