The Theater of the plague

On April 6, 1933, Antonin Artaud delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne that would be published a year later under the title Theatre and the Plague. While in Berlin, the Nazis in power were organizing the first major anti-Semitic demonstrations, triggering what psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich would later call the “emotional plague,” a contagion of unanimous gestures producing a potentially deadly political adherence, the poet gave voice to a sumptuous derangement of language, unfolding between plague and theatre.

Both once found their cardinal setting in Avignon — its Palais des papes, its Festival. At a time when we are realizing that we may be paying the political price for having said nothing about the Covid pandemic, despite it dominating all our conversations, can this place be politically reactivated? This is the question we will explore in this talk, which will take on — if not the form, then at least the hope — of a future performance.

A conference by Patrick Boucheron, historian and professor at the Collège de France