In Artaud's “written drawings,” we saw the manner in which the writer enacted a kind of theatrical event, with the page as a stage, a “scene of the subjectile,” the violent site of the self's projected performance onto paper. In what follows, another such scene will be presented, another stage upon which thought is symptomatically enacted. This time, though, the page is my own, and the performance—less violent, more colorfully playful—is nonetheless revealing of the act of thoughtful repetition, and the recurring desire to get to the bottom of something which simultaneously rests on the surface and plunges infinitely into its own endless reference.

Jacques Derrida's important essay on Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” has already been multiply referenced in previous chapters.