This course suggests an encounter between two of the radical European artists of the 20^th century – Antonin Artaud and Pier Paolo Pasolini: two anti-moderna modernists, pre-aesthetic artists, two Europeans in search of the non-European. In The Theatre of Cruelty and The Cinema of Poetry, in the insistence on ritual and gesture, in the erotic relation to God and magic, each critiqued and dissented from the decent political and artistic culture of his time. Of Artaud we will read The Theatre and Its Double and Heliogabalus, and discuss his influence on the Parisian thought of the second half of the 20^th century (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari). Of Pasolini we will read a few poems, A Violent Life, some of his articles, and see how he keeps haunting contemporary leftist thought (Agamben, Didi-Huberman).