Performing (the Subject of) Exteriority: Virtuality, Mimesis and the Gratuitous ‘One Must’

Abstract

Why is it that, despite all the efforts of the Virtual, the world has become more Real? One key to this problematic arrives with Antonin Artaud, who envisioned the ethos of his theatre in the aftermath of the First World War and the 1918 flu pandemic, at a time when the Western societies’ self-image based on anthropocentric rationality was beginning to recover from a series of severe crises. The genesis and the fundamental metaphor of this ethos dates back to the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720, which, along with the Lisbon earthquake, fuelled the debate on theodicy and the ensuing rational worldview of the Enlightenment, a stance influenced by the truth-oriented outlooks of antiquity and the Renaissance.¹ Antedating the rational civil society it strives to deconstruct, Artaud’s theatre pursues an irrational/ecstatic performance qua a compulsion without politics or societal function. It articulates a forced synthesis of the stage and the audience, manifest in the frantic gesturing of the last surviving plague victim who embodies a subjectivity made performative only by an apocalyptic must, a virtual performance or tekhnē² of exteriority disguising the end of the world. This chapter revisits the gratuitousness characteristic of Artaud’s theoretical (ir)rationale and reads it against the anthropocentric problematic of the Virtual³ as well as the views of mimesis from Plato and Aristotle to Lacoue-Labarthe, Weber and Lindberg that condition and challenge the theories and modes of human representation in Western performance.