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ENIKŐ SEPSI logos. And this logos is, first of all, a verb (verbum, the Word), with the character of a verb (in contrast to the horizontality of adjectives — as we could continue in the voice of the well-known Hungarian poet, Janos Pilinszky). The persona, the mask worn and displayed by us, the personality, the no-one [“personne’], is an empty point that at its center speaks and denies. (233) In exhalation, it transubstantiates: the spiritual is not immaterial but the metamorphosis of matter, its exhalation/expiration. Man, created by speech in the image of the Creator, becomes active through speech. In place of Artaud’s hieroglyphics, Novarina’s theater interrogates the image of man (which in its essence is speech), his anthropoglyphs, in vivo. The text erupts through the actor’s body with his respir(it)ation: it is the common Passion of actor and text. True mimesis is the activation of existence, the setting of existence into motion. As an imitatio Christi, the actor de-portrays [“dé-représente”] and destroys the human idol. The Word crucified on the cross of space hurls human words into space, the body given over to this passive act. Through prayer, which is respir(it)ation, life is given back, since respiration evokes what is missing (Christ’s other name is the gouged out, the one who is empty, like us, who are personae)."* This is the Pascalian (Paschal) act. Novarina follows Pascal’s thoughts in his use of numbered fragments which stand in the latently influential stream of the French essay: they engage in dialogue with Jules Lagneau, Alain, Simone Weil, and Claudel (even though their names do not crop up, and the intertextuality may not always be conscious). According to Alain, ritual provides rules and objects to the attention, which is why it might be the origin of art.“ His student, Simone Weil, extends the train of thought with her concept of artistic de-creation [décréation]. The characteristic of the de-created state is the in-active activity whose origin is found in the Bhagavad-Gita. Related concepts include desire without an object, and undirected attention. In truth, it is the tense compromise between metaphysical stillness and the movement necessary for any physical action. Human autonomy, evil, and mortality are crucified on the cross of space and time. By means of grace, the “T”, assuming itself to be autonomous (this autonomy is the ego’s greatest illusion), is gradually erased by its own volition: this process is the opposite of creation, namely, de-creation (taking one back to the uncreated state, in contrast to destruction, which leads into the void). Reminiscences of János Pilinszky might arise in Novarina participated in the new French translation of the Bible with other poets (Jacques Roubaud, Olivier Cadiot), dramatists (e.g., Francois Bon), and novelists (Jean Echenoz, Emmanuel Carrère, Jean-Luc Benoziglio). Continuing in the vein of Simone Weil’s thinking, imagination seeks to fill the rupture occurring at this point — which could also be filled transcendentally — with illusions. Alain: Du cérémonial, in Systéme des beaux-arts, Paris, Gallimard, 1926, 40-41. (For more detail on the subject, see my study: A propos d’Alain, in Revue d’Etudes frangaises, No. 10, 2005, 95-105.) Simone Weil: Décréation, in La pesanteur et la gräce, Paris, Plon, 1988 [1947], 42. * 90 ¢
