로메오 카스텔루치의 <지옥, Inferno> : 실재의 정치성

초록

This article examines Romeo Castellucci’s performance Inferno (2008), addressing the question of how the eruption of the Real can acquire a political dimension. In staging Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Castellucci does not represent hell as a scene of posthumous punishment; instead, he leads the audience to experience the presence of hell in the here and now. Cries of suffering, explosions and silences, nameless beings, and a montage of fragmented images do not offer allegorical meanings or assertive statements; rather, they transform appearance itself into an event that confronts the audience with the Real. To analyze this, the study adopts Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Real and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of inoperosità as its theoretical framework. The Real is the site where the impossible returns through the fissures of language and the symbolic order, while inoperosità suspends the operation of law and institutions, thereby opening the potential for a new form of community. These two concepts converge in Castellucci’s theatre, where the destruction of representation is transfigured into the possibility of a ‘politics without politics’. Building on this theoretical framework, this article analyzes the key scenes of Inferno (2008) — self-naming, the crowd and the circulating basketball, the burning piano, the juxtaposition of children with Warhol, and the veil with Étoiles — to demonstrate how the irruption of the Real dismantles established political consensus and representation, thereby opening the possibility of a politics without politics. While Castellucci’s theatre has conventionally been analyzed with an emphasis on its imagery, this study argues that such images cannot be reduced to mere aesthetic shock or iconoclasm. Castellucci’s choice of images over words is not a matter of visual effect alone, but rather a medium through which the irruption of the Real and the operation of inoperosità are mediated, leading toward a politics without politics. Ultimately, the destination is the sensorial manifestation of the coming community. Accordingly, this article proposes a new framework for thinking about the political dimension of contemporary theatre, moving beyond image-centered interpretations of Castellucci’s work.

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