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 destabilising power through literature, psychoanalysis, media, and philosophy. Drawing on Artaud's vision of theatre as an unpredictable, contagious force—what he called "the return of the repressed"—the book rejects the Aristotelian idea of theatre 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 theatre and theoretical discourse, posing theatricality as a site of radical otherness and transformation.