Joel White (KCL) - 2014-15 Students
joel.white@kcl.ac.uk

The Philosophy of Antonin Artaud: Interruption, Theatre, and Life

The aim of my thesis is to expound how the philosophical writings of Antonin Artaud pertain to a thinking of interruption. Positioning my thesis in distinction to rest of the literature on Artaud, which deals with him either as a figure in dramaturgy or a figure in the critical history of psychiatry, I argue that Artaud’s work is philosophical in kind and should be treated as such. Artaud, through a critical engagement with the European philosophical tradition expounds his own epistemology (aesthetic and theological), ontology (post-foundational), and political philosophy (anarchic revolutionary). The wider aim of my thesis, which can defined as historico-philosophical, as it pertains to the history of philosophy, is to outline the paradigmatic use of theatre from Plato and the pre-Socratics through to contemporary philosophies of the spectator. In short, I will explore the philosophical implications that are involved when philosophy, aesthetic or otherwise, is theorised through the theatre.