"touching her absence" : the unmaking of the self in Sarah Kane's theatre of negativity

This thesis examines the non/representation of selfhood in Sarah Kane’s plays Blasted (1995), Crave (1998), and 4.48 Psychosis (2000), in relation to themes of death and desire. In her works, selfhood is dispossessed within precarious diegetic and theatrical geographies, alienated from one’s own corporeal reality and disembodied speech, and dissipated together with stable dramatic character. Kane stages an active disintegration of identity, yet the self’s desire to be rid of self-consciousness remains a construct of consciousness. Similarly, on the level of theatrical representation, Kane’s experimentation with language’s “pure” phenomenality is also inevitably obstructed by its signifying power. The desire for death thus becomes a relentless process of dying and survival; theatrical gestures towards pure experientiality are always already mediated; and invocations of impersonal, citational speech are always embodied and spoken by bodies on stage. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics of negativity, Maurice Blanchot’s self-annulling literary practice, and the lineage of crisis in the text-performance relationship from Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty to postdramatic theatrics, I argue that Kane’s works stage failures of vision, identity, immediacy, and transcendence both as a continual deferral of possibility and hope and as an invitation to an ethical spectatorship that endures collectively in the absence of the object and understanding. The nihilistic images of ontological nothingness, in turn, intimate an ethics of perseverance and survival – one in which the subject persists not by affirming its own coherence, but by always inhabiting indeterminacy and remaining vulnerably exposed to what exceeds and unsettles it.