Theatricality Beyond Disciplines

A radical rethinking of theatricality as a disruptive force that unsettles knowledge and redefines the boundaries between theory and performance. 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    

About the Author :
Dr. Amin Erfani is a scholar of French and Francophone literature, a translator of contemporary and avant-garde theater, and an author of dramatic plays. He is a professor of French language and literature at the City University of New York, USA.