Distributed for Intellect Ltd
Theatricality Beyond Disciplines
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 theater as an unpredictable, contagious force—what he called “the return of the repressed”—the book rejects the Aristotelian idea of theater 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 suits any student or scholar interested in examining the relationship between theater and theoretical discourse, posing theatricality as a site of radical otherness and transformation.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Theatricality, the Pandemic, & the Scapegoat
Theatricality & the Concept
Theatricality & the Metaphor
Framing Theatricality
Theatricality & New Media
Theatricality & the Pandemic
Theatricality & Pharmakos
Theatricality & Festivals
Theatricality & the Abject
Chapter 1:Artaud’s Contagious Cries: Virtuality as Aurality
The Viceroy’s Dream
Aurality in the Age of New Media
Chapter 2: Secular Prayers: Jean Genet
Genet’s “The Criminal Child”
Writing Death: Suitcases, Circus, & Cemeteries
Chapter 3: The Stage of the Infant Tongue: Mimesis, Psychoanalysis, & the Avant-Garde
The Split Scene of Mimesis
Sigmund Freud: The ‘Psychopathic’ Theater
The “Other Scene” vs. the “Primal Scene”
Beyond Neurosis and into the ‘Barbaric’
Valère Novarina: Beyond the “Primal Scene”
Chapter 4: Monstrous Tongues: On Foreignness in the Theater of Bernard-Marie Koltès
The Drive to Become ‘Other’: Life as Text
Speaking ‘Foreign’: Monstruous Monologues
Citing the Silent Tongue: “The Night Just Before the Forests”
Language As Skin: “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”
Chapter 5: The End of “Theory” is Only its Beginning: of “Theatricality” in Jacques Derrida’s Circumfession
Pneuma: Burnt Signification
The Hypertext
Learned Ignorance
La Langue crue & The “Labor of Theory”
Afterword