Artaud-Heliogábalo: carnaval, crueldade e profanação

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the theme of politics in the work of writer and playwright Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), especially in Heliogabalus; or the Crowned Anarchist (1934). Artaud has been studied in recent decades in the human sciences, above all on the basis of his theatrical, literary and cinematographic experiences, but there is little debate about his political contributions; nor is Heliogabalus focused on. So, beyond its purely aesthetic characteristics, it’s worth appropriating what this text gives us to know politically. In this sense, the narrative about the life of the young Roman emperor reveals in a privileged way a unique perspective of what the political phenomenon is – it is not only the struggle between the “parties” and the domain of the state, but it is also the composition of languages, rites and scenic acts. In order to properly realise this line of argument, I studied the corpus through thematic analysis, as well as writing a text of an essayistic nature: therefore, in the movement of thought, I tried to bring together discreetly separated elements into a readable whole, like a carpet. I argue that in the space of Heliogabalus the process of carnivalization – as conceptualised by Mikhail Bakhtin – appears as a central political element. Furthermore, the interaction of the living example of the crowned anarchist with the ideas of the Theatre of Cruelty, on the one hand, and with Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of oikonomia and profanation, on the other, has proved fruitful in terms of thinking about a deeply ritualised, theatrical political practice that produces a language of physical signs.