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.
By:
Amin Erfani
Imprint: Intellect Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 244mm,
Width: 170mm,
ISBN: 9781835951736
ISBN 10: 1835951732
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 17 November 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
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
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.
