Artaud’s work is performative in the sense that it never simply describes, but actively produces the events it enacts. As Austin characterises performative language, ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action’.3 Artaud’s work, performed correctly, is magical, finding its power in ritualistic chanting. Intonation is key to this, recalling what he wrote about metaphysical language in The ­Theatre and its Double, where the aim is ‘to deal with intonations in an absolutely concrete manner, restoring their...

We  identified ‘showing’—rather than ‘saying’—as the primary self-manifestation of the aesthetic. By ‘showing’ and ‘manifestation’ we do not mean expression, but exhibition and exposition. Wherever works work only with aisthēta and relevance is drawn from perceptions or things and their materiality—from every nuance of coloring, from the way in which objects are framed or combined, from the position of a detail, from the interval between two notes and their microtonal succession or arrhythmic placement, from any hesitation of physical feeling,...