1

THEATRE POWER SUBJECT

On Dragan ivadinovs Elizabethan Trilogy
Bojan Anelkovi
Translated by Polona Petek

After five years, Dragan ivadinov has completed his cycle of five performances based on the
Elizabethan Trilogy (Tri elizabetinske tragedije) by Croatian playwright Vladimir Stojsavljevi. This is a
fairly extensive theatre project, which has brought together more than 30 actors from various
theatres all over Slovenia, with which the stylistic metamorphoses of the post-gravitational trio
ivadinov-Zupani-Turi has wandered through various scenes of Slovenian scientific-artistic as well
as commercial-economic institutions, including the factory. Lets recall: in April 2008, the last part of
Stojsavljevis trilogy, The Forbidden Theatre (Prepovedano gledalie), was staged at the Ljubljana
Exhibition and Convention Centre (Gospodarsko razstavie). This was followed by the prologue,
tellingly entitled Love::State::Avatar (Ljubezen::Drava::Avatar), which was staged in autumn of the
same year in the Atrium of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC
SAZU). In 2009, the first part of Stojsavljevis trilogy, Marlowe, was staged in the fermentation hall
of the Union Brewery. In 2011, with his staging of the central drama of the trilogy, Love and
Sovereignty (Ljubezen in drava), possibly the most important Slovenian director appeared on the
mainstage of SNG Drama Ljubljana for the very first (and, according to him, also the very last) time.
And finally, in January this year, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, we could see the
final act of this cycle, Sovereignty::R.III.Epilogue (Drava::R.III.Epilog), which, like the prologue, was
staged in a fairly intimate atmosphere, for 30 select spectators.
Theatre and State
The key text, which made this five-year-long theatrical journey worthwhile, is no doubt Love and
Sovereignty, which ivadinov has tackled before. He tried to stage it at the very beginning of his
career, precisely 30 years ago, as his final production at the Ljubljana Academy of Theatre, Radio,
Film and Television (AGRFT); however, just before graduating, he radically quit the academy with the
2
text he titled A Letter to Fake Teachers (Pismo lanim uiteljem). The drama Love and Sovereignty
also served as the textual basis for the performance Inhabited Sculpture One Against One (Naseljena
skulptura ena proti ena) from 1995, which is the first performance of his 50-year-long project
Noordung 19952045.
1
As we know, the first reprise of this premire performance took place only in
2005, in the hydrolab of the Yuri A. Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Moscows Star City; and
the next the second reprise will take place in 2015, at the Cultural Centre of European Space
Technologies (Kulturno sredie evropskih vesoljskih tehnologij/KSEVT) in Vitanje. And so on, every
10 years, until the fifth and the last reprise in 2045, as planned by the script, when the bodies of
dead actors will be replaced by technological substitutes and their spoken lines from Love and
Sovereignty will be translated into electronic rhythms and melodies. The whole thing is supposed to
end with the setting up of an art satellite in equatorial orbit, 35,000 kilometres away from the planet
Earth, and with ivadinov committing suicide in outer space. The self-evident question to be asked
here is, of course: Why did ivadinov choose to work precisely with this text practically throughout
his entire (artistic) life?
There can be several reasons, of course, but here, we will try to limit ourselves to two, which seem of
key importance. First, even though the title of Stojsavljevis text is Love and Sovereignty, the drama
in fact deals with the relation between art and power and could just as well be titled Theatre and
Sovereignty, which could even be more fitting apropos its content. Here, then, we are dealing with
the relation that is set up, in The First Sister Letter of the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre (Gledalie
sester Scipion Nasice), as the fundamental starting point of ivadinovs retrogardistic period and, at
the same time, of all his subsequent techno- and post-gravitational metamorphoses: Theatre
between the spectator and the actor does not exist. Theatre is not empty space. Theatre is state.
2

However, the relation between theatre and sovereignty can be just another name for numerous
other relations: between art and politics, the subject and power, fiction and reality, the symbolic
and the real, the virtual and the actual, and so on. The second, equally important reason for this text
being chosen as the dramatic basis for a 50-year-long theatre project is the fact that this is a drama
set in the country and the time of the birth of modern theatre, that is, in England at the turn of the
16th century. Namely, if one of the key reasons for the Noordung project to be conceived as a 50-
year-long process is theatrical demonstration of a break with such a traditional model of theatre,
which is based on the dramatic text that is to say, a break that transpires in processual annihilation

1
I discuss the project Noordung 19952045 in detail in the article The Technodispositifs of the Theatre Time
Machine Noordung (Tehnodispozitivi konceptualnega asovnega stroja Noordung), Maska, nos. 143144,
Ljubljana 2011, pp. 7077.
2
The First Sister Letter (Prvo sestrsko pismo) of the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre, available online at
http://www.krstpodtriglavom.org/ [last accessed 30 March 2013].
3
of such a theatre which drama could be more fitting than the one whose centre is occupied by the
most (in)famous playwright of all time, William Shakespeare himself?
It is by no means a coincidence that Antonin Artaud who is undoubtedly ivadinovs central
theatrical reference in all phases of his creative career in the programme of his theatre of cruelty,
too, plans to stage, among other things, texts from the Elizabethan period: We shall stage, without
regard for text: 1. An adaptation of a work from the time of Shakespeare, a work entirely consistent
with our present troubled state of mind, whether one of the apocryphal plays of Shakespeare []. 9.
Works from the Elizabethan theatre stripped of their text and retaining only the accoutrements of
period, situations, characters, and action.
3
And yet, while one of the basic purposes of the 50-year-
long performance is precisely such a demonstrative annihilation of the dramatic text through
processual replacement of the deceased actors lines with music, the Elizabethan Trilogy project set
itself a completely different, at first glance even diametrically opposed task: to stage precisely this
drama in full and verbatim, from the beginning to the end, almost without any intervention into the
original text. Even more, what needed to be staged was not only the drama Love and Sovereignty,
but in fact Stojsavljevis Elizabethan Trilogy in its entirety, and complemented with ivadinovs
Prologue and Epilogue, so that the whole thing now comprises nine hours of a virtual monster of a
performance, which may even be actualised in the near or not-so-near future, depending on
funding and the availability of several actors. It is very important, and for ivadinov rather unusual,
that talking on stage is all but incessant throughout these nine hours. Just as it is remarkable that
ivadinov in this project set himself another, equally unusual restriction: to stay firmly within the so-
called black box for the entire duration of the project, which means that the boundary between
the audience and the actors remains physically practically intact throughout these nine hours.
The Order of Thing
Why, after 30 years, does ivadinov trample his own fundamental principles so radically, why does he
put a dramatic text verbatim on stage? Why does he need to do this? The first among many possible
answers is, once again, the one offered by Artaud: this is simply in a spirit of reaction against our
principles and as an example of what can be drawn from a formal text in terms of the stage.
4
And
second, ivadinov, of course, does not put any old text on stage but precisely the text that he intends
to annihilate processually and demonstratively through a 50-year-long process.

3
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty (First Manifesto), in: Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double,
New York: Grove Press, 1958, pp. 99100.
4
Cf. ibid.
4
To be sure, the cruelty of the Artaudian or ivadinovian theatrical vision is based on the constant
effort to replace the poetry of language with the poetry in space which is expressed not only with
words, but rather with all the means of expression utilizable on the stage, such as music, dance,
plastic art, pantomime, mimicry, gesticulation, intonation, architecture, lighting, and scenery.
5

However, this does not mean that language and speech are depreciated in their theatrical
approaches quite the opposite. When Artaud writes about speech as one among (and equal to)
many elements on stage, we must understand this tentatively, in the sense of argumentation, which
counters the classic model of theatre, based on the dramatic text; the sheer amount of attention that
he dedicates to language in his programmatic texts reveals that language is of key importance to him.
And when ivadinov implements his 50-year-long processual replacement of the spoken text of the
drama with electronic rhythms and melodies, this is not simply annihilation of spoken language but
rather its translation into a different language, an invention of another and different theatrical
language, beyond reason, beyond everyday words and their meanings the language of machines,
which is also the language of the unconscious.
6
In such a theatre, language of one kind or another
cannot be annihilated for one simple reason: in the kind of theatre, which does not want to
represent, but rather to repeat and thus to double the world and life, there must be things as well
as words, there must be the visible as well as the speakable as the two poles of knowledge, which, as
Foucault has shown with unparalleled clarity, cannot be reduced to one another: And it is in vain
that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space
where they achieve their splendour is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the
sequential elements of syntax.
7

ivadinov has always known how to use this duality and the irreducibility of the heard and the seen;
however, only with the Elizabethan Trilogy has he, perhaps for the first time, actually shown what
one can achieve with words on stage. We are condemned to our senses; however, for now, our
senses do not suffice to see and hear everything that transpires on stage: there is, as always with
ivadinov, too much to see, but the woe of spoken words this time is downright unheard of and
inaudible. Perhaps someone has noticed that, in various performances, many a viewer has closed her
eyes in her attempt to eliminate the visible and thus grasp the spoken. All in vain, though: the highly
stylised syntactic sequences of Stojsavljevis trilogy, additionally artificialized through theatrical

5
Ibid., p. 39.
6
On the link between machines and the unconscious through the concept of desiring machines, see: Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London and New York: Continuum,
2012. See also: Georges Canguilhem, Machine and Organism, Incorporations, New York: Zone Books, pp. 45
69.
7
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, London and New York: Routledge, 1989, p. 8.
5
intonation into a completely unnatural mounting cadence, are far from syntactic sequences known to
us from ordinary, everyday language. In this sense, ivadinov remains Artauds faithful student: To
make metaphysics out of a spoken language is to make the language express what it does not
ordinarily express.
8
And as long as words on stage express what they do not ordinarily express, as
long as they transform into echoes of themselves on the actors lips and their sense begins to
resonate with itself, the moving bodies and things on stage can mingle with suprematist-
constructivist projections, which erase the boundaries between them and the stage. Only then can a
veritable theatre begin: when we break and open up words, things and bodies, so they can step out
of themselves to enter into resonant mutual relations, opening one another and surrendering
themselves to one another through an endless game of echoes and reflections of meaning, with
which Magritte so thoroughly fascinated Foucault: Between words and objects one can create new
relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life. And
what Magritte claims in relation to his painting becomes valid for theatre as well: Sometimes the
name of an object takes the place of an image. A word can take the place of an object in reality. An
image can take the place of a word in a proposition.
9

In the sense of such an understanding and use of the audio-visual, ivadinov is unusually close to
contemporary cinema, in the same way that Foucault is close to it.
10
This, of course, does not mean
that ivadinov adopts his theatrical ideas from cinema, but rather that his theatrical ideas traverse
and resonate with the ideas of contemporary cinema. Not unlike Artaud, who believes in cinema,
he believes that cinema can bring about a more profound theatricalization than theatre itself, but he
only believes that for a short time. He soon thinks that theatre is more capable of renewing itself,
and freeing sound powers, then a still limited, over-visual cinema, even if this means that the
theatricalization has to include electronic rather than cinematographic aids.
11

In short, Foucaults lesson applies to any field of knowledge, be it theatre, cinema, painting,
philosophy or something else: things need to be broken, opened up, and at the same time, words

8
Antonin Artaud, op. cit., p. 46.
9
Quoted in Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California
Press, 1982, p. 38.
10
Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 65.
11
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, London: Athlone Press, 1989, p. 191.
6
need to be broken, opened up a repetition, another layer, the return of the same, a catching on
something else, an imperceptible difference, a coming apart and ineluctable tearing open.
12

The Subject and the Mask
13

Listen, whether you are coming or going, whether you are alone. Of course you are not alone. You
are both here. You and your role. This is why the whole thing can start at all,
14
we hear Mateja
Rebolj say on stage; she might be impersonating Dragan ivadinov addressing Lotos parovec, who
plays Richard III who is not even on stage and we do not know whether he is coming at all Or
perhaps he has already been here Maybe he is still here Or is he already here?
What applies to the unconscious, applies to veritable theatre as well: No answers or solutions can
ever be original or definitive: only questions-problems can, in favor of a mask previous to every mask
and of a displacement previous to every place.
15
And what applies to veritable theatre, applies to
life as well: Behind the masks, therefore, are further masks, and even the most hidden is still a
hiding place, and so on to infinity.
16
In other words, there is no I, only its displacements, its masks;
and the subject is nothing but this residue, this surplus, it is precisely this difference between Is, the
difference between masks. However, if the actor as the subject is just the difference between masks,
then his task on stage is precisely to perform this difference. And he can only do this by means of
other masks, their difference, their displacement, by means of a variation in place, voice, intonation.
Since all masks are fictions and simulacra, the actor himself becomes fiction, he is just a simulacrum
of the actor. And when the actor is simulated, the spectators cannot help becoming simulated
spectators. However, when everything turns into simulacra, simulacra become real. Thus, the
theatrical machine produces its own reality, thus it produces its own subject: Of course you are not
alone. You are both here. You and your role. This is why the whole thing can start at all

12
Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel, Paris: Galllimard, 1963. Quoted in: Gilles Deleuze, Breaking Things Open,
Breaking Words Open, Negotiations, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 84.
13
The complex issues of the relationship between the subject and the mask albeit, indeed, not in relation to
theatre but rather Nietzsches philosophy are discussed in depth by Gianni Vattimo in his work Il sogetto e la
maschera: Nietzsche e il problema della liberazione (Milan: Bompiani, 1974).
14
Dragan ivadinov, Sovereignty::R.III.Epilogue (manuscript).
15
Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, London: Continuum, 1994, p. 108. Cf. also: The disguises and
the variations, the masks or costumes, do not come over and above: they are, on the contrary, the internal
genetic elements of repetition itself, its integral and constituent parts. This path would have been able to lead
the analysis of the unconscious towards a veritable theatre. Ibid., pp. 1617.
16
Ibid., p. 106.
7
So what did we, 30 simulated spectators, watch for a good hour and a half of the concluding
performance of the Elizabethan Trilogy on the improvised stage of the not particularly large lecture
theatre at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova? What can we, with certainty, say to have
seen? Did we see seven actresses and one actor playing six women and two men in standard post-
gravitational uniforms? Perhaps. Although the initials D.. obviously refer to Dragan ivadinov, we in
fact cannot claim that Mateja Rebolj impersonated Dragan ivadinov, just as we cannot say with any
certainty that the initials in the title of the performance, Sovereignty::R.III.Epilogue, necessarily refer
to Richard III, for if this were the case, the performance would no doubt be called Richard III. Given
the themes of the performance and the current Slovenian socio-political context, R.III might signify a
third republic of sorts, as some of the creators of the performance have hinted. Perhaps. Even
though the performance deals with events from the past, this would then make it a virtual
sovereignty of the future, in which women rather than men have the final say. Is the concluding part
of the cycle ivadinovs ultimate feminist gesture? Is Mateja Rebolj Dragan ivadinov becoming
woman becoming Mateja Rebolj becoming Dragan ivadinov becoming Joica Avbelj, Gorka Berden,
Barbara Cerar, Arna Hadialjevi, Marua Majer, who are all together becoming Vladimir
Stojsavljevis text? If, in the prologue entitled Love::Sovereignty::Avatar, the person whose name in
real life is Vladimir Stojsavljevi, standing next to the person whose name in real life is Dragan
ivadinov, utters the words My name is Dragan ivadinov then what is the name of the person
standing next to him if not Vladimir Stojsavljevi? Through the staging of the Elizabethan Trilogy, is
Slovenian director Dragan ivadinov becoming Croatian playwright Vladimir Stojsavljevi or vice
versa? Is ivadinov, together with Stojsavljevi, becoming the pregnant Tjaa eleznik, who is going
to give birth to Lotos Vincenc parovec, who will have to become animal to be able to give birth to
Richard III, who will become sovereignty becoming theatre that is ivadinov?
17
Perhaps this is also
possible if the Roman numeral III in the title reminds one of the letter as written in the Cyrillic
alphabet, which has become ivadinovs standard signifier, which he even uses as his signature,
probably to honour the fame and glory of the Russian avant-garde. Perhaps. Does, then, perhaps the
signifier R.III conceal ivadinov himself, who, after four years of writing the text of the concluding
drama, has identified with it to such an extent that Richard III has become Richard ivadinov? Are we
dealing here with the type of theatre that wishes to bring down the boundaries between text and
context, as suggested by the digital text that was wandering around the stage in nearly all
performances of the Elizabethan cycle? If so, are the bodies put on stage so they could stage another
body, a different one, perhaps Artauds body without organs, the third body, that of the

17
On becoming-other, see the chapter Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible in:
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London and New York:
Continuum, University of Minnesota, 1987.
8
protagonist or master of ceremonies, who passes through all the other bodies?
18
Has the woe of
the spoken, poeticised words of the Elizabethan Trilogy come crashing down on the spectators so as
to show us that there exists an equality between words and the world, between the inside and the
outside, and that journeying into space is in fact journeying through ones own mind?
What if none of the numerous possible interpretations is correct, or if all these and other
interpretations are valid only if they are valid simultaneously like the five performances of
ivadinovs Elizabethan Trilogy, which do not follow one another chronologically, but rather, in a
sense, transpire simultaneously?
Difference and Repetition
Lets pay attention to apparent illogicalities, or rather, to the fact that the circle, which the
concluding performance of the cycle rounds off, is far from perfect. We are summing up what we
said at the beginning. Even though the Elizabethan Trilogy has three parts, ivadinov directed five
performances over a period of five years, adding his own prologue and epilogue to Stojsavljevis
trilogy. He first staged the third part, then the prologue, followed by the first part. According to
ivadinovs announcements in 2011, prior to the premiere in SNG Drama Ljubljana, the second part
of the trilogy was supposed to end the whole thing. However, he then added this more-than-
important epilogue. If you think, chronologically speaking, things could not be more confusing, you
are wrong, for the epilogue is in fact set at the beginning of the story, that is, before the Elizabethan
Trilogy, in the year 1483, when Richard III began his reign.
And since Stojsavljevis trilogy deals with the relation between theatre and sovereignty at the time
of the birth of modern theatre, ivadinovs concluding drama is set in a mythological time before
its birth. Thus, we are placed in the ultimate Artaudian zone: We have not been born yet, there is no
world, / things have not been created, we have not found meaning yet [] dance / and, therefore,
theatre / do not exist yet.
19
And even time does not exist, at least not as the linear time that we are
familiar with; we find ourselves in a time in which all times the past, the present, and the future
are present simultaneously. Namely, the final act cannot be considered independently, on its own,
because it inscribes itself retroactively into all the performances of the cycle, and it does so by virtue
of the performances that reflect one another, so the final act writes itself through their repetition.
This is why it was necessary for Arna Hadialjevi, who plays Lady H. (and who knows whether, at the

18
Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, op. cit., p. 190.
19
Antonin Artaud, Pesmi-teksti, Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 2010, p. 12.
9
end of the final performance, it was the actress or her role speaking), to go through the fragments of
the other roles speech and thus skim over and, in a sense, repeat all roles and the whole Epilogue
while, at the same time, repeating and changing all roles and performances of ivadinovs
Elizabethan Trilogy. As for the third time in which the future appears, this signifies that the event
and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self, [] what the self has become
equal to is the unequal in itself.
20
Only through such an impersonal dimension of the future, which
Deleuze defines as the third synthesis of time, which, however, is in a sense always present in the
present, for it is always present in every moment, can we understand the following statement by
ivadinov: That is why there is no past and no future, only the absolute present! Theatre is the
absolute present!
21
However, this statement, of course, applies not only to the Elizabethan Trilogy,
but to ivadinovs uvre in general, for this statement is a manifesto declaration of the post-
gravitational theatre of the future.
Not the sheer simple repetition without difference, but rather the complex repetition, which
produces small internal difference this is the basic mechanism of veritable theatre, which can be
detected in virtually all performances signed by Dragan ivadinov. The mechanism of difference and
repetition is also the essence of his life project, Noordung, which is conceptualised in such a way that
through complex repetition, which alone can produce difference and bring something new it
stages Nietzsches mysterious idea of the eternal recurrence, which, however, is nothing but another
name for difference and repetition.
22
In other words, the 50-year-long theatrical process Noordung
stages nothing and no one but itself, which is also its deepest meaning: The theatre of repetition is
opposed to the theatre of representation, just as movement is opposed to the concept and to
representation which refers it back to the concept. In the theatre of repetition, we experience pure
forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with
nature and history, with a language which speaks before words, with gestures which develop before
organised bodies, with masks before faces, with spectres and phantoms before characters the
whole apparatus of repetition as a terrible power.
23


20
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., pp. 8990. As regards the three syntheses of time, see the
chapter Repetition for Itself, pp. 70129.
21
Dragan ivadinov, 50 koordinat postgravitacijske umetnosti, 2010, 17
th
coordinate: Spojni mehanizem,
available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/31079708/50-Topics [last accessed 30 March 2013].
22
What is key here is the fact that difference is internal, that is, it is produced through repetition itself. In this
case, the 50-year-long performance through the process of replacing the deceased actors bodies with
technological substitutes and their spoken lines with music produces differences that are a generic part of the
repetition from which they are derived; therefore, the performance produces internal difference within itself.
23
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., p. 10.
10
Which ivadinov? Which Performance? Who could know? ivadinov is his own theatre. The mind is
the universe. Theatre is sovereignty. Sovereignty speaks through the mouth of Richard III. Richard III
fucks Queen Elizabeth. Queen Elizabeth gives birth to Malevichs Black Square. All this in the
Slovenian Museum of Contemporary Art, fictitiously named the Museum of Contemporary Art
Metelkova, even though it is actually located on Maistrova Street. It is the year 1913. We are
watching the performance Victory Over the Sun. It is the year 1483. This is the year in which the
performance you are watching right now is set. It is the year 1983. We are watching ivadinovs
never-staged final production for the academy, Love and Sovereignty. I take a few books, including
the Slovenian translation of Fernando Pessoa, and I put them in a leather bag. The book is called
Psihotipija. My name is Miklav Komelj. The sign on the leather bag reads Star City 1998. My name
is Antonin Artaud. It is the year 2013. You are watching the performance Sovereignty::R.III.Epilogue.
You are watching the Elizabethan Trilogy performance. My name is Vladimir Stojsavljevi. In a
module, we are sliding towards the last partition of the mind. It is true, there is nothing left,
nothing. Magnificent! This means that anything, absolutely anything can begin. Hello, new world!
Lets go! Lets instil soul into it.
24
You are witnessing the final act of the 50-year-long performance
Noordung 19952045. What follows is a planned act: due to the joining process, we are at the
energy centre of the event. There is no space left for our identification; we are universal, for the
joining mechanism is processed by the scheme of systemic planetary organisation.
25
It is 20 April
2045. In ten days, I will be dead. My name is Dragan ivadinov. My name is nobody.
26


Bojan Anelkovi has a Masters degree in Media Studies (ISH) and he is a PhD student in Philosophy
and Theory of Visual Culture (FHS Koper), Head of Open Radio Investigative Platform RADAR, and
Managing Editor of Radio Student.
Abstract: The text offers a philosophical reflection on the cycle of five performances that form the
Elizabethan Trilogy project (20082013) by director Dragan ivadinov. By introducing four conceptual
pairs theatre and sovereignty, words and things, the subject and the mask, and difference and
repetition it also attempts to reflect on ivadinovs entire opus and on the meaning of his theatre.

24
Vladimir Stojsavljevi, Ljubezen in drava, Gledaliki list SNG, Vol. XCI, No. 2, Ljubljana 2011, p. 72.
25
Dragan ivadinov, 50 koordinat, op. cit.
26
In this manner, the I which is fractured according to the order of time and the Self which is divided
according to the temporal series correspond and find a common descendant in the man without name, without
family, without qualities, without Self or I, the plebeian guardian of a secret, the already-Overman whose
scattered members gravitate around the sublime image. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., p.
90.
11
At the centre of attention in the theatre of repetition, which is opposed to the theatre of
representation, there is the relation between theatre, sovereignty and the subject; the author of this
text tries to shed light on this relation by drawing on Antonin Artauds concept of the theatre of
cruelty and possible connections between theatre and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche,
Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
Keywords: theatre of cruelty, art-sovereignty, language of the unconscious, subject-mask, body
without organs, eternal recurrence