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...

The human body is the most important medium through which a public space is curved out of the social. Of course, this does not always have to occur in form of a militarized collective marching in-sync through the streets. Very often it is precisely the vulnerability of bodies which is used as a ­performative medium of protest (up to the extreme point where people decide to publicly set themselves on fire). Taking this word of caution into account, we may...