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The Postsecular Theatre of Romeo Castellucci

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00668

1537-9477

Dana Tanner-Kennedy,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

In the beginning was the face.In Romeo Castellucci’s 2011 theatre piece On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God, the titular face was the inescapable, disconcerting, beatific visage of Jesus that dominated the mise-en-scène, gazing out across the audience as it gazed back. Castellucci borrowed the face from a detail of the 1465 oil on wood image known as Christ Blessing painted by Renaissance master Antonello de Messina, which depicts Jesus as Salvator Mundi—the savior of the world. Projected across a vast backdrop that loomed over the action unfolding beneath it, the face stared placidly outwards, luminescent and enormous, inviting—or perhaps challenging—all who viewed it to contemplate its inscrutable regard.In spite of what the face did, it was what was done to and beneath its gaze that inspired critical responses ranging from apoplectic to apathetic. The production’s stint in Paris provoked a now infamous series of protests involving fundamentalist Catholic groups, who led prayer vigils outside the theatre and stormed a performance holding a sign declaring, “Stop Christianophobia.” The hysteria sparked an international group of famous actors, directors, and producers to publish a rejoinder in Le Monde supporting Castellucci’s freedom of speech.1 A similar frenzy accompanied the piece’s run in Milan. After its London engagement, Michael Billington in The Guardian merely issued a cool yawn, confessing to feeling “mildly bored rather than morally outraged.”2 In her brief assessment of the work and its surrounding media frenzy, scholar Gloria Pastorino charted a different course by proposing that Castellucci’s work is a “profoundly Christian” honoring of the fourth commandment and Biblical calls to care for the sick. Yet as a work of sacred performance, the piece goes beyond this reading to embody some of the ineffable theological concepts at the crux of Christianity. An elegant synthesis of content and form, On the Concept of the Face connects Jesus, Plato, iconoclasm, and the history of Christian art and its relationship to the body—all themes that run throughout Castellucci’s work—to create a performance that refuses categorization as either a wholly religious or secular work. The performance issuing from this intersection unfolds as a live meditation on a holy icon, replete with vacillations of spirit, rages and doubts, affirmations and mysteries.On the Concept of the Face might best be described as “postsecular theatre,” an emerging mode of performance that rejects both dogmatically religious meanings and stringently secular worldviews in favor of an agnostic wrestling with faith, religion, God, and all matters spiritual. Postsecular theatre restores a sacred vertical expanse to what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “horizonal modern imaginary” and stages both yearning for and suspicion of transcendence, often simultaneously, summoning spectators towards belief even as it complicates their surrender to it. Because postsecular works are deeply in dialogue with specific religious paths, studying them requires that we understand something of those traditions. Knowledge and critical tools from religious studies and theology, together with theatre and performance studies, help illuminate works like On the Concept of the Face, which unfolds at the threshold between the religious and the secular.Perhaps its richest and strangest gift, postsecular theatre at times performs the work of religion. While postsecular works play on professional, ostensibly secular stages to audiences with a wide spectrum of beliefs (and unbelief), these plays and performances participate, to some degree, in the efficacious rituals that mark religious traditions. On the Concept of the Face serves as a living, moving version of the kind of devotional religious object it evokes, but in the postsecular mode, those devotional meanings are complicated by shifting allegiances to belief and unbelief. The performance invites spectators into the inner tumult of agnostic wrestling that arises from simultaneously beholding a divine icon and blaspheming against it, praising it and defacing it, all while yearning for and rejecting the mystical presence of God.Castellucci’s performance took place in two parts, each visually dominated by the massive projection of Christ’s face standing upstage. The original painting, now hanging in the National Gallery in London, depicts Christ from head to mid-chest, his left hand settled on a wooden ledge that extends into the viewer’s space and his right hand lifted in a three-fingered gesture of blessing. The close up, portrait-style depiction of Christ originated in fifteenth-century Flanders where it became a popular devotional image. The “portrait” derived from the legend of Saint Veronica, who is said to have wiped Christ’s desecrated face with her veil as he carried the cross to Calvary; the indelible image of his visage was miraculously imprinted on the cloth. The piece of fabric believed to be Veronica’s veil is one of the prized relics housed at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.While the gospels tell of holy women accompanying Christ to the cross, the name Veronica never appears. The name likely derives from a designation in various medieval Latin manuscripts that the veil represents the oldest and truest likeness of the face of Christ: the vera icon or “true image.” Gradually, in popular imagination, the Veronica, as it was called, transformed into the name of a woman, and several legends were eventually attached to her, including the story of the veil.Saint Veronica later became the subject of popular devotion due to her relationship to the Holy Face. In the nineteenth century, she appeared in the visions of Mary of Saint Peter, a Discalced Carmelite nun in Tours, France, who believed she had received from Jesus a series of meditations on the Holy Face. From 1844 to 1847, Sister Mary documented devotional prayers that were to be performed as reparation for the widespread violation of the first three commandments, including blaspheming against God and profaning the sabbath. In her vision, Christ equated these violations with the spit and mud that had violated his face as he carried his cross to Calvary. Christ dictated to her the “Golden Arrow Prayer” and promised that “according to the care you take in making reparation to My Face disfigured by blasphemies, so will I take care of yours which has been disfigured by sin. I will reprint therein My image and render it as beautiful as it was on leaving the Baptismal font.”3 Sister Mary’s devotions were later promoted by Venerable Leo Dupont, known as the “Apostle of the Holy Face,” and he went on to form the Archconfraternity of the Holy Face to spread their reparative power. Castellucci’s performance stages, in part, this popular devotion to the Holy Face, but he inverts the process of reparation, suggesting that it is only by profaning the Face that it can be truly venerated.In the first section of the performance, a domestic scene played out inside a fashionable modern apartment full of pristine white surfaces and glinting chrome, was dwarfed like a doll house against the face. A frail, elderly man sat on a white leather couch watching television while his son, a smartly dressed middle-aged man, prepared to leave for a day of work. As the son busied himself, his father repeatedly lost control of his bowels, soiling himself, the white sofa, chair, and eventually the floor. Humiliated, the father wept at his accidents, but his son reassured him in barely audible tones while slowly and patiently washing his father’s failing body, changing his diaper, and dressing him in fresh clothes. This intimate sequence of soiling and cleaning repeated several times until the seemingly endless mess became unbearable, and the son cried out in exasperation. The father, full of shame, buried his face in his hands, muttering, “scusi, scusi.” And through this, the face of Christ looked placidly on, the live figures moving under his beatific gaze.The second part moved from this brief family drama to a series of evocative soundscapes and images, the suggestion of characters within a narrative replaced by shifting moments of spectacle. An amplified voice whispering “Jesu, Jesu,” echoed through the theatre and the domestic scene as the lights slipped into bruised hues, and percussive sounds like an arhythmic bouncing ball filled the space. Ten preteen boys with backpacks trickled in and proceeded to pelt the face of Christ with grenades. Furious noises like shredding metal, banging and scraping just beyond a level comfortable for listening, underscored the scene. After the boys exited, the image of Christ seemed to billow outwards before figures with knives slashed the surface and crawled out of it. Rivulets of dark liquid ran down the face—ink or more feces, perhaps—until illuminated letters shone through the fabric, spelling “YOU ARE MY SHEPHERD” across Christ’s face. Moments later, a flickering “NOT” joins the sentence. The negation took its place in the syntax, but the more dimly lit word seemed uncertain: “YOU ARE NOT MY SHEPHERD,” it tentatively read. Though obscured by the text, slashes, and remnants of dark liquid, the projected face of Christ brightened ever so slightly at the end.As is often the case in Castellucci’s work, On the Concept of the Face calls on centuries of art history—in this case artistic responses to theological questions about the nature of Christ—as well as the relationship between the body and the divine, and the tension between orthodox and heretical views of those subjects. In her book Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art, Eleanor Heartney argued for what she termed an “Incarnational consciousness” present in the works of American artists such as Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley, and David Wojnarowicz.4 The often overtly religious work of these artists—Catholics all, however lapsed or practicing—combined Christian iconography with sexuality, physical extremity, and bodily fluids, and became one of the catalysts for the culture wars of the late-1980s and 90s, in part an Evangelical crusade to defund works of art deemed blasphemous, obscene, and anti-American. Heartney traced this Incarnational consciousness, which she viewed as fundamentally Catholic, back to the doctrine of the Incarnation instituted at the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E., which resolved the problem of Christ’s ontological status by declaring him both fully human and fully divine. The consequences of this position “awards the body a dual status. It is not only an enticement for temptation and sin, but also serves as the medium though which we make contact with God.”Religious art from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance emphasized Christ’s humanity over his role as heavenly judge. Striking images of bloody wounds and festering sores in pieces like Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16) as well as expertly rendered lifelike musculature, as in Michelangelo’s Risen Christ (1519–21), expressed the mystery of the Incarnation. As Heartney observed, “Art promoted the humanism of the Renaissance while offering a popular line of defense against the heresies which would deny the ’humanation’ of Christ.” A similar emphasis can be found in the crucifixion scenes of the late-medieval passion plays, in which Christ’s lengthy monologues from the cross describe his suffering in detailed vernacular for the illiterate masses unable to encounter the Latin of the Bible directly.Throughout Castellucci’s oeuvre, he, like the American artists Heartney discusses, has explored side-by-side the limits of the body and the relationship between the domestic and cosmic, the spiritual and the apocalyptic. In his spectacle-based productions, he has placed on stage bodies that are disfigured and diseased, obese and emaciated, young and old. Though his pieces sometimes follow a loose narrative structure, the body in extremis is the foremost line of communication. In his essay “The Iconoclasm of the Stage and the Return of the Body,” Castellucci writes: “Therefore, escape; escape—in the shell of the figure—from figurativeness and from the overload of narration. Avoiding the expedient or the tedium of a story to narrate in order to reach more immediately—is this velocity?—the pure communication that is the body.”5 For the artist, it is the untrained, spontaneous body that can most effectively shock an audience into seeing the world anew.Castellucci links his avoidance of technique and his discomfort with narrative-based work to Plato, the original iconoclast. Plato’s mistrust of mimesis and reproduction lives within Castellucci’s own iconoclasm, which he sees as inextricably linked to his process of making theatre. As company member Chiara Castellucci writes, “For [Plato] visual reality was deceptive, as opposed to the incorruptible truth of ideas. Art, instead of eliminating the deceit of visual reality, reproduced it while uselessly attempting to overcome it.” Like the battles between iconoclasts and iconophiles that date back to the Byzantine era, both sides of the argument claim a sense of reverence. If the icon had no power, why bother to destroy it? As Castellucci states: “Actually, any antagonism is a form of reverse faith, identical to its opposite.” Nowhere in Castellucci’s work is the connection between iconoclasm and the body more clearly explored than in On the Concept of the Face.The two-part structure of the piece recalls the diptych form popular in medieval and Renaissance devotional art and altarpieces. Composed of two panels joined in the middle by a hinge, diptychs painted with religious content were often composed of complimentary images illustrating related theological concepts. Van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgment Diptych (c. 1422–25), for example, consists of two highly detailed panels most likely commissioned for personal devotion. The left side depicts the crucifixion in the upper third of the canvas along with the attendant armies and mourners, who occupy the lower two-thirds. The right side features Christ enthroned in the upper third of the opposite panel, where he presides over the hosts of heaven and the damned in the lower two-thirds. The bisecting vertical and horizontal planes map a cruciform shape, which functions as the compositional armature of the piece. Like van Eyck’s devotional diptych, On the Concept of the Face can be read as two opposing yet interrelated images of Christ mapped over a similar cruciform shape.As in the van Eyck, the first half of Castellucci’s work embodies the theological mystery of the incarnation and crucifixion. The three figures—the elderly father, the son, and the face in the painting—read together represent both the Holy Trinity and the dual nature of Christ. In the elderly father, Castellucci gives us the human Christ in a version of the crucifixion, a body stretched to its limits, and in the son, a loving figure who patiently cares for the sick. The indwelling divine presence of God and the promise of resurrection cast their light over the scene in Antonello’s portrait of the face.Only a detail of the Antonello painting is present onstage. In the production, Christ’s face appears to emerge from the upstage darkness and hover in space, recalling the monochromatic backgrounds of Northern Gothic or Orthodox iconography. In the full painting, Christ’s head and shoulders stand in stark contrast to the black background, and he is shown making a gesture of blessing with his foreshortened right hand, which seems to extend outward into the viewer’s space. This gesture of benediction is one of the most common hand positions depicted in images of Christ. The three extended fingers symbolize the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while the two closed fingers represent Christ’s dual nature as both fully human and fully divine. The foreshortening creates the illusion of a three-dimensional hand emerging from a two-dimensional picture plane—a technique that was a relatively recent invention of the Renaissance. Castellucci excises the lower half of Antonello’s painting, allowing the domestic scene to stand in for it.Just as Christ’s hand emerges from the canvas creating the illusion of a fictive reality, so too does the domestic scene in the first half of the production create the illusion of a fictive world in dramatic terms. The narrative fiction that unfolds across the horizontal plane of the stage completes the Antonello painting, which bisects the stage in a clear vertical axis. This vertical intrusion on a largely horizonal play world forms one of the hallmarks of postsecular theatre, and Castellucci’s creates particular theological resonances. Painting and performance together create a cruciform armature not unlike the composition of the van Eyck diptych. The body of the work itself is stretched along a cross.The suffering body on this particular cross is the elderly man. While in performance his repeated defecation has inspired everything from hushed attention to outright laughter in audiences, it is an image that encompasses the depth of Castellucci’s Incarnational consciousness and his ability to embody dense theological concepts in a single mise-en-scène. Integral to the doctrine of the Incarnation is the concept of kenosis or self-emptying, which derives from Philippians 2:6–8: “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” Kenotic theology affirms both Christ’s divine status and the reality of his humanity, reconciling this paradox by arguing that Christ emptied himself of his divinity in order to live a fully human life. How to reconcile the human with the divine and depict this most fundamental tenet of the faith have been questions at the core of Christian art since its inception. In Castellucci’s elderly father lives a vision of Christ in supreme humiliation, his body literally emptied, while the son walks a path of devotion and compassion—a true “suffering with” that the way of the cross demands.The writings of postmodern French philosopher and Catholic theologian Jean-Luc Marion are particularly illuminating on the intersection of iconography and kenotic theology, both of which figure so heavily into Castellucci’s work. In God Without Being, Marion drew a distinction between two kinds of images: the idol and the icon. The idol comes into being through the human gaze while the icon gazes back upon the viewer allowing the invisible to emanate through it. He described this double gaze as a visible mirror of the invisible: “In reverent contemplation of the icon … the gaze of the invisible, in person, aims at man. The icon regards us—it concerns us, in that it allows the intention of the invisible to occur visibly.”6 In this process of double regard, “the icon opens in a face that gazes at our gazes in order to summon them to its depth.” In The Crossing of the Visible, the veil of Veronica returns as a powerful touchstone in Marion’s phenomenology of icons. Here he extended his thinking, describing how the icon “is derived from the kenosis of the image.” Christ serves as an icon of God, a visible incarnation—the face—of the invisible supreme divinity. Christ’s disfigurement on the road to Calvary, in particular, renders his humanity transparent: “The dulling of the image, which is accomplished in the disfiguration of Christ, delivers the first icon: the veil of Veronica wipes away not a visible image but the kenosis of every figure—the kenosis of the image, ’the condition of a slave’ [Philippians 2:7]—and allows the trace of the invisible to appear, which envisages us.” Through Castellucci’s spectacle, we are invited to gaze through Antonello’s portrait to the Veronica—the “true image”—it evokes: the profaned face of Christ and the Holy that blazes behind it.In its tension between the visible and invisible, the body and the un-embodiable, On the Concept of the Face invites comparison to many of the Incarnationally minded American artists Heartney follows in her book, particularly the work of Andres Serrano. His Piss Christ (1987), a glowing amber photograph depicting a crucifix submerged in the artist’s own urine, similarly explores the collision between the sanctified religious image and the taboos of the body. Piss Christ was part of a larger series of photographic work incorporating urine, semen, and blood as raw material, and like On the Concept of the Face, sent religious and political conservatives into paroxysms of rage. Amelia Arenas posits that “the sight of bodily fluids disturbs us because it threatens the fantasy of our own self-containment and corporeal stability.”7 But the juxtaposition of those fluids with religious imagery challenges the dualistic notions of the sacred and profane, suggesting that “if the body is holy and perfect, human excrement might provide an intimation of the soul within.” Arenas cites other works in the history of Christian art operating in this specific version of the Incarnational mode. The Miraculous Lactation of Saint Bernard (1650) by Spanish painter Alonso Cano depicts the transformative moment in the saint’s life when, in a trance, the Virgin suckled him. In the painting, a long stream of milk spurts from the breast on a statue of Mary across the canvas into the mouth of the kneeling Bernard. Countless images of Saint Francis attempt naturalistic renderings of his stigmata, showing the sympathetic sores he received on his hands when in ecstatic contemplation of Christ’s wounds. Both Serrano and Castellucci follow in this long-established tradition of marrying the “scatological to the eschatological.”The sharp shift from the first half to the second half of Castellucci’s piece moves us from the suffering Christ to Christ as savior and judge. Throughout the work, Antonello’s image casts its gaze out over the scenes and into the audience, similar to the enthroned figure in van Eyck’s right panel. The theatre space becomes a miniature cosmos over which he presides, and he gazes imperturbably forward, suffering along with those who suffer and granting mercy to those who would punish him for inflicting such suffering. The attempted destruction of Christ’s face can be read as both a personal wrestling with faith as well as a larger shift towards a secular society in which religious images no longer exert the same force as they once did. If read as an expression of an Incarnational mode of thought, the face that continues to peer through the stained and shredded fabric presents a testament to the indestructability of the divine by the tantrums of humankind, here represented as angry children. Castellucci casts himself as iconoclast and then slyly refutes his own ability to destroy the icon. In doing so, he also unwittingly critiques the protests of the so-called faithful who unsuccessfully try to deny or destroy his piece of religious art.The projected face of Christ serves as both the object of devotion and the hinge of the diptych, bisecting the center of the stage. It also bridges two genres of Christian iconography: In the history of religious art, the Renaissance, as we have seen, marked a movement towards more humanistic depictions of Christ. Prior to this shift, the most common image of Christ portrayed him enthroned, transcendent and inaccessible, sitting in judgment at the end of time. These images of Christ sometimes make the three-fingered gesture of blessing with his right hand. In the thirteenth century, a new, antithetical form of iconography began to depict a half-length figure of Christ in the repose of death, crowned in thorns, blood still flowing from his wounds. This image came to be known as the “Man of Sorrows.” Read together, these genres portray two key Christian theological concepts—that Christ became an embodied man whose calling was to suffer, and that Christ overcame suffering and death to redeem the world. While the Antonello painting presents an eschatological vision of Christ as savior of the world, the elderly father completes the duo of images. Like the two closed fingers in the gesture of benediction, the father and the painting onstage together evoke Christ as both fully human and fully divine.In Castellucci’s use of projection for the painting of the face, the medium becomes the message. While the fabric that the image is projected upon is destroyed, the immaterial image of Christ remains unharmed. This is part of Castellucci’s Platonic game. The icon or copy is, perhaps, obliterated, but the concept remains—a clue as to why he specifies that the piece is a meditation on the concept of the face rather than simply the face itself. Or in Marion’s terms, the image is destroyed—emptied—but the “trace of the invisible” appears. As with the body of the father, the theological and spiritual significance of the projected painting is manifest in its material makeup. As another example that an Incarnational consciousness is at work, the physical world of the production not only mirrors a possible spiritual world but the spiritual world is manifest in it.Castellucci’s iconoclasm, and the ironic iconoclasm of the protesters who would stop Castellucci’s work from being seen, fall into a historical lineage dating back to the Byzantine era. Mosaic law prohibited the making of graven images in the third commandment, addressing the fear that representational art would lead to idolatry. This argument has been cited throughout history as scriptural justification for the destruction of religious images. From the earliest days of Christianity, however, images of Christ played a significant role in bringing the divine nearer to the earth. The first organized effort of iconoclasm occurred in the eighth century: Images of Christ were outlawed and existing ones were to be smashed, covered, or burned, and a civil war between the iconoclasts and iconophiles ensued, lasting over a hundred years. In one surviving Byzantine manuscript, an image of the crucified Christ is drawn next to another image of an iconoclast whitewashing a painting of Christ’s face, suggesting that the destruction of the image is equal to the horror of the crucifixion itself. In the West, the veneration of sacred images was never as controversial as it was in the Byzantine Empire until the Reformation, when Protestants began to oppose religious art as evidence of the Catholic Church’s decadence and deviation from scriptural authority.The earliest Christian images are found deep within the Roman catacombs in paintings from the third century depicting Christ as a shepherd. Though scholars consider pagan images of Orpheus as the source, the title “good shepherd” comes from John 18:16–17. “I am the good shepherd.” Jesus states. “A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” Castellucci invokes these early images of Christ as he expresses what might be read as ambivalence towards the “good shepherd” and the efficacy of the crucifixion in the face of human indignity and suffering.The shepherd/not shepherd ending and the larger structure of the diptych gives the sense of a deeply personal vacillation between faith and doubt, in which one conviction is always manifest inside the other. In theological terms, this movement between affirmation and negation recalls two methods of inquiry into the nature of the divine. Cataphatic theology presupposes that God can be described through “positive” forms, such as the divine attributes of mercy, wisdom, justice, omniscience, and omnipotence. Apophatic theology, or the via negativa, maintains that God “as the unique, transcendent, and unoriginate Creator of all that is, is by definition prior to all creaturely categories and therefore can be neither conceived nor described in creaturely terms.”8Theologians over the centuries have elaborated the intertwined nature of these two methods. In The Divine Names, the sixth-century mystic Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite argues that cataphatic “presumption of knowing” serves as a step on the path to the apophatic “mystery of unknowing.” In the fifteenth century, Nicholas of Cusa proposed a new description of God as “not-other,” attempting to capture the radical categorical difference between God and God’s creatures. God is at once not other than the created world nor is God outside of it: “We are to recognize and acknowledge that the divine Not-Other is both not one of the others and at once not other than any or all of them.”9 Both the Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa were theological reformers as influenced by Plato as they were by the Bible.Read through these opposing theologies, the mercy and the suffering of the figures in the first half of On the Concept of the Face are cataphatic steps to an apophatic transformation leading to an independence from earthly forms in the second half. While the father and son converse throughout the first half of the production, the second half forgoes language entirely until the affirmation-refutation of the shepherd appears at the very end. The grenade-throwing children are models of an apophatic method of inquiry, demonstrating that the divine cannot be reached through the rational realm of language or image. Perhaps this is Castellucci’s take on the oft-quoted passage from Luke 18:16–17: “Let the children come to me and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it.” Rather than naïve acceptance, these children demonstrate that the kingdom belongs to those who would destroy the words and images that mask transcendence. It is the eradication of images, not the worship of them, which leads to the mystery of unknowing. Castellucci’s vision is at once Incarnational, apophatic, and iconoclastic in both the Platonic and Christian connotations.Castellucci continually returns to this question of the relationship between the transcendent God and embodied creation. In Santa Sofia: Teatro Khmer (1986), Castellucci and his sister Chiara imagined a meeting between two great iconoclasts of world history, the Byzantine emperor Leo III and Pol Pot. This fantasia, Nicholas Ridout and Joe Kelleher suggest, “would appear to have been rehearsing a complex, seemingly paradoxical argument, whereby the iconoclastic drive against the spectacle, against the images—and by extension against the theatre—can only be pursued through the language of the spectacle.”10 In Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep (1999), Castellucci’s retelling of the Genesis myth, he combines Gospel and Apocryphal elements to offer a Gnostic vision of a corrupted world, hailing from the same theatrical universe as the miniaturist apocalyptic mysteries of Artaud and Strindberg, Jet of Blood and Coram Populo!. As Jonathan Marshall states, “Castellucci’s essential thesis in Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep is that in the shift between an idea, a thought or our conception of any given thing, to its actual manifestation, something monstrous has taken place.”11On the Concept of the Face vibrates with the same anxiety over the violence committed against the image and the violence that the image commits against the concept.This, finally, is a kind of postsecular mysticism that lives at the heart of Castellucci’s work, his personal via negativa that leads from the theatre, by way of the theatre, to what is beyond it. Through technique, he destroys technique. By way of the image, he blasts the image. In displaying a body in pain, he points to its transcendence. “I aim at a technique to be overcome; to a supertechnique that rests on its vanished, agnostic, and shelterless operation. … It is the supertechnique of the cross, I believe,” Castellucci once wrote.12 It is this “supertechnique of the cross” that operates in On the Concept of the Face, suspending father, son, audience, and divinity in the mystery of unknowing.