“A Comedy of Death”: Copi and his Profanations of AIDS

Abstract

1988 is the year of the premiere of the play Une visite inopportune (An Untimely Visit), perhaps the most autobiographical piece by the Paris-based Argentine writer, performer, and cartoonist Copi, diagnosed HIV positive in 1984. The play takes place entirely in a hospital room, which brings together the different actors involved in a prototypical scene of the fatal advance of the disease in the mid-eighties: the patient, the nurse, the doctor, friends, but also a journalist –who might incarnate the role played by the media in the AIDS crisis– and death as an untimely visitor. Drawing from Douglas Crimp's ideas on the importance of politically contesting the meanings associated with AIDS, this essay aims to explore the intervention of an absurd, humorous, and hallucinated work amidst the affects and representations that prevailed at that time in relation to the disease, both at a global scale and, more specifically, in its more immediate French context. The concept of profanation, as it is understood by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, allows us to capture the way in which Copi recovers a subject that, by then, had been –and continued to be– strongly dominated by the authoritative discourses of medicine, religion and the mass media.