A Rethinking of Pinter’s Language and Power from Deleuze’s Affect Theory: The Birthday Party as a Case Study

This article deals with Pinter’s use of language through which he works out his plays, and by which he has become fortunate enough to be part of a school i.e. the Theatre of the Absurd. His true understanding of the realities of everyday language with its ambiguities, irrationalities, inconsistencies, and fragmentations by which he has featured his stage has spawned him the recurrent term “Pinteresque language” among notable critics. This paper draws on Gilles Deleuze’s affect conceptual tool to investigate those strong mutual relations of language and extra-linguistic forces in The Birthday Party. To do so, the researchers entail looking to Pinter’s myriad performances or/and a representation of power. Focus is put on how Pinter’s scholarship of language in the play under study is grounded on the notion of affect as a useful means which engenders references of sensation of the “Pinteresque” i.e. the ability to join the words as they are spoken to the action and image of his characters