Volume-II, Issue-IV, May 2026
Novel Insights A Peer-Reviewed Quarterly Multidisciplinary Research Journal |
Volume-II, Issue-IV , May 2026 |
Dionysian Becoming and Posthuman Liberation in Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros: A Nietzschean and Harawayan Reading Shalini Ghosh, Independent Research Scholar, West Bengal, India Email: shalinighosh900@gmail.com |
Received: 04.05.2026 | Accepted: 29.05.2026 | Published Online: 31.05.2026 |
Page No: | DOI: 10.69655/novelinsights.vol.2.issue.04W.0 | |
Abstract | ||
This paper attempts to re-propose the interpretation of the rhinoceros epidemic as a Dionysian and posthuman liberation by applying together the theories from Friedrich Nietzsche and Donna Haraway to analyse Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros. The play has traditionally been interpreted as an allegory of fascism, conformity and ideological contagion. These readings are important but this paper suggests that the metamorphoses of each rhino also perform an ecstatic dissolvement of the hard-wired humanist identity. The study refers to the Dionysian as a force that challenges rationality, individuality, language and the anthropocentric supremacy, in light of Nietzsche's conception of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy, and reads the rhinoceros epidemic as such. Haraway’s theories of hybridity, anti-anthropocentrism, and posthuman becoming provide further illumination to the play's collapse of distinctions between human and animal, civilisation and nature, and self and collective existence. The paper, by examining the changes, surplus and the inability of language, suggests that the rhinos represent both violent destruction and vivid energy. Berenger's last resistance, then, is not just heroic humanism, but a mournful clinging to Apollonian individualism and the delusion of a stable humanity. In the end, the absurd in Rhinoceros is not a meaningless chaos, but a radical becoming and a Dionysian change. Keywords: Rhinoceros, Ionesco, Nietzsche, Apollonian, Dionysian, posthumanism, Haraway, Theatre of the Absurd, becoming-animal, anthropocentrism | ||