French Literature Reviews - 2026
Uno Kuniichi, Artaud: Thought and Body
Theatre and Performance
Text revised by Gligla Gonaschvili.
A leading specialist and a vital bridge for French philosophy and literature in Japan, Uno Kuniichi publishes in French his groundbreaking study on Antonin Artaud – a unique experimental thinker of the body and of force. This is a revised, restructured, and expanded version of his doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Gilles Deleuze in 1980.
His texts, born from his early inexplicable crises, probe the unthinkable and the compelling question of the "body." Artaud had already raised a fundamental problem, and this revelation of the "body" in extraordinary tension with the "organs" remains essential and unique. To affirm the body, yet resist the organs. This highly paradoxical stance leads him to rethink the organic and the inorganic intertwined in life, along with all the power dynamics that determine and organize it. Furthermore, as an exceptionally adventurous man of the theatre who sought to radically renew it by profoundly rethinking its flesh and voice, Artaud re-examined the same question regarding the language of theatre and the cinematic image. From his perspective of "Cruelty," theatre and cinema must engage with the deepest folds of thought and the body. Dr. L. once diagnosed the institutionalized Artaud at his hospital once and for all: "He is finished. He will never write again."
Yet writing is never lost—such as writing infused with glossolalia, forged in an intense, fractured linguistic workshop condensed through crisis within his massive notebooks. Something is conquered and asserted through these relentless battles. Is it a "body without organs" that demands the absolute immanence of life's forces? Or is nothing absolute in his endless quest?
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Uno Kuniichi (宇野邦一, born 1948) is a philosopher, translator, essayist, and former professor at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. He is renowned for his translations of major works by Deleuze and Guattari (such as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus), Artaud, Beckett, and Genet, on whom he has also published benchmark texts and other essays in Japanese, ranging from Voyage au bout du sens (1985) to La Vie inorganique (2024). He defended his dissertation in French on Antonin Artaud under the supervision of Gilles Deleuze in 1980. Uno Kuniichi's encounter with Tatsumi Hijikata in the early 1980s left a profound mark on him and continued to resonate in his own research throughout his life.
Antonin Artaud remains a central figure in discussions of theatrical reform and modern avant-garde performance, known for his radical rethinking of staging, voice, and the sensory limits of dramatic art. His writings challenge conventional notions of dramatic representation, seeking instead an immediate encounter between performance and the spectator. Such approaches build upon broader traditions within modern French philosophy that examine the relationship between physical sensation, creative expression, and institutional boundaries, while readers interested in contemporary approaches to performance theory and post-war French philosophy may find this work relevant to their research into the limits of representation and the philosophy of the body.