Being Gilles

For several years, Robert Cantarella has been “being Gilles”, that is bringing back to life the courses that Gilles Deleuze gave in the 1980's at the University of Vincennes and the University of Paris-VIII. Using ear-buds, the actor transmits the philosopher's courses word for word, with his intonation, rhythm, hesitations, suspensions and all the unavoidable errors inherent in the oral mode. All the same, Robert Cantarella does not do a pastiche of Gilles Deleuze. He turns himself into the faithful sound copy, the faithful transmitter, communicating his ideas by incarnating them in an ephemeral way as close as possible to his voice, that so particular voice that made his intellectual reasoning easier to understand. In another body, the thinking, in a certain fashion “deterritorialized”, of Gilles Deleuze – to borrow from philosophical concepts – comes out livelier, more exhilarating and more necessary than ever. For the Festival d'Avignon, Robert Cantarella has decided to propose two seminars made up of five courses each: the first on the anti-Oedipus, the famous notion developed with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and the second on cinema and thinking. Between theatre and philosophy, a new experience: the passion of thinking presented out loud. LP