The Theater in Modernist Thought

How Do You Make Yourself a Theatre without Organs? Deleuze, Artaud and the Concept of Differential Presence

“…on the written word, on distancing abstraction and mediating reflection'. 65 Likewise, Puchner argues that Deleuze's 'speculative theatre without representation' is 'at odds with the actual practices of the theatre as we know it'. 66 The philosopher's manifesto for a new theatre fails to resonate with how existing performance works.…”

“…In both cases, it is important to emphasize the attention paid to language as a means to counterbalance the tendency to conceive the pursuit of nonrepresentational theatre (whether as the theatre without organs, a subtractive theatre of perpetual variation, or the theatre of cruelty) as one that reinstates a dichotomy between language and body, and falls down heavily in favour of the presence of the latter over the alienating power of the former. All three theatres may well be antitextual, as Martin Puchner implies, 35 but only if by 'text' we mean a self-identical script the truth of which must be faithfully reproduced in performance, or a homogenizing force that serves to fix the creativity and variability that Deleuze argues is immanent to language. But they are by no means antiliterary or uninterested in speech as a theatrical element; on the contrary, 'One Less Manifesto' argues that a 'public reading of poems by Gherasim Luca is a complete and marvellous theatrical event'.…”