Writing Under the Influence

"The Theater and the Plague" contains an astonishing written account of the plague. Antonin Artaud's essay replicates the plague in writing by developing what could be called a "malignant" rhetoric. In this article, the possibility of a pathogenic writing is considered by tracing the transformation of influence, relation, and communication into virulent vectors of the plague. The theater, for Artaud, erupts out of this space between a dramatic, rhetorical, and epidemiological discourse.