Theatricality Beyond Disciplines

This transdisciplinary study expands on theories of theatricality beyond performance studies and into poetry, media technology, translation studies, critical and psychoanalytic theory. Builds upon Antonin Artaud’s elaboration of the theatre as a plague, disrupting pre-established fields of knowledge, power and accepted representational categories. A radical rethinking of theatricality as a disruptive force that unsettles knowledge and redefines the boundaries between theory and performance. In Theatricality Beyond Disciplines, Amin Erfani expands the concept of theatricality beyond the stage, tracing its destabilizing power through literature, psychoanalysis, media and philosophy. Drawing on Artaud’s vision of theatre as an unpredictable, contagious force – what he called 'the return of the repressed' – the book rejects the Aristotelian idea of theatre as a space of healing. Instead, it frames it as an unsettling intervention into systems of power and meaning. Through close readings of Artaud, Genet, Novarina, Koltès and theorists like Freud, Barthes and Derrida, Erfani reveals how theatricality operates primarily in the aural rather than the visual mode, inciting paranoia, psychic contamination and ruptures in language. A provocative challenge to disciplinary boundaries, this book is for any student or scholar interested in examining the relationship between theatre and theoretical discourse, posing theatricality as a site of radical otherness and transformation. Amin Erfani is professor of French language and literature at the City University of New York. This book expands on theories of 'theatricality' in French and critical studies, adopting a transdisciplinary approach that reaches beyond performance studies into poetry, media technology, translation and psychoanalytic theory. Building on Artaud’s concept of theatre as a 'plague' – an unpredictable, cataclysmic and contagious force that disrupts power structures and knowledge – the book challenges Aristotelian norms of theatre as a medium of 'healing' and 'teaching'. Instead, theatricality emerges as a force of radical disruption, what Artaud called 'the return of the repressed', demanding openness to otherness. The chapters present theatricality as primarily aural rather than visual, inciting 'paranoiac listening', invoking unretrievable 'primal scenes', and allowing unconscious 'psychic' contamination. 'Theatricality' is explored through works by Artaud, Genet, Novarina and Koltès, but also Freud, Barthes, Kristeva, Girard and Derrida. Each writer challenges the premises of their own artistic genres and fields of study, questioning binary systems like artistic production versus theoretical articulation, the technological versus the natural, and art versus life. As shown, these binaries underpin mechanisms of repression, sacrificial violence and the exclusion of the voiceless other. The book assigns a generative function to traditionally maligned notions like unintelligibility, madness, marginality, contagion and criminality.