Deterritorializzare la ferita : Eliogabalo alle soglie del corpo, tra Antonin Artaud e Alberto Arbasino

This paper is divided into two parts. First, it starts by analyzing Antonin Artaud’s Héliogabale ou l’Anarchiste couronné. In this section, it is underlined the presence of an ‘original wound’ from which all the murder scenes featured in this novel derive. This wound is closely connected to the gnostic laceration between male and female sexual organs outside the hermaphroditic Aeon. The second chapter is devoted to Alberto Arbasino’s Super-Eliogabalo, highlighting how ‘the wound’ is replaced by ‘the performance of the wound’. In the postmodern novel, the injury and the violence are mainly directed to articles of consumption, gradually excluding gradually human bodies.