DISSOLUTION IDENTITAIRE ET RÉIFICATION DU CORPS DANS LE THÉÂTRE D’EUGÈNE IONESCO
IDENTITY DISSOLUTION AND REIFICATION OF THE BODY IN EUGENE IONESCO’S THEATER

Summary/Abstract: The place where man’s identity is inscribed, the body constantly undergoes transfigurations that reshape the individual’s relationship with the world. The characters of Ionesco are in crisis (Robert Abirached), their identity dissolution being in fact a consequence of the disorders of their bodily integrity. Identity is reduced to the body, but this body is damaged, weakened, fragmented, crippled, mutilated, animalized, reified, mechanized. In this way, man integrates and submits to the object system, feels “objectified, reified by the objects that surround him” (Ionesco), having no control over himself or over the things that seem to be dominated by it. On the stage, the props, the decor and the bodies of the characters merge and even become interchangeable. Sick bodies, aged bodies, rotten bodies, puppet bodies, metamorphosed bodies or the dead bodies of the characters proliferate on the stage and are assimilate to objects, burying all humanity itself. This process of reification of the body is a subject to the law of Time, of a destructive time, "accomplice of evil" (Paul Vernois), seen as the enemy of the immutable identity of man, leading him definitively towards agony and death. The loss of humanity leads to an objectification of the body, so that the characters acquire a different dimension which places them between the organic and the mechanical.

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