Jean-Luc Nancy

Body-theatre

Each time I come into the world, that is to say every day, my eyelids open onto
something that cannot be called a spectacle, for I am already caught by it, mixed into
it, carried along it by all forces of my body which moves forward towards this world,
incorporates its space, its directions, its resistances, its openings, and moves within
this perception; I am only the viewpoint starting from which this perceiving which is
also an action can be organised. Like all points, the starting point is without
dimensions. And we know that it is the blind spot around which are disposed all the
perspectives, relations, the close and the distant. The obscure vanishing point which
stays in the back of myself, but 'back' in the sense of 'in the back of the room', at a
backside that I could represent to myself as being a point, or so to say a non-space
situated just behind the space which develops as my head, my skull, my back; it is
everything that is below oneself in such a way that the perceiving and acting body
knows that it is carried and projected from there.

From this point of view, the spectacle is not possible, and there is only
engagement and mixup with the world, attractions and repulsions, crossings and
obstructions, captures and losses, seizures and relinquishments. Being in the world is
the very contrary of being at a spectacle. It is being within, not in front. Besides, what
we, even outside of the philosophic circles, are used to calling "being-in-the-world",
is the translation of the German in der Welt sein, by which Heidegger tries to signify
an in which is precisely not an in of inclusion – of a subject in a pre-existing world –
but an in of belonging together of the two in the mode of what he calls "thrownness" –
Geworfensein, in which one should hear at the same time the gesture of throwing and
projecting into the very fall that makes us "find ourselves here", and the sketch –

1
Entwurf – the projection of a possible gesture and bearing of existing – for existence
itself is nothing else than the unceasing putting into play of one's own sketches.

I make this small detour by Heidegger only in order to mark that in the most
powerful insistence on the priority of the "being-in" – of being insofar as it is
abandoned, thrown, destined, mobilised in its being by the very fact of being – we are
as little concerned as possible by the phenomena of representation: representation
requires a "subject" to which it could happen, although in regard to the existent itself
the subject can only be perfectly secondary, derived and limited (for instance the
subject of knowledge, the subject of a conception or a vision). Insofar as it is the
question of separating as deeply as possible the order of existence from the orders of
knowing, representing, figuring and also of measuring and evaluating, in order to
bring them all back to the condition of existing – the point is not to deny them but to
show their ultimate condition –, it is necessary to take heed of something that has
started irrevocably: in our age, the "subject" has "driven off" like Rimbaud's
peninsulas, its moorings are untied and it has broken away from its "ancient parapets",
and it has been thrown and projected towards another moment of its very singular
destiny, the infinite destination of which we – we and the world – are.

On the other hand, this sending without reserve or return does not prevent us
from noting that this description of existing lacks something. Nothing prevents us
from pointing out this lack, and we are on the contrary very precisely and insistently
driven to do it. We can put it very simply: existence also wants to put itself on stage.
This is a part of its project, of its projection or of its thrownness. This is a part of its
being-in-the-world.

No doubt, Heidegger does not ignore this – it would be too easy to attribute
such short-sightedness to him. Nevertheless, he never thematises the necessity of
staging as such. No doubt it is implied in the attention he gives to art in general and in
particular to poetry, but this attention never touches theatre. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
underlined this point: it was for him a crucial element of the distance that he wanted
to keep within his proximity with Heidegger. He noted in particular that theatre did
not play any role in Heidegger's reflections on Hölderlin, while it is self-evident that

2
theatre was very important for the translator of Sophocles and the author of the
tragedy The Death of Empedocles.

I will not pursue this line of questions any further; they belong to Lacoue-
Labarthe. They remain his. But they give me an indication: the existent wants to put
itself on stage, and this will (desire, drive, as you like) belongs to existence itself.
Later on we will try to justify the second proposition, if we can. For the time being,
we will examine the first one.

And let us go back to the scene of my coming into the world. Each time it
happens, that is to say every day, my eyelids do not open only onto the non-spectacle
of the perceived, experienced, acted world. At the same time they also open onto the
obscurity that I first called a blind spot at the back of myself or behind myself: they
do not open in this way for me, for my look, but for the possible look of another, of a
multitude of others. It is a possible look, no doubt it is an indisputable look, because
even in my deepest solitude I belong to this multitude of others. I belong to it at least
as the one who knows that it is not possible for me to see the thing that comes out
when the small double curtain rises: my own look. In this way I am like a spectator
who has not been able to get a place in the theatre and who nevertheless knows what
s/he misses: inside of the closed space, the back leaning against the obscurity of the
rest of the city, the curtain rises on a scene, that is to say, on the proper space of a
coming to presence. Never mind how many characters, how intense a lighting, what
kind of a scenery: the only thing that matters is the coming to presence, and in this
sense the representation, that is to say an intensification of presence.

When this other is not myself but another self, him-or-herself leaning against
the same obscurity within him-or-herself – knowing that s/he is bound to the same
impossibility of seeing him/herself and of knowing whether s/he is "same", except by
the vanishing point of his/her blind spot – when such an other sees and hears me, s/he
knows that s/he is looking at a spectacle. Not at what is called the "spectacle of the
world", which normally denotes a kind of a panorama of perception spread out before
a subject and which, when analysed, belongs to his/her own being in the world, but
really at a spectacle in the theatrical sense of the word: s/he sees how a presence puts

3
itself on stage and presents itself to him/her. S/he receives, rather than perceives, the
intensification of this presence, that is to say its staging.

It is not necessary to refer to the most laden sense of these words – "spectacle",
"staging" – nor to think about all the possible ways of assuming different roles, of
showing off and boasting, of exhibiting oneself and appearing to advantage, of
ostentation and posing. It is enough to experience very simply and very discreetly that
the so-called "subject" is coming to presence – that is to say, once more, to
"representation", according to the intensive and actually the originary sense of the
word. And in this sense, a subject is a body.

***

Is it necessary to be more precise? The subject, albeit thrown into the world and
engaged with it, is still not a presence. It can be other than a subject of knowledge, but
it is still an immaterial point, a viewpoint or a point in which acts, conducts and
thoughts are being decided, turned and joined. In this sense, the "da" of Heidegger's
Dasein, the "there" of existing, remains ambiguous: no doubt, it is opening and
spatiality, in the sense of the ex-position according to which it ex-ists, but
simultaneously it is also, and notwithstanding Heidegger's own desire, punctual and
somehow held back within the subjectivity of its "each time mine" (Jemeinigkeit). In
this case, "subjectivity" does not mean the relativity and the interiority of a point of
view, but only and first of all – and once again notwithstanding Heidegger's own
effort of putting it – the immateriality of "my" position, which is punctual, the summit
of the angle or of the articulation of a decision of existence. In a word, it is not a body.
It cannot reach its own body.

This is why it is not any more theatrical than the subjects of representation in
the ordinary sense of the word (i.e. the representation of an idea, an image, or a
signification) or the subjects of knowledge, action, judgment, or the subjects of
relation and affect.

In reality, as long as one thinks in terms of the "subject", one thinks, whether
one likes it or not, in terms of an intangible substance – even when this substance

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really becomes a subject, as Hegel wanted it, that is to say a relation to self in which
the self alienates and extraneates itself in view of returning back onto itself. With
Hegel we do not really deal with theatre, and maybe we never deal with it in
philosophy (except maybe with Aristotle, but that is another story, and I will not start
it here). We are on the contrary always more or less in the intangible configuration of
a point of projection (which is also a projection of self) connected to significations,
which are intangible by definition.

In this sense, the one is all that there is; by the way, this is also why the question
of the other imposes itself in such a complex manner when one asks how a subject can
recognise another subject or how an ego can relate to the alter ego. The problem is
that when starting by the one, it is not possible to reach the other. Heidegger knows it,
when he objects to all the other ways of introducing the other except the originarily
given Mitdasein, a being-there-with or a being-with-another-there. But this "with" –
to which I grant we have to attach the greatest importance, and which is the form of
common that the modernity no doubt finds the most difficult to think – this "with" still
risks to be nothing but a simple side by side of subjects. I am also far from denying
the importance of contiguity, co-presence and common appearing or compearance.
Nor of the other, so to say orthogonal dimension of facing the other and which refers
to the tradition of "I and you" (Buber) and of "the face of the other" (Lévinas).

What matters here belongs to another order, which is so to say anterior and
exterior to all forms of common appearing, whether side by side or face to face. What
matters is the very condition of there being presence at all. Of course, the presence is
in the world – but the world is nothing but a disposition of presences, to the extent
that "disposition" has both the topological sense of an arrangement of presences
simply by spacing them, and the dynamic sense of a tendency of presences to come
and to withdraw, to arrive and to depart; for presence never consists in the simple
position in a situation with given coordinates, but in the exposition, in the
presentation, in coming, approaching and moving away. The word "presence" is
constructed on the "pre" of proximity and not on the "pre" of anteriority. The present
is neither before nor in front but near. This is why it is temporal as well as spatial:
neither before nor after, but near, coming close, and the spatiality of "nearness" is a
temporal spatiality of coming and approaching.

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 ***

This is when we come to the order of body and of theatre. The body is what
comes, approaches on a scene – and theatre is what gives the place for the approach of
a body.

This is what happens when I come to the world – every day, each time. "I" do
not come as the eternally intangible punctuality of a subject of enunciation, nor of any
subject whatsoever. We could even say: "I" never come. The I remains situated in the
absolute anteriority of its punctuality. Instead, its eyes open up as well as its mouth
and ears, and its body stretches, strays, disposes towards something. Of course we
could say that "I" comes out of the mouth, out of "its" mouth, and this is absolutely
true. But what, of the other, comes, approaches, touches us, is the mouth, the voice,
and in the same way the other's eyes approach us, their look and their way of staring
and viewing come closer.

This is like in the Creation according to Artaud – him of course, how could we
avoid being in his company? According to at least one of his trajectories, Artaud
deduces (if I can say so) the theatre from the Creation (with a capital C). I will not
stop here to examine the alchemical symbolism that precedes this consideration but I
simply note the following: he first states that theatre forms the Double "not of this
immediate everyday reality which has been slowly truncated to a mere lifeless copy" 1
but rather of "another, deadlier archetypal reality [réalité dangereuse et typique]
[which is] not human but inhuman".

Then he realises that this other reality is precisely the reality of the Creation,
insofar as it makes its work in two phases. The first one is the act of "one general –
unconflicting – Will". It is followed by the second one, "the time of obstacles and the
Double, of matter and dulling of ideas ['épaississement de l'idée' > lit. 'thickening of
the idea']."

1
"Le théâtre alchimique" in Le théâtre et son double, in Œuvres, Gallimard – Quarto, 2004, 532, de
même pour la cit. suivante et p. 534 pour les autres. Translation by Victor Corti: Antonin Artaud,
Collected Works, volume four, The Theatre and its Double. Calder & Boyars, London, 1974. p. 34.

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 Clearly these two phases are logical rather than chronological. There is the
moment of unity without conflict, which is finally just the "idea", or let us say the
principle and the decision of the existence of the world, and there is the moment of
effectivity, which comes less like another stage and more like the real opening of the
world – of the " Cosmos in turmoil", as the text specifies. The Cosmos is traversed by
conflicts. This means that reality is full of conflicts, and a careful reading of the text
would show that it is so precisely because of the matter, that is to say of the "dulling
of ideas" which can also be understood as "the expression of light, rarity and
intransmutability in a solid, impenetrable manner". This is the material gold of the
alchemical transformation, which is itself the symbol of the spiritual gold.

But – and this is the essential point – it is a necessary symbol. I will not study
the reasons of this necessity, because my aim is not to penetrate into Artaud's logic. I
simply pose with him that there is a material opacity and dullness which are
indispensable for the presentation of the stakes of the Creation or of the Cosmos – as
creation and cosmos – insofar as conflict is among their stakes. The cosmical
(elsewhere he says metaphysical) conflict needs to be presented as a "drama". Why
does it have to be presented? Because by itself it is or it makes the demand of
presentation.

A body is not simply a particular concretion, local accumulation, dulling or

thickening: Artaud is manifestly speaking about a thickening that also implies the
distinction and the multiplicity of bodies. The idea may seem to be one; the reality, of
which it is the idea, can only be plural. (I venture to think that this is precisely what
Artaud formulates intuitively when he is speaking about the two phases of the
creation.) A body is what comes, what approaches on a scene – and theatre is what
gives the place for such an approach. In truth, the idea of cosmos is the idea of
plurality, and all creation is before distinction, separation, spacing.

But spacing itself is not an inert interval. It is exposition. To put it crudely, the
void between bodies is not a negative thickness – and nor are the other forms of
spacing and immateriality. Here I refer to the Stoic theory of incorporeals: according
to the Stoics, there are four incorporeals, namely the void, the time, the place and the
lekton (the sayable or the expressible). The spacing that I am speaking about is a

7
combination of the void and the place; the void permits the distinction of places, and
the time is nothing else but the spacing of sense, the extension by which it stretches
towards itself (or if you prefer, by which the signifier stretches towards the signified).

This is how the bodies are essentially and not accidentally exposed. Dis-position
is the nature of their position in being, and the dis- implies the ex-: the bodies are
disposed partes extra partes, as in Descartes' definition of extension. Once again,
exteriority is not a simple lack of interiority or of self-presence: it is the very
condition of the co-presence of bodies, or of their common appearing which is simply
the rule and the effect of creation.

If I dared, I would say that theatre has already started in the interstellar spaces
or in the infinitesimal spacings of particles, because what Artaud calls drama has
already started there, first of all as action, as the act of accomplishment that is an
answer to an expectation (service, cult, responsibility). The expectation is actually
already the expectation of a sense: of "what can be said" of the common appearing of
things that is called "cosmos".

But it is enough that I say that the speaking body comes among bodies as the
manifestation of this expectation. And that this time, with the speaking body, theatre
is already given or sketched.

This body presents itself by opening itself: this is called "the senses". At the
same time as the senses receive sensorial information, they also emit it, if I can say so.
One again, the eye sees, but it looks, too. While looking, it exposes, it projects in front
of itself something of its own way of seeing and of being seen. And what is more,
always of its knowledge of not being able to see itself seeing. All of this is given in a
look of its eyes in which, as Proust says, "flesh becomes mirror and, more than any
other part of the body, gives us the illusion of letting us approach the soul".

On the whole, Proust's phrase is strange, for even though it is possible that I see
myself in the eyes of another, the phrase is not justified by this optical mirror
function. The phrase rather says that in the eyes of another I see myself looking and
consequently being looked at – always following the same fundamental extra-version

8
which makes it impossible for me to see myself seeing, and because of this exposes
me absolutely.

But "the other parts of the body", as Proust puts it, also present us with
approaches of the soul. My hands, my legs, my throat, my postures, my bearing, my
gestures, my expressions, my airs, the timber of my voice, the whole pragmatics of
the body, as one might call it, without exception everything on the surface of my skin
and of what I can cover or decorate it with, everything exposes, announces, declares,
adresses something: ways of coming near or going away, forces of attraction and
repulsion, tensions for taking or leaving, for swallowing or rejecting.

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine writes: "This is how my skin becomes its own

theatre", and he continues: "This explains why the actor or the simple speaker is
moved by pulsations, the original signification of which is unknown to him or her".2

In all its ways of opening and closing, of placing and displacing itself, of
disposing and imposing itself, and of fleeing, a body engages a drama which is not at
all "personal" or "subjective" but each time a singular dramatisation of its singular
detachment among other bodies – as it is projected with them in the cosmos.

The affects are secondary here (love, hate, power, betrayal, rivalry…), or rather
they are merely modulations and transcriptions of the great primordial tension
between bodies: how they are pressed against one another, how they reject one
another, how they catch and free one another. That is to say how they relate to one
another: not "through" the incorporeal that distinguishes them, but as the incorporeal
itself. Place, time, sense and void (by "void" we can understand the absence of bodies
that are dead or not yet born) are the matter and the force of relation. (It goes without
saying that I do not distinguish here between the relation between bodies and the
relation of each body to itself: each relation passes through another, this is the logic of
comon appearing and (re)presentation).

2
Soleil arachnide, Paris, Gallimard, 2009, p. 120. [The English translation of Arachnid sun is not
available in the libraries of Helsinki, this is my literal translation – S.L.]

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 What we name stage is the place in which the proper time of a presentation (of
bodies: this complement could be elided) is born and taken as drives of sense between
the voids of the bodies' fortuitous existences; it is a place in which fortuituousness
itself becomes the necessity of a drama and in which the void acquires the consistency
of a gathering of sense.

We know that in the beginning, skéné was a light makeshift shelter in which one
could retire in order to sleep, drink, or have a party with friends, for instance on a
boat. It is a place of intimacy, which becomes the obscure background of the theatre,
the reverse side of the scene: the actors will present themselves in front of this place,
on the proskènion, on which they enter through one of the doors put on the scenery. (I
will not stop to discuss the word "obscene", the etymology of which has been
discussed too much to permit anything else than foreseeable resonances. Nevertheless,
it is a fact that indepently of semantics every exposition tends to obscenity.)

In front of the intimate shelter, which somehow topples over the space into a
blind spot, opens a space out of which one must come, in which the body pushes
forward – for its entire presence is here, in this outside of oneself which is not
detached from an "inside" but which evokes it only as an impossibility, as a void
outside of space, time and sense. This is how "self" becomes: a character, a role, a
mask, way, air, exhibition, presentation – that is to say a singular variation of the
dehiscence and of the distinction by which there is a body, a presence.

In the poem that he entitles the "Theatre of Cruelty", Artaud writes:

"When there is metaphysics,

mysticism,
irreducible dialectics,
I listen to the twists
of the great colon
of my hunger
and under the impulsions of its obscure life
I dictate to my hands
their danse,

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 to my feet,
or to my arms"3

"My hunger" is my appetite, my desire, my drive; it triggers the impulsions of

the intimate, internal "dismal life" which transmits the rhythm, the pace, the whole
"dance" that answers to the deep – "metaphysical, mystical" – beat or to the "twist"
that answers to nothing else – "irreducible dialectics" – than to the very birth to the
world, to the creation in its dulling, coagulation, condensation, distinction.

I cannot stop, now, to examine the fact that this dance is not only physical but it
also belongs to the text, to the theatrical speech and in particular to the exchange of
words, and this determines the ownmost features of theatrical literature. What matters,
is that in theatre, text is bodily, it is a body. By the way, this is why it is possible to
say that in theatre "something really happens", as Claudel puts it in the mouth of one
of his characters (an actress):

"It's worth your while to go to the theatre to see something happen. You hear
me! Something that really happens! That starts and ends!"4

What "really happens" and what starts and ends, is something that never
happens to the subject, for whom birth and death, provenance and flight are
suspensions. Instead, it happens to the bodies which indeed arrive, come to detach and
singularise themselves, and then disappear in the totality or in the nothingness. What
arrives and goes away in this way – but this going-away is also an arrival – is a
presence. That is to say a sense. One could say: a "subject" is a frantic aiming of a
sense, a "body" is a sense in action. In the action of passing, between creation and
discreation [décréation].

Such a passage presents itself by presenting its arrival and departure, by

presenting the beginning and the end of a sense. Consequently such a sense cannot
accomplish a signification, but it is the sense of passage, of the act of passing. It is the
sense of the entire duration of a presence, when the presence is articulated by the
3
Op. cit. 1662. [English translation? Here's the litteral translation of S.L.]
4
Claudel, L'Echange, Paris, Mercure de France, 1964, p. 166. [English translation unavailable in
Helsinki. This is the literal translation by S.L.]

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rising and the falling of the curtain, that is to say, of the non-thickness of the truth that
falls on the sense.

In other words, what we ignore, the appearing-disappearing, arrives there, in the

space-time of the place in which sense is proferated between bodies – for sense can
only happen "between" one and the other, it can only be felt from one to the other.
This space-time is what we call "scene", it is the proskènion on which bodies advance
in order to present what each body does as a body: it presents itself in its appearing
and disappearing, it presents the action – the "drama" – of a sharing of sense.

There is beginning and end; there is the proper time of this (re)presentation –
this is the stage itself insofar as it opens and closes. It is not the time of succession but
of passage, of the quick distension of an instant that has been withdrawn from the
course of time (this is how one can see in the classical rule of three unities something
less formal than it would seem).

Jean Magnan puts the following words in the mouth of a character – who is
marked out as a "creature of the theatre":

"Here, between three walls,

without a wall that would make me believe
in a fourth one,

time. The time. The time.

Imaginary time. Personal time. A sensible mixture

of the two. Fifty per cent Arabica.
Theater time. At the purest state.

Insomniac.

And sugar-free."5

5
Un peu de temps à l'état pur, Génève, Philippe Macasdar Editeur, 1987, p. 71.

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 Like in Proust, from whom the expression has been borrowed, the "pure time" is
the time of the (re)presentation, that is to say of the presentation in truth. Time
removed from the course of time, insomnia at the night that surrounds the theatre and
into which actors, scene and spectators fall together with the curtain.

In the precise – and like instantaneous – duration of this time, bodies address
words to one another. Actors exchange words, in order to address to us, spectators,
precisely the fact that it is a matter of addresses here. It cannot be anything else.
Heiner Müller writes: "What is not adressed cannot be put on stage".6

Adressed speech is bodily speech. It is not so much a matter of signification, but

of voice, and with the voice – or silence – of gesture, posture and bearing of the body.
Speaking bodies make a bodily speech. This is how they present themselves for what
they are: presences, whose spacings open tensions – Artaud calls them "conflicts" –
whose play conducts the drama.

The play: here, the word means at the same time articulation, the joining of the
addresses, and the fact that they are interpreted. The double sens of play corresponds
to the duality which is actually put in play: the presence must be presented because it
is not simply given: it gives itself. In other words, it is not if it does not enter into the
intensity – tension, intention – of the address. There is no neutral presence that could
be intensified here and there. But presence wants intensity – a body is an intensity.

The representation in the theatrical sense of the word and in the – historically
first – sense of a putting to presence is an intensive play of presence. My body is
straight away a theatre because its very presence is double – it is outside or in front, I
am inside of behind (actually nowhere). Each presence doubles itself in order to
present itself, and the theatre is as ancient and no doubt practically as common as the
speaking body.

Whether one says it with Artaud and his Double, with Lacoue-Labarthe and his
"originary mimesis", or with François Regnauld affirming in a Lacanian way that "the

6
"Adieu à la pièce dialectique" dans Hamlet-Machine,… p. 67.

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Theater presents the discourse of the Other"7, theatre is the duplication of presences as
a putting in presence of presents, or as a presentation of their being present. The body
itself is already a presentation: indeed, a body does not consist simply of a "being" –
whatever one wants to say by this word – but it articulates this being as an appearing
or it indexes it on a being-there which implies a copresence – distance, proximity,
interaction – with other bodies. Theatrality proceeds from a declaration of existence –
and existence itself is a being that is declared, presented and not kept in itself. It is
being that signals itself; it gives itself to be felt not only in a simple perception but as
a thickness and as a tension.

This is why Hamlet can say: " the players cannot keep counsel [en français:
secret]; they'll tell all" (act 3, scene 2). This sentence has a particular sense in the
theatrical plot of the Prince of Denmark, and this can only enhance its general import.
Theater is the suspension of the secret – if it is the secret of a being-in-itself or the
secret of a soul that has retired into an intimacy. On the contrary, the in-itself itself or
the intimacy as such come out and expose themselves. Nothing less than the "world as
theatre", that we know so well since Calderon and Shakespeare but that our tradition
actually repeats ever since Plato's Cavern, but the "world as theatre" as truth, quite
like and because the body turns out to be the truth of the soul: it is truth pushing itself
onto the scene, or more exactly truth that makes a scene.

Having come to this point, it is not possible to avoid going back to something
that underlies and supports theatre in all of its forms: that is to say, something like a
cult.

Brecht said that tragedy was born when it left the cult, and this is how he
wanted to underline the decisive nature of this "departure". 8 But this is also how he

7
Petite éthique pour le comédien…
8
Florence Dupont insists on the origin of the latin comedy in cult – in the rituals of the ludi. According
to her, this comedy follows a genuine ritual, which is celebrated by putting into play – in all senses of
the expression – the circumstances and the codes of the seriousness of the ordinary life. From her point
of view, Aristotle is the one who, by breaking entirely loose from the Dionysian ritual, obliges himself
to put the theatre under the spell of muthos, that is to say of the story that plays the function of theatre
by mimesis and catharsis (see Aristote ou le vampire du théâtre occidental, Flammarion 2007). I will
not enter into this debate: I only note that mimesis and catharsis undoubtedly represent transformations
and extensions of the ritual celebration in Aristote, too, but whithout him knowing it.

14
shut his eyes to something that every departure takes with it. A cult is not simply a
ritual in the sense of formalism and observance. Before this, it is a behavior that has
been adapted to an encounter with something like a mystery, a secret, a part aside that
the cult makes it possible to approach (in the cult, it approaches us and we approach
it). It is the coming to presence of something that otherwise remains withdrawn.

A cult is always organised around the expectation that something arrives,

something happens, something takes place and appears from the background of an
essential non-appearing. This is called a "sacrifice": sanctifying, making sacred. A
theatrical body is a body that sanctifies its own presence – that is to say, if you like it,
its soul, or also its creation, its cosmic inscription, its glory, its delight, its suffering,
its failure, in a word, its common appearing as a sign among signs.

Every cult has a theatrical side, even though theatre becomes what it is only
when it leaves all cults (including its own cult and cults, that if fabricates incessantly).
What still belongs to cult in theatre and what in a very precise sense is sacrified in it
(or ludified, to refer one again to roman comedy) is the speaking body – a speech
become body, not the story but the address, the signals of bodies and therefore also
the gestures and everything that is physical, or physiological, energetic, dynamic –
"biomechanic", to play with a word of Meyerhold – these make the scene.

This is why one should not say that the cult precedes and engenders the theatre,
but that the body-theatre precedes all cults and all theatres. Theatrality is neither
artistic nor religious – although art and religion proceed from it. It is the condition of
the body, and the body is the condition of the world, which is the space of the
common appearing of bodies, of their attractions and repulsions. Yves Lorelle writes
in the beginning of his study of body and stage: "Every culture has given to itself the
spectacle of the highest summits of the mastery over the moving body" 9. One must
pay attention to the fact that a "culture" is precisely a possibility of putting together
and of forming a mode of spectacle, that is to say, of presenting and signifying this: as
soon as there is a world, there are bodies who encounter one another, who move
away, attract and reject one another, who show themselves to one another while at the

9
Le corps, les rites et la scène – des origines au XXe siècle…

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same time showing behind and around themselves the incorporeal night of their
origin.

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