This book explores relationships between intermedial theater, consciousness, memory, objects, subjectivity, and affect through productive engagement with the performance aesthetics, socio-cognitive theory, and critical methodology of transversal poetics alongside other leading philosophical approaches to performance. It offers the first sustained analysis of the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, and Friedrich Nietzsche in relation to the contemporary European theater of Jan Lauwers and Needcompany, Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Thomas Ostermeier, Rodrigo García and La Carnicería Teatro, and the Transversal Theater Company. It connects contemporary uses of objects, simulacra, and technologies in both posthumanist discourse and postdramatic theater to the transhistorically and culturally mediating power of Shakespeare as a means by which to discuss the affective impact of intermedial theater on today¿s audiences.

1. Introduction; Bryan Reynolds.- 2. Noodling the Nodals, Nodal Hamlet: Difference and Repetition, Extreme Performances, Remembering to Forget; Bryan Reynolds.- 3. Aspects of Intermediality: Objective Agency, Wonderment, and Transversal Refractions from the Age of Shakespeare; Bryan Reynolds (with sections by zooz [aka Bryan Reynolds and Sam Kolodezh] and Kristin Keating Fracchia & Bryan Reynolds).- 4. The Fugitive Theater of Romeo Castellucci and Jan Lauwers after Nietzsche and with Guattari and Deleuze: Intermedial Operations, Animal Interventions, and Fractalactic Occurrences; Adam Bryx & Bryan Reynolds.- 5. Transversal Affectivity and the Lobster: Intimate Advances of Deleuze and Guattari, Rodrigo García and La Carnicería Teatro, Jan Lauwers and Needcompany, and Alice in Wonderland; Bryan Reynolds & Guy Zimmerman.- 6. Fractalicious! (Implosive Affects and Transversal Refractions); Bryan Reynolds.- 7. For the Love of Hamlet's Headspace: Noodling with Deleuze, Thomas Ostermeier's Nodals, and Allo-Realism; Sam Kolodezh & Bryan Reynolds.- Appendix 1: Glossary of Transversal Terms.- Appendix 2: Continuous (R)Evolutions: Thermodynamic Processes, Analog Hybridization, Transversal Becomings, and the Posthuman; zooz (James Intriligator & Bryan Reynolds).- Index.-

Bryan Reynolds is Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He is also the Artistic Director of the Amsterdam-based Transversal Theater Company, a director of theater, a performer, and a playwright, whose plays have been produced in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.