‘Let them burn the library at Alexandria’: Ethics, failure and the cruel mise en scène of Artaud’s Les Cenci (1935)

This article reconsiders Antonin Artaud’s only fully realized embodiment of the Theatre of Cruelty, Les Cenci (Folies-Wagram, May 1935), as an ethical project rather than a mere aesthetic experiment or the catastrophic ‘failure’ that twentieth-century criticism has tended to inherit. Reading the production through the prism of Artaud’s call in Le Théâtre et son double to let ‘the library at Alexandria be burned down’, the article argues that the seventeen nights of Les Cenci stage an ethics of implication: a deliberate dispossession of the spectator that renders complicity and responsibility unavoidable. Drawing on archival accounts, Adrian Curtin’s reconstruction of the production’s sound design, Kimberly Jannarone’s historicization of Artaud within inter-war crowd theory, Adriana Cavarero’s horrorism, Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face and Nicholas Ridout’s work on theatre and ethics, the article shows how Artaud’s mise en scène operates as a moral apparatus. Beatrice Cenci, exposed in her unspeakable wound, becomes the cruel ethical figure whose suffering the spectator can neither disavow nor aestheticize.