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.
