“I employ the word ‘cruelty’ in the sense of an appetite for life, a cosmic rigor and impeccable necessity,” wrote Antonin Artaud, a mad Virgo and surrealist, in his work The Theater and its Double. Artaud and other dissidents and hard to categorize thinkers are the patron saints of this hazy space.
At the start of lockdown, I decided on a whim to teach…