On the horizon of every revolution, whether failed or partially realized, lies a phantom of hope, beckoning towards an end to violence and the promised beginning of individual and collective transformation. In the retrospection of modern dramatists such as Büchner, Beckett, and Müller, however—modern denoting a profound pessimism about the possibility of real transformation occurring through preexisting intellectual and representational forms—, this hope has become petrified. (Dis)illusion is the prevalent sensibility, as this drama struggles, in its retellings of Occidental history, to disassociate the mise en scène from persistent illusions of progress and change. Fatigue, thus, gains tactility in the tension between a need to tell and an inability to tell it better, creating a self-reflexive aesthetic of failure whose degrees oscillate between despair and cynicism. And yet, despite the hope which has dispersed into something like Benjamin’s seeds of history spilled upon the ground, this drama has answered affirmatively to Eliot’s mournful question: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout?” A peculiar fecundity blooms from “A heap of broken images,” a flowering of disillusion and an accretion of fatigue, which relentlessly thinks through failure, impotence, and the inability to begin again (or end) to the living end. This fatigue above all, then, is a fatigue of thought, thought which pushed to increasingly sophisticated discernments of failure becomes a curse—a masochistic and self-incriminating revolt against the incapacity to overcome this failure. At this terminal point, where the capacity to reinvent the world runs up against the finitude of history and representation we might look to Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty for an end to the perpetual rehearsal of despair. Placing “the violence of blood . . . at the service of thought,” Artaud rearticulates the tortured, screaming body in order to (theoretically) abolish both representation and the tired re-presentation of Occidental drama by the hegemony of logocentrism. And through such a spectacle, we might, if just for an ineffable instant, obliterate modern drama’s terminal impasses and scratch the wound that gnaws at us all.