Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Ethics of Play in Earpiece Performances by Nature Theater of Oklahoma and Gob Squad
Get PDFIn Rhapsody for the Theatre, Badiou propped the notion of the ethics of play against a theory of the subject that had yet to be fully deployed. His reflection remains tentative and he simply suggests ‘that the actor could very well show a subject without substance,’ that ‘always between-two, [the ethics of play] operates in the pure present of the spectacle, and the public […] gains access to this present only in the aftermath of a thought,’ and ultimately that ‘the ethics of play is that of an escape’ (Badiou 2008, 216, 221). There is a delay at work in the ethics of play, an in-between. By looking at Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times and Gob Squad’s Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You never Had It So Good), this article proposes to examine how an ethics of play could be materially deployed in these earpiece performances through the delay, albeit minimal, the in-between text or instruction and their actualisation on stage
Attempts on (writing) her life: ethics and ontology in pro-feminist playwriting
Get PDFDoes a feminist dramaturgy exist for male playwrights? The post-1990s work of British playwrights Simon Stephens, Tim Crouch and Martin Crimp variously enact an attrition between female protagonists and male writers. Appraising these "attempts on (writing) her life" requires a feminist criticality that can incorporate the unique, intersubjective relation of playwright and character. What is the gendered relationship of these actors? In the manner of Performance/Philosophy, this essay finds that Levinasian fecundity answers this call – finding a crucial space for continental philosophy in the pro-feminist movement. Drawing on the philosophical significance of “objectification”, this essay argues that ethical portrayals of gender - in Peggy Phelan’s notion of the ‘representational economy’ - bestow a responsibility upon male playwrights to explore the potential to contribute to feminist critical writing. Whether this is a matter of ontology – and the essentialism of sexual difference that accompanies such a position – is weighed against the ethics of men-writing-women.
"Any Search for an Origin is Hysterical": Summoning the Ghost of J.L. Austin
Get PDFAs the father of the concept of the “performative utterance”, British philosopher of language J.L. Austin is regularly cast as the point of origin in a genealogy tracing the influence of linguistic theory on performance theory. Based on extensive research into Austin’s writing praxis, this paper demonstrates that the philosopher produced and disseminated his research orally, dialogically, and pedagogically through contexts that privileged the inter-subjective exchange. It frames Austin’s self-described practice of “linguistic phenomenology” as a pragmatic one in which philosophy is context. I demonstrate that this mode of “doing” or “performing” philosophy is also at play within the dramaturgy of Austin’s texts, which restage his thought processes and invite his readers to become spectators to the dramatization of his ideas. My analysis offers up a portrait of a J.L. Austin who enacted his philosophy about the performative utterance in a performative manner. In so doing, it exposes the inaugural texts about performativity as hybrid objects that trouble the concepts of “authorship” and “origin”. It also shows that these texts are infected, at their inception, by parasites, by literature, by the Other, and by the ghosts that Austin tried so hard to exorcise, yet that—on some level of consciousness—he simultaneously allowed to haunt his philosophical voice.
Caesura of History: Performing Greek Tragedy after Brecht
Get PDFTaking into account the intertwining of the theory of tragedy on the one hand and theatrical work on ancient tragic texts on the other, the paper explores the way in which tragedy poses the question of history. This is especially the case in conceptions of tragedy as an interruption in a continuum. Hölderlin’s idea of caesura, its reflection in Benjamin’s understanding of tragedy as a revision of myth are in the center of a critical dramaturgy of this kind. By analysing Brecht’s work on Antigone as well as the stagings of critical theatre makers that came after Brecht (Einar Schleef, Dimiter Gotscheff), the paper shows the consequences of the concept ‘tragedy as caesura‘ on the level of the aesthetics of the theatre, unclosing in a radical way the temporality of the tragic process. From this point of view, tragedy is understood as a site of encounter with the persisting powers of the past; as reflexive rupture in the transition between times, that undermines the established order, but without, however, arriving at a new one. Although in the history of theatre and thought tragedy has been too often associated with the universal and timeless, how is it possible to think of historicity in a way negating submission under the universal without losing the genre of tragedy itself
Figurations of Immanence
Get PDFIf anything, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, makes all living beings, including the human subjects, very much ‘part of nature’. Calling for an embodied philosophy of radical immanence marks the start of a bodily philosophy of relations. The body in this perspective is a relation to what is not itself. It is basically a movement or an activity. Could certain processes of writing be described as immanent to such movements or activities
Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung. Nietzsche et cetera.
Get PDFDeutsch:
Die Lecture-Performance „Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung. Nietzsche et cetera“ wurde bei dem Forschungsfestival Philosophy On Stage#4 am Tanzquartier Wien uraufgeführt, das sich zum Ziel gesetzt hatte, neue Allianzen zwischen Philosophie und den Künsten zu erproben.
In dem folgenden Script zur Performance wird die Philosophie als ein Modus des In-der-Zeit-seins verstanden, in der sich Unzeitgemäßes zeigt, indem eine Revolte der Zeit gegen die Zeit zu Gunsten einer kommenden Zeit in Gang gebracht wird. Die Zeitlichkeit des Unzeitgemäßen, die das philosophierende Denken begrifflich freisetzen kann, gehört weder dem Regime der Vergangenheit, noch dem der Ewigkeit an, sie ruft vielmehr Zukunft hervor.
Da die Philosophie diese Fähigkeit mit den Künsten teilt, wird kunstbasiertes Philosophieren in der Lecture-Performance als ein Feld gedacht, das Unzeitgemäßes erscheinen lässt. Wobei unter kunstbasiertem Philosophieren jene Allianz der Künste mit der Philosophie verstanden wird, in der die Philosophie künstlerische Forschungspraktiken in die Praktiken des Philosophierens mit einbezieht.
In seiner Schrift Politik der Freundschaft hat Jacques Derrida aufgezeigt, dass der Satz „Ach! Wenn ihr wu?sstet, wie es bald, so bald schon – anders kommt! …“ das aporetische Prinzip einer Demokratie der Zukunft zur Sprache bringt, in der die Zeitlichkeit des Unzeitgemäßen in Gang gebracht wird. Dabei verweist der Genitiv in der Formulierung Demokratie der Zukunft auf eine Form von Demokratie hin, die nur solange existiert, solange sie sich für ihre eigene Veränderlichkeit und Ereignishaftigkeit offen hält. Eine solche Form von Demokratie wird stets das Vorspiel einer Zukunft gewesen sein, die man vorab mit ganzem Herzen bejahen muss, um ihr Kommen zu ermöglichen; wieder und wieder.
Ein Modus der Bejahung des Werdens, der eng mit Nietzsches abgründigstem Gedanken in Verbindung steht – dem Gedanken der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen, in dem die Zeit ihr Werden ewig wieder-holt, um sich als Leben einer immanenten, nicht enden wollenden Bewegung der Unendlichkeit in sich selbst unaufhörlich zu vollziehen.
English:
The following lecture performance was a part of the research festival Philosophy On Stage#4 at Tanzquartier Wien, where new relations between philosophy and the arts were tested and put into practice.
The lecture starts with the claim that philosophical thinking necessarily performs the temporality of the untimely as a mode of being-in-time, which realises a revolt of time against its times in favour of a time to come. Being neither part of the past nor of eternity, the temporality of the untimely calls future events into being.
Insofar as philosophy shares the temporality of the untimely with the arts, the lecture-performance defines arts-based philosophy––the alliance of art and philosophy, by which philosophy has started to implement artistic practices into philosophy––as a field for the appearance of the untimely.
As Jacques Derrida has shown in Politics of Friendship, the proposition “Alas! if only you knew how soon, how very soon, things will be – different! –”, characterises precisely the aporetic principle of a democracy of thefuture, grounded in the temporality of the untimely. The genitive ‘of’ thereby indicates a mode of democracy which does only exist as long as it keeps itself open towards its own changeability and eventfulness. Therefore it necessarily takes place as the prelude of a future one is able to affirm full heartedly in advance, that is to say, over and over again.
A mode of being-in-time that touches the secret of Nietzsche’s most abysmal thought: the thought of the eternal return of the same, in which somebody has realized the never ending eternity loops of be-coming; a life of immanence; a recurring movement of eternity within itself
To Repeat or Not To Repeat: That is the Question
Get PDFI had never been in Copenhagen before, yet this was my second visit to the city. The purpose of my travel was to inhabit, at least for several days, the urban environment that once contained the peripatetic musings of Søren Kierkegaard. I went to Denmark’s capital in order to get closer to a vanished writer, a person now gone and replaced by his textual remnants. Words incite motions: I was there, standing right in front of the Vor Frue Kirke, in response to certain pages once read and pondered. My trip was a tribute to the affective consequences of libraries- books can be-come maps, passions, curiosities, displacements, attractions, resistances, temporalities. Ink in-flects life. In addition, after being in Europe I was planning on spending the upcoming summer back in the United States, learning the Danish language at the Kierkegaard Center in St. Olaf Col-lege, Minnesota. I’d reached the point where translation was no longer enough- I demanded a direct acquaintance with the original sound of Kierkegaard’s multiple voices. After many years of conversations and reasonings and debates, our friendship had turned into a relationship.
Immanence in Physics
Get PDFIn this article, the conceptual history of space in physics will be presented in the context of transcendent and immanent concepts. In short, transcendent concepts postulate space as an ambient super-structure to organize material objects, while in immanent concepts space does not exist apart from objects but emerges through their relations. In this analysis it becomes apparent that transcendent characterizations of space have been dominant in physics during the past centuries, while immanent conceptions of space have come to the fore only since the development of the general theory of relativity. The importance of immanence in physics besides relativity is still lacking. In contrast to the classical framework of absolute and relative accounts of space, the notions of transcendence and immanence allow for a complementary conception of space which combines elements of both
Embodiment as First Affordance: Tinkering, Tuning, Tracking
Get PDFThis article begins from a discussion of philosophical realism and the turn towards close analysis of skilled material practices that characterizes many recent critical interventions. I examine the roots of this turn and suggest that skilled practice is a privileged site for the enactment and testing of realist ontologies. However, I question the extent to which realist thinkers have emphasized practices in which materials outside the human body are central over those in which embodiment itself is the primary medium of practice. Thinkers of realist ontology, I argue, have neglected embodiment as the primary site of an engagement with the fine-grained detail of the world. In contrast, I propose that realist ontologies developed through reference to technological engagements not only apply equally well to embodied practices but actually find their original and primary manifestation there. The body itself is the ‘first affordance’ and the site at which questions of realism and objectivity are first encountered and resolved in practice. I illustrate this point by considering how three modes of material engagement — tinkering, tuning, and tracking — manifest in embodied practices ranging from dance and sport to those of everyday life. I conclude by emphasizing the continuing political importance of embodiment as first affordance and its crucial place as a ‘fragile junction’ between ecology and technology
Disjointed Confessions: Adikia and Radical Deradicalization in Schlingensief’s Hamlet
Get PDFIn 2001, in Zürich Switzerland, German director Christoph Schlingensief staged a version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In this version’s famous mousetrap scene, in which Hamlet wants to force his uncle to confess to fratricide, all the players of the mise en abyme are portrayed by a group of neo-Nazis endeavouring to separate themselves from the right–wing scene. In a dramatic break from Shakespeare’s text the group go on to share their own personal experiences with the audience. The production attempted to comment on and create debate about the ‘rottenness’ of the State, not just Switzerland, amid the rise in approval ratings and growing influence of far-right parties in the surrounding countries. I posit that Schlingensief’s project is a form of radical deradicalization (i.e., a radical method of deradicalizing neo-Nazis). This paper analyses Schlingensief’s Hamlet by utilizing the concepts of adikia (disjointure, dislocation, injustice) and dike (jointure, ordering, justice), which go back to the oldest extant Greek text: the Anaximander fragment. Drawing on Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida’s reinterpretations of adikia and dike I endeavour to illustrate how Schlingensief’s work attempts to intervene in the disjointure caused by the contemporary politics of fear by bringing adikia to the production of Hamlet itself