Deleuze and Artaud: Anti-Representational Theater

Although Gilles Deleuze\u27s philosophy continuously addresses the theater, his goal is not to create a kind of philosophical theater that would imply a fusion of theater and philosophy, but to formulate the equivalent of theater in philosophy itself. He wants to challenge the concept of theater as representation – to avoid the theater of representation in the sense of a traditional theater that cannot get out of the trap of false representation of some kind of identical ideal. Deleuze wants to confront the regime of repetition with a virtuous new world of infinite multiplicities, a series of differences that cannot be controlled by placing them under any kind of identity. For Deleuze, theater is not representative, but offers opportunities for encounters with the non-representative force of "continuous variation" or difference-in-itself. Deleuze finds this in Artaud\u27s theater of cruelty, which for Deleuze represents a theater of multiplicity that is in all respects opposed to a theater of representation