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THEATRE – POWER – SUBJECT

On Dragan Živadinov’s Elizabethan Trilogy

Bojan Anđelković

Translated by Polona Petek

After five years, Dragan Živadinov has completed his cycle of five performances based on the

Elizabethan Trilogy (Tri elizabetinske tragedije) by Croatian playwright Vladimir Stojsavljević. This is a

fairly extensive theatre project, which has brought together more than 30 actors from various

theatres all over Slovenia, with which the stylistic metamorphoses of the post-gravitational trio

Živadinov-Zupančič-Turšič has wandered through various scenes of Slovenian scientific-artistic as well

as commercial-economic institutions, including the factory. Let’s recall: in April 2008, the last part of

Stojsavljević’s trilogy, The Forbidden Theatre (Prepovedano gledališče), was staged at the Ljubljana

Exhibition and Convention Centre (Gospodarsko razstavišče). This was followed by the prologue,

tellingly entitled Love::State::Avatar (Ljubezen::Država::Avatar), which was staged in autumn of the

same year in the Atrium of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC

SAZU). In 2009, the first part of Stojsavljević’s trilogy, Marlowe, was staged in the fermentation hall

of the Union Brewery. In 2011, with his staging of the central drama of the trilogy, Love and

Sovereignty (Ljubezen in država), possibly the most important Slovenian director appeared on the

mainstage of SNG Drama Ljubljana for the very first (and, according to him, also the very last) time.

And finally, in January this year, at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Metelkova, we could see the

final act of this cycle, Sovereignty::R.III.Epilogue (Država::R.III.Epilog), which, like the prologue, was

staged in a fairly intimate atmosphere, for 30 select spectators.

Theatre and State

The key text, which made this five-year-long theatrical journey worthwhile, is no doubt Love and

Sovereignty, which Živadinov has tackled before. He tried to stage it at the very beginning of his

career, precisely 30 years ago, as his final production at the Ljubljana Academy of Theatre, Radio,

Film and Television (AGRFT); however, just before graduating, he radically quit the academy with the

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text he titled A Letter to Fake Teachers (Pismo lažnim učiteljem). The drama Love and Sovereignty

also served as the textual basis for the performance Inhabited Sculpture One Against One (Naseljena

skulptura ena proti ena) from 1995, which is the first performance of his 50-year-long project

Noordung 1995–2045.1 As we know, the first reprise of this première performance took place only in

2005, in the hydrolab of the Yuri A. Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Moscow’s Star City; and

the next – the second – reprise will take place in 2015, at the Cultural Centre of European Space

Technologies (Kulturno središče evropskih vesoljskih tehnologij/KSEVT) in Vitanje. And so on, every

10 years, until the fifth – and the last – reprise in 2045, as planned by the script, when the bodies of

dead actors will be replaced by technological substitutes and their spoken lines from Love and

Sovereignty will be translated into electronic rhythms and melodies. The whole thing is supposed to

end with the setting up of an art satellite in equatorial orbit, 35,000 kilometres away from the planet

Earth, and with Živadinov committing suicide in outer space. The self-evident question to be asked

here is, of course: Why did Živadinov choose to work precisely with this text practically throughout

his entire (artistic) life?

There can be several reasons, of course, but here, we will try to limit ourselves to two, which seem of

key importance. First, even though the title of Stojsavljević’s text is Love and Sovereignty, the drama

in fact deals with the relation between art and power and could just as well be titled “Theatre and

Sovereignty”, which could even be more fitting apropos its content. Here, then, we are dealing with

the relation that is set up, in The First Sister Letter of the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre (Gledališče

sester Scipion Nasice), as the fundamental starting point of Živadinov’s retrogardistic period and, at

the same time, of all his subsequent techno- and post-gravitational metamorphoses: “Theatre

between the spectator and the actor does not exist. Theatre is not empty space. Theatre is state.”2

However, the relation between theatre and sovereignty can be just another name for numerous

other relations: between art and politics, the subject and power, “fiction” and “reality”, the symbolic

and the real, the virtual and the actual, and so on. The second, equally important reason for this text

being chosen as the dramatic basis for a 50-year-long theatre project is the fact that this is a drama

set in the country and the time of the birth of modern theatre, that is, in England at the turn of the

16th century. Namely, if one of the key reasons for the Noordung project to be conceived as a 50-

year-long process is theatrical demonstration of a break with such a traditional model of theatre,

which is based on the dramatic text – that is to say, a break that transpires in processual annihilation

1 I discuss the project Noordung 1995–2045 in detail in the article “The Technodispositifs of the Theatre Time

Machine Noordung” (“Tehnodispozitivi konceptualnega časovnega stroja Noordung”), Maska, nos. 143–144, Ljubljana 2011, pp. 70–77. 2 “The First Sister Letter” (“Prvo sestrsko pismo”) of the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre, available online at

http://www.krstpodtriglavom.org/ [last accessed 30 March 2013].

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of such a theatre – which drama could be more fitting than the one whose centre is occupied by the

most (in)famous playwright of all time, William Shakespeare himself?

It is by no means a coincidence that Antonin Artaud – who is undoubtedly Živadinov’s central

theatrical reference in all phases of his creative career – in the programme of his theatre of cruelty,

too, plans to stage, among other things, texts from the Elizabethan period: “We shall stage, without

regard for text: 1. An adaptation of a work from the time of Shakespeare, a work entirely consistent

with our present troubled state of mind, whether one of the apocryphal plays of Shakespeare […]. 9.

Works from the Elizabethan theatre stripped of their text and retaining only the accoutrements of

period, situations, characters, and action.”3 And yet, while one of the basic purposes of the 50-year-

long performance is precisely such a demonstrative annihilation of the dramatic text through

processual replacement of the deceased actors’ lines with music, the Elizabethan Trilogy project set

itself a completely different, at first glance even diametrically opposed task: to stage precisely this

drama in full and verbatim, from the beginning to the end, almost without any intervention into the

original text. Even more, what needed to be staged was not only the drama Love and Sovereignty,

but in fact Stojsavljević’s Elizabethan Trilogy in its entirety, and complemented with Živadinov’s

Prologue and Epilogue, so that the whole thing now comprises nine hours of a “virtual” “monster of a

performance”, which may even be actualised in the near or not-so-near future, depending on

funding and the availability of several actors. It is very important, and for Živadinov rather unusual,

that talking on stage is all but incessant throughout these nine hours. Just as it is remarkable that

Živadinov in this project set himself another, equally unusual restriction: to stay firmly within the so-

called “black box” for the entire duration of the project, which means that the boundary between

the audience and the actors remains physically practically intact throughout these nine hours.

The Order of Thing

Why, after 30 years, does Živadinov trample his own fundamental principles so radically, why does he

put a dramatic text verbatim on stage? Why does he need to do this? The first among many possible

answers is, once again, the one offered by Artaud: this is simply “in a spirit of reaction against our

principles and as an example of what can be drawn from a formal text in terms of the stage.”4 And

second, Živadinov, of course, does not put any old text on stage but precisely the text that he intends

to annihilate processually and demonstratively through a 50-year-long process.

3 Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre of Cruelty (First Manifesto)”, in: Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double,

New York: Grove Press, 1958, pp. 99–100. 4 Cf. ibid.

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To be sure, the “cruelty” of the Artaudian or Živadinovian theatrical vision is based on the constant

effort to replace the poetry of language with the poetry in space – which is expressed not only with

words, but rather with “all the means of expression utilizable on the stage, such as music, dance,

plastic art, pantomime, mimicry, gesticulation, intonation, architecture, lighting, and scenery.”5

However, this does not mean that language and speech are depreciated in their theatrical

approaches – quite the opposite. When Artaud writes about speech as one among (and equal to)

many elements on stage, we must understand this tentatively, in the sense of argumentation, which

counters the classic model of theatre, based on the dramatic text; the sheer amount of attention that

he dedicates to language in his programmatic texts reveals that language is of key importance to him.

And when Živadinov implements his 50-year-long processual replacement of the spoken text of the

drama with electronic rhythms and melodies, this is not simply annihilation of spoken language but

rather its translation into a different language, an invention of another and different theatrical

language, beyond reason, beyond everyday words and their meanings – the language of machines,

which is also the language of the unconscious.6 In such a theatre, language of one kind or another

cannot be annihilated for one simple reason: in the kind of theatre, which does not want to

represent, but rather to “repeat” and thus to double the world and life, there must be things as well

as words, there must be the visible as well as the speakable as the two poles of knowledge, which, as

Foucault has shown with unparalleled clarity, cannot be reduced to one another: “And it is in vain

that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space

where they achieve their splendour is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the

sequential elements of syntax.”7

Živadinov has always known how to use this duality and the irreducibility of the heard and the seen;

however, only with the Elizabethan Trilogy has he, perhaps for the first time, actually shown what

one can achieve with words on stage. We are condemned to our senses; however, for now, our

senses do not suffice to see and hear everything that transpires on stage: there is, as always with

Živadinov, too much to see, but the woe of spoken words this time is downright unheard of and

inaudible. Perhaps someone has noticed that, in various performances, many a viewer has closed her

eyes in her attempt to eliminate the visible and thus grasp the spoken. All in vain, though: the highly

stylised syntactic sequences of Stojsavljević’s trilogy, additionally artificialized through theatrical

5 Ibid., p. 39.

6 On the link between machines and the unconscious through the concept of desiring machines, see: Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London and New York: Continuum, 2012. See also: Georges Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism”, Incorporations, New York: Zone Books, pp. 45–69. 7 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, London and New York: Routledge, 1989, p. 8.

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intonation into a completely unnatural mounting cadence, are far from syntactic sequences known to

us from ordinary, everyday language. In this sense, Živadinov remains Artaud’s faithful student: “To

make metaphysics out of a spoken language is to make the language express what it does not

ordinarily express.”8 And as long as words on stage express what they do not ordinarily express, as

long as they transform into echoes of themselves on the actors’ lips and their sense begins to

resonate with itself, the moving bodies and things on stage can mingle with suprematist-

constructivist projections, which erase the boundaries between them and the stage. Only then can a

veritable theatre begin: when we break and open up words, things and bodies, so they can step out

of themselves to enter into resonant mutual relations, opening one another and surrendering

themselves to one another through an endless game of echoes and reflections of meaning, with

which Magritte so thoroughly fascinated Foucault: “Between words and objects one can create new

relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.” And

what Magritte claims in relation to his painting becomes valid for theatre as well: “Sometimes the

name of an object takes the place of an image. A word can take the place of an object in reality. An

image can take the place of a word in a proposition.”9

In the sense of such an understanding and use of the audio-visual, Živadinov is unusually close to

contemporary cinema, in the same way that Foucault is close to it.10 This, of course, does not mean

that Živadinov adopts his theatrical ideas from cinema, but rather that his theatrical ideas traverse

and resonate with the ideas of contemporary cinema. Not unlike Artaud, who “‘believes’ in cinema,

he believes that cinema can bring about a more profound theatricalization than theatre itself, but he

only believes that for a short time. He soon thinks that theatre is more capable of renewing itself,

and freeing sound powers, then a still limited, over-visual cinema, even if this means that the

theatricalization has to include electronic rather than cinematographic aids.”11

In short, Foucault’s lesson applies to any field of knowledge, be it theatre, cinema, painting,

philosophy or something else: things need to be broken, opened up, and at the same time, words

8 Antonin Artaud, op. cit., p. 46.

9 Quoted in Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California

Press, 1982, p. 38. 10

Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 65. 11

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, London: Athlone Press, 1989, p. 191.

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need to be broken, opened up – “a repetition, another layer, the return of the same, a catching on

something else, an imperceptible difference, a coming apart and ineluctable tearing open.”12

The Subject and the Mask13

“Listen, whether you are coming or going, whether you are alone. Of course you are not alone. You

are both here. You and your role. This is why the whole thing can start at all,”14 we hear Mateja

Rebolj say on stage; she might be impersonating Dragan Živadinov addressing Lotos Šparovec, who

plays Richard III – who is not even on stage and we do not know whether he is coming at all… Or

perhaps he has already been here… Maybe he is still here … Or is he already here?

What applies to the unconscious, applies to veritable theatre as well: “No answers or solutions can

ever be original or definitive: only questions-problems can, in favor of a mask previous to every mask

and of a displacement previous to every place.”15 And what applies to veritable theatre, applies to

life as well: “Behind the masks, therefore, are further masks, and even the most hidden is still a

hiding place, and so on to infinity.”16 In other words, there is no I, only its displacements, its masks;

and the subject is nothing but this residue, this surplus, it is precisely this difference between I’s, the

difference between masks. However, if the actor as the subject is just the difference between masks,

then his task on stage is precisely to perform this difference. And he can only do this by means of

other masks, their difference, their displacement, by means of a variation in place, voice, intonation.

Since all masks are fictions and simulacra, the actor himself becomes fiction, he is just a simulacrum

of the actor. And when the actor is simulated, the spectators cannot help becoming simulated

spectators. However, when everything turns into simulacra, simulacra become real. Thus, the

theatrical machine produces its own reality, thus it produces its own subject: “Of course you are not

alone. You are both here. You and your role. This is why the whole thing can start at all…”

12 Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel, Paris: Galllimard, 1963. Quoted in: Gilles Deleuze, “Breaking Things Open,

Breaking Words Open”, Negotiations, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 84. 13

The complex issues of the relationship between the subject and the mask – albeit, indeed, not in relation to theatre but rather Nietzsche’s philosophy – are discussed in depth by Gianni Vattimo in his work Il sogetto e la maschera: Nietzsche e il problema della liberazione (Milan: Bompiani, 1974). 14

Dragan Živadinov, Sovereignty::R.III.Epilogue (manuscript). 15

Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, London: Continuum, 1994, p. 108. Cf. also: “The disguises and the variations, the masks or costumes, do not come ‘over and above’: they are, on the contrary, the internal genetic elements of repetition itself, its integral and constituent parts. This path would have been able to lead the analysis of the unconscious towards a veritable theatre.” Ibid., pp. 16–17. 16

Ibid., p. 106.

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So what did we, 30 simulated spectators, watch for a good hour and a half of the concluding

performance of the Elizabethan Trilogy on the improvised stage of the not particularly large lecture

theatre at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Metelkova? What can we, with certainty, say to have

seen? Did we see seven actresses and one actor playing six women and two men in standard post-

gravitational uniforms? Perhaps. Although the initials D.Ž. obviously refer to Dragan Živadinov, we in

fact cannot claim that Mateja Rebolj impersonated Dragan Živadinov, just as we cannot say with any

certainty that the initials in the title of the performance, Sovereignty::R.III.Epilogue, necessarily refer

to Richard III, for if this were the case, the performance would no doubt be called Richard III. Given

the themes of the performance and the current Slovenian socio-political context, R.III might signify a

third republic of sorts, as some of the creators of the performance have hinted. Perhaps. Even

though the performance deals with events from the past, this would then make it a virtual

sovereignty of the future, in which women rather than men have the final say. Is the concluding part

of the cycle Živadinov’s ultimate feminist gesture? Is Mateja Rebolj Dragan Živadinov becoming

woman becoming Mateja Rebolj becoming Dragan Živadinov becoming Jožica Avbelj, Gorka Berden,

Barbara Cerar, Arna Hadžialjević, Maruša Majer, who are all together becoming Vladimir

Stojsavljević’s text? If, in the prologue entitled Love::Sovereignty::Avatar, the person whose name in

real life is Vladimir Stojsavljević, standing next to the person whose name in real life is Dragan

Živadinov, utters the words “My name is Dragan Živadinov” – then what is the name of the person

standing next to him if not Vladimir Stojsavljević? Through the staging of the Elizabethan Trilogy, is

Slovenian director Dragan Živadinov becoming Croatian playwright Vladimir Stojsavljević – or vice

versa? Is Živadinov, together with Stojsavljević, becoming the pregnant Tjaša Železnik, who is going

to give birth to Lotos Vincenc Šparovec, who will have to become animal to be able to give birth to

Richard III, who will become sovereignty becoming theatre that is Živadinov?17 Perhaps this is also

possible if the Roman numeral III in the title reminds one of the letter Ž as written in the Cyrillic

alphabet, which has become Živadinov’s “standard” signifier, which he even uses as his signature,

probably to honour the fame and glory of the Russian avant-garde. Perhaps. Does, then, perhaps the

signifier R.III conceal Živadinov himself, who, after four years of writing the text of the concluding

drama, has identified with it to such an extent that Richard III has become Richard Živadinov? Are we

dealing here with the type of theatre that wishes to bring down the boundaries between text and

context, as suggested by the digital text that was wandering around the stage in nearly all

performances of the Elizabethan cycle? If so, are the bodies put on stage so they could stage another

body, a different one, perhaps Artaud’s body without organs, “the third body, that of the

17 On becoming-other, see the chapter “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…” in:

Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London and New York: Continuum, University of Minnesota, 1987.

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‘protagonist’ or master of ceremonies, who passes through all the other bodies”?18 Has the woe of

the spoken, poeticised words of the Elizabethan Trilogy come crashing down on the spectators so as

to show us that there exists an equality between words and the world, between the inside and the

outside, and that journeying into space is in fact journeying through one’s own mind?

What if none of the numerous possible interpretations is correct, or if all these and other

interpretations are valid only if they are valid simultaneously – like the five performances of

Živadinov’s Elizabethan Trilogy, which do not follow one another chronologically, but rather, in a

sense, transpire simultaneously?

Difference and Repetition

Let’s pay attention to apparent illogicalities, or rather, to the fact that the circle, which the

concluding performance of the cycle rounds off, is far from perfect. We are summing up what we

said at the beginning. Even though the Elizabethan Trilogy has three parts, Živadinov directed five

performances over a period of five years, adding his own prologue and epilogue to Stojsavljević’s

trilogy. He first staged the third part, then the prologue, followed by the first part. According to

Živadinov’s announcements in 2011, prior to the premiere in SNG Drama Ljubljana, the second part

of the trilogy was supposed to end the whole thing. However, he then added this more-than-

important epilogue. If you think, chronologically speaking, things could not be more confusing, you

are wrong, for the epilogue is in fact set at the beginning of the story, that is, before the Elizabethan

Trilogy, in the year 1483, when Richard III began his reign.

And since Stojsavljević’s trilogy deals with the relation between theatre and sovereignty at the time

of the birth of modern theatre, Živadinov’s concluding drama is set in a “mythological” time before

its birth. Thus, we are placed in the ultimate Artaudian zone: “We have not been born yet, there is no

world, / things have not been created, we have not found meaning yet […] dance / and, therefore,

theatre / do not exist yet.”19 And even time does not exist, at least not as the linear time that we are

familiar with; we find ourselves in a time in which all times – the past, the present, and the future –

are present simultaneously. Namely, the final act cannot be considered independently, on its own,

because it inscribes itself retroactively into all the performances of the cycle, and it does so by virtue

of the performances that reflect one another, so the final act writes itself through their repetition.

This is why it was necessary for Arna Hadžialjević, who plays Lady H. (and who knows whether, at the

18 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, op. cit., p. 190.

19 Antonin Artaud, Pesmi-teksti, Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 2010, p. 12.

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end of the final performance, it was the actress or her role speaking), to go through the fragments of

the other roles’ speech and thus skim over and, in a sense, repeat all roles and the whole Epilogue

while, at the same time, repeating and changing all roles and performances of Živadinov’s

Elizabethan Trilogy. “As for the third time in which the future appears, this signifies that the event

and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self, […] what the self has become

equal to is the unequal in itself.”20 Only through such an impersonal dimension of the future, which

Deleuze defines as the third synthesis of time, which, however, is in a sense always present in the

present, for it is always present in every moment, can we understand the following statement by

Živadinov: “That is why there is no past and no future, only the absolute present! Theatre is the

absolute present!”21 However, this statement, of course, applies not only to the Elizabethan Trilogy,

but to Živadinov’s ɶuvre in general, for this statement is a manifesto declaration of the post-

gravitational theatre of the future.

Not the sheer simple repetition without difference, but rather the complex repetition, which

produces small internal difference – this is the basic mechanism of veritable theatre, which can be

detected in virtually all performances signed by Dragan Živadinov. The mechanism of difference and

repetition is also the essence of his life project, Noordung, which is conceptualised in such a way that

– through complex repetition, which alone can produce difference and bring something new – it

stages Nietzsche’s mysterious idea of the eternal recurrence, which, however, is nothing but another

name for difference and repetition.22 In other words, the 50-year-long theatrical process Noordung

stages nothing and no one but itself, which is also its deepest meaning: “The theatre of repetition is

opposed to the theatre of representation, just as movement is opposed to the concept and to

representation which refers it back to the concept. In the theatre of repetition, we experience pure

forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with

nature and history, with a language which speaks before words, with gestures which develop before

organised bodies, with masks before faces, with spectres and phantoms before characters – the

whole apparatus of repetition as a ‘terrible power’.”23

20 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., pp. 89–90. As regards the three syntheses of time, see the

chapter “Repetition for Itself”, pp. 70–129. 21

Dragan Živadinov, 50 koordinat postgravitacijske umetnosti, 2010, 17th

coordinate: “Spojni mehanizem”, available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/31079708/50-Topics [last accessed 30 March 2013]. 22

What is key here is the fact that difference is internal, that is, it is produced through repetition itself. In this case, the 50-year-long performance – through the process of replacing the deceased actors’ bodies with technological substitutes and their spoken lines with music – produces differences that are a generic part of the repetition from which they are derived; therefore, the performance produces internal difference within itself. 23

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., p. 10.

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Which Živadinov? Which Performance? Who could know? Živadinov is his own theatre. The mind is

the universe. Theatre is sovereignty. Sovereignty speaks through the mouth of Richard III. Richard III

fucks Queen Elizabeth. Queen Elizabeth gives birth to Malevich’s Black Square. All this in the

Slovenian Museum of Contemporary Art, fictitiously named the Museum of Contemporary Art –

Metelkova, even though it is actually located on Maistrova Street. It is the year 1913. We are

watching the performance Victory Over the Sun. It is the year 1483. This is the year in which the

performance you are watching right now is set. It is the year 1983. We are watching Živadinov’s

never-staged final production for the academy, Love and Sovereignty. I take a few books, including

the Slovenian translation of Fernando Pessoa, and I put them in a leather bag. The book is called

Psihotipija. My name is Miklavž Komelj. The sign on the leather bag reads “Star City 1998”. My name

is Antonin Artaud. It is the year 2013. You are watching the performance Sovereignty::R.III.Epilogue.

You are watching the Elizabethan Trilogy performance. My name is Vladimir Stojsavljević. In a

module, we are sliding towards the last partition of the mind. “It is true, there is nothing left,

nothing. Magnificent! This means that anything, absolutely anything can begin. Hello, new world!

Let’s go! Let’s instil soul into it.”24 You are witnessing the final act of the 50-year-long performance

Noordung 1995–2045. “What follows is a planned act: due to the joining process, we are at the

energy centre of the event. There is no space left for our identification; we are universal, for the

joining mechanism is processed by the scheme of systemic planetary organisation.”25 It is 20 April

2045. In ten days, I will be dead. My name is Dragan Živadinov. My name is nobody.26

Bojan Anđelković has a Master’s degree in Media Studies (ISH) and he is a PhD student in Philosophy

and Theory of Visual Culture (FHS Koper), Head of Open Radio Investigative Platform RADAR, and

Managing Editor of Radio Student.

Abstract: The text offers a philosophical reflection on the cycle of five performances that form the

Elizabethan Trilogy project (2008–2013) by director Dragan Živadinov. By introducing four conceptual

pairs – theatre and sovereignty, words and things, the subject and the mask, and difference and

repetition – it also attempts to reflect on Živadinov’s entire opus and on the meaning of his theatre.

24 Vladimir Stojsavljević, “Ljubezen in država”, Gledališki list SNG, Vol. XCI, No. 2, Ljubljana 2011, p. 72.

25 Dragan Živadinov, 50 koordinat, op. cit.

26 “In this manner, the I which is fractured according to the order of time and the Self which is divided

according to the temporal series correspond and find a common descendant in the man without name, without family, without qualities, without Self or I, the ‘plebeian’ guardian of a secret, the already-Overman whose scattered members gravitate around the sublime image.” Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., p. 90.

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At the centre of attention in the theatre of repetition, which is opposed to the theatre of

representation, there is the relation between theatre, sovereignty and the subject; the author of this

text tries to shed light on this relation by drawing on Antonin Artaud’s concept of the theatre of

cruelty and possible connections between theatre and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche,

Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

Keywords: theatre of cruelty, art-sovereignty, language of the unconscious, subject-mask, body

without organs, eternal recurrence