448
PARTISAN REVIEW
would
neither
refer us to preexistent texts (or to an implicit psychological
unity)
nor
merely transfer the cult of total presence from abstract sources
behind the scenes to the physical elements of theater themselves. As we may
see in looking at some contemporary examples, it's possible to conceive of a
nonpsychological and a nontextual theater in terms of a certain
inadequacy
between dramatic presence and dramatic significance. The significance,
however, would be literally nowhere, neither in the theater nor out of it;
its nature would be more a question of positioning than of content. That is,
nothing would ever be designed to centralize-and capsulize-dramatic
meaning for us. All the physical elements of theater would be both excessive
and inadequate: either charged with energies untranslatable into sense, or
de-emphasized in ways designed to make us constantly look elsewhere. And
this decentralization of theatrical presence forces the spectator to abandon
a fixed , fetishistic attention to actors' bodies which, it could be argued, has
provided the principal erotic pleasure of traditional theater.
Repetition has various modes, but it is inconceivable that repetition
itself be abolished. The mode which haunts Artaud, and which he tries so
desperately to eliminate, both in the theater and his own being, might be
thought of as a vertical or transcendental repetition. Phenomena repeat the
source from which they derive, and ontologically, the phenomenal world
is inferior to its origins and causes. Performance is subordinate to texts;
behavior merely illustrates character. There are viable alternatives to this
sort of repetition, but it would be difficult to overemphasize its powerful,
if
frightening, appeal. As I suggested earlier, the connection between indi–
viduality, death, and character-formation on the one hand and, on the
other, repetition as a falling away from an origin ideally present to itself
would seem to be a biologically authenticated connection. Artaud pro–
foundly saw that to reject derivation implies a "refusal" of birth and of
defecation. We
are
a dropping away from an origin, which we relive, in
fantasy, as wholly adequate to itself; and in the body's wastes, death seems
to be produced and made immediately visible to the living. The psychology
most natural to us undoubtedly involves us in thinking of visible behavior
as proceeding from and illustrating profound character structures. And the
successful throwing off of this psychology involves a kind of murder. Birth
is a "falling" from above, and so, in a sense, is vertical derivation. (The
play is a "dechet" from the text; behavior, a "dechet" from our nature) .
Vertical derivation is therefore biologically linked to having parents. For
Artaud to escape from being a "dropping," he must deny his birth, "kill"
his parents. A murder, Derrida writes, is always at the origin of cruelty–
murder of the parent, of the all-powerful Logos behind the theatrical scene,
and, of course, murder of God. Ultimately, only deicide restores the dignity
