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Haptic Spectatorship and the Political Life of Cruelty, or, Antonin Artaud “Signaling Through the Flames”

It seems peculiar that Artaud, the twentieth century’s quintessential thinker of cruelty, would open his one book on theatre theory with a fundamentally “moral” concern. Culture, as it stands, and its concomitant construct of “civilization” “tyrannize” by operating externally to the lives that they affect. “Life itself,” in all its profundity, remains both unknown and unsought as those who happen to be living it are allowed only approximate cultural representations (and misrepresentations) of what it could be. In response, Artaud desires a restoration of life by way of a physiologically affective theatre, a Theatre of Cruelty, as he names it, wherein spectatorial experience would become an essential exercise in liberation from the “tyrannical” culture of the interbellum French bourgeoisie—its art, politics, social codes, modes of production, and so on, all of which remain formally, spatially, and temporally cordoned off from any firsthand experience of the fullness of life. Taking as its primary task the subversion of bourgeois culture’s removal from life, Artaud’s theatre refuses its artistic inheritance while striving for the unthinkable: a perfect “coincidence” with—and ontological indistinguishability from—something called “life.” The one doubles the other, but as neither representation nor simulacrum, neither mirror nor shroud; rather, this staged doubling must make it seem as though it is in fact life that doubles the theatre (as the book’s title overtly suggests) and, as such, becomes empowered and allowed to emerge amongst the stale confabulations of “civilized” culture’s more intellective or psychological pursuits. What the theatre