ABSTRACT
In 1978, Deleuze and the Italian actor, playwright and filmmaker Carmelo Bene published under their names a modest volume in Italian titled Sovrapposizioni. The next year, a French version of the text appeared as Superpositions [Superimpositions]. The first part of the book presents the script of Bene’s drama Richard III, or the Horrible Night of a Man of War. The second consists of Deleuze’s “One Less Manifesto [Un manifeste de moins],” an essay on Bene, the theater and its relation to minor literature. Besides providing Deleuze’s most extended commentary on drama, the book offers an intriguing example of the kind of contemporary writing Deleuze sees as fulfilling literature’s project of a minor usage of language. The book’s superimposition of Bene’s play and Deleuze’s essay invites as well an analysis of the relation between the two texts, a relation that is largely complementary but framed in different vocabularies that require a delicate and rather involved translation of terms. Deleuze sees the figure of Shakespeare’s Richard III as a “man of war” engaged in a “becoming-woman,” and Bene treats Richard similarly in his dramatic appropriation and transformation of Shakespeare’s script. To understand Deleuze’s unorthodox reading of Richard, one must look first at Kleist and his Penthesilea, for only in this drama is the relation Deleuze finds between the warrior and becoming-
ic” elp on
the no
use ces ca, ng luon ra-
rily of
ener-
nds ced
of an-
d is of
nutic echeous
lathe lkits an are ew. gue
De the the dra wa tha occ det lat nen a c an Pen Dia the Sh
ing pro
woman made clear. To make sense of Bene’s Richard III, one must penetrate the cryptic comments scattered throughout his play and situate them within his equally idiosyncratic dramatic theory. Once so glossed, Bene’s drama and Deleuze’s essay prove to promote a common vision of the theater, a “minor theater” that sets all the variables of the stage in continuous variation.
