Theatre for the Dead
Abstract
This article refers to the famous question of the politicization versus aestheticization of art, recently discussed by Boris Groys in terms of usefulness and uselessness, or “design” and “art proper,” and, by criticizing Croys’ dualist approach, shows that in the biopolitical framework of contemporary ideology, the usefulness and uselessness pass into each other and thus create a circle within which any art is presented as individual or social therapy, or a sort of phármakon that is both poison and cure.
In search for another conception of art, the article addresses to some radical avantgarde conceptions of theatre, such as Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death, and, reflecting through the ways of recombining elements and principles of what Alain Badiou characterized as a “leftist threat” for the theatre, demonstrates a rational political kernel of their destructive force.
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