„Tak, tak” miłości na „nie, nie” śmierci
The “Yes, Yes” of Love to the “No, No” of Death

The Struggle of Thanatos and Eros in Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre

Summary/Abstract: The main goal of the article is to analyse and interpret Tadeusz Kantor’s works from a crypto-theological perspective. The author focuses on the last theatre cycle by the artist, the Theatre of Love and Death. Most researchers do not take into account the fact that at the end of his life the artist added “Love” to his Theatre of Death and by doing so clearly emphasised new epistemic and philosophical aspects of his art. The theatre of Kantor’s last years of creative activity is a theatre in which death is not the only one of prime importance. It is counterbalanced by the idea of love “as powerful as death”, of love able to challenge the absurdity of death. The author analyses “Cricotages”, short theatrical forms realised mostly outside the Cricot 2 and interprets them as containing Kantor’s “small theology” based on metaphors, symbols. It encompasses questions of great importance about the meaning of suffering, about the purpose of man’s journey, about the deep feeling of want and emptiness, about the necessity of reading the disappearing traces of transcendence. Inspired by studies carried out by philosophers and anthropologists of death (e.g. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Hans Belting, Jean-Didier Urbain, Edgar Morin, or Stanisław Cichowicz), the author argues that Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre is not a nihilist one, devoid of any hope; it is rather a theatre that resumes communication, severed sometime earlier, with the dead. Kantor’s leaning towards death, his way of looking at the man from the perspective of a cemetery, hints at spiritual aspects of his art, revealing oft-times hidden theological tracks. The Cracow artist insisted in his last creative years that when death puts an end to life, love does not stop; Eros can become the only worthy opponent of Thanatos.

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