Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Every Text is a Performance: A Pre-History of Performance Philosophy
Get PDFThis article traces a genealogy of performance philosophy along two separate lines within the history of the twentieth-century academy. On the one hand, it locates within the long history of philosophically-informed studies of dramatic literature a partial model for the work of performance philosophy, one that applied philosophical scrutiny to dramatic texts without ever extending the same consideration to theatrical performance—in spite of the practical theatrical work of many of this movement’s leading academic proponents. On the other hand, it identifies in the poststructualist rethinking of textual authority an opening for the reconsideration of philosophical communication that returns performance to a place of philosophical potential that it has not securely held since before Plato’s dialogues. It is argued that the intersection of these two trend lines in academic thought should be regarded as constituting an important intellectual genesis point for the emergence of performance philosophy and a useful means of approaching the purposes and boundary points of the field
Tragedy, Immanence, and the Persistence of Semblance
Get PDFThe form of tragedy has been central to philosophical projects since classical antiquity, and it gained special critical import as a result of the so-called \u27tragic turning within philosophy\u27 during the Romantic period of German Idealism (see Beistegui 2000). The aim of this short paper is to address the notion of aesthetic appearance (semblance, Schein) within aesthetic theory (Theodor W. Adorno) and in contemporary tragic theatre (Howard Barker) and to show that the problem of semblance re-appears as a productive critical category in the current discourse of performance philosophy
Thinking Without Authority: Performance Philosophy as the Democracy of Thought
Get PDFPerformance philosophy commences with an impertinent gesture when it describes itself as inaugurating a ‘new field’ of study. Accompanying that claim is a radical proposition that ‘performance thinks’; that it should be counted as a form of philosophising in its own right. But in what sense can performance be construed as ‘genuinely’ philosophical thought? Taking my cue from Laura Cull’s alignment of performance philosophy with Laruelle’s practice of ‘non philosophy’ – and specifically, with its introduction of ‘democracy’ into the dispositives of ‘standard’ philosophy in order to challenge its transcendental authority over the Real – I argue that performance philosophy might be seen to enact a similar disruption of the ‘dispositives’ of performance theory. This, however, is only partly what is at stake in the fundamental proposition of performance philosophy, and I conclude by suggesting that a more radical proposal lies behind its assertion of a new ‘field’ – one that does not reduce it to an empirical fact, but grasps it as a radical ‘utopian’ hypothesis designed to ‘open up’ the philosophical dimension of performance itself; utopian because what performance offers – seen in this way - is not simply another system of representation but a possible democratic thought of the Real itself
The ‘Philosophy of Performance’ and the Performance of Philosophy
Get PDFThe notion of the \u27philosophy of x\u27, which has recently tended to become part of many subjects, from music to management, tends to obscure a range of important issues. The idea behind it seems to be that, by designating one\u27s reflections on a subject as the ‘philosophy’ of whatever it is one is reflecting about, one achieves some kind of higher insight. Such an approach arguably grants too much to a subject whose main manifestation is actually endless disagreement on fundamental issues. In the light of this less flattering view of philosophy I want to suggest that we may sometimes achieve more by thinking of some of our practices, particularly in the aesthetic domain, as manifestations of what philosophy might become, rather than just thinking of those practices as objects of philosophical analysis
To Grieve
Get PDF“Your Face”, RumiYou may be planning departure, as a human soulleaves the world taking almost all its sweetnesswith it. You saddle your horse.You must be going. Remember you have friendshere as faithful as grass and sky.Have I failed you? Possibly you\u27reangry. But remember our nights of conversation,the well work, yellow roses by ocean,the longing, the archangel Gabrielsaying So be it. [Finlay], your face,is what every religion tries to remember.I\u27ve broken through to longing now,filled with a grief I have felt before,but never like this.The center leads to love.Soul opens the creation core.Hold on to your particular painThat too can take you to God.My work is to carry this loveas comfort for those who long for you,to go everywhere you\u27ve walkedand gaze at the pressed-down dirt.Pale sunlight,pale the wall.Love moves away.The light changes.I need more gracethan I thought
The Concert of Humans and Nightingales: Why Interspecies Music Works
Get PDFThe Concert of Humans and Nightingales: Why Interspecies Music Work
Exceptionalism, Schizophrenia, Artaud: On Judgment
Get PDFGilles Deleuze posits that judgment is the crowning principle governing tragedy and modern philosophy at the same time (“Pour en finir avec le jugement,” in Critique et Clinique, 1995). Drawing on Antonin Artaud’s final radio play, Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu [To Be Done with the Judgment of God], Deleuze argues that Artaud, like D.H. Lawrence, Kafka and Nietzsche, suffered from the judgment of others inasmuch as he was individuated; his body was made to have organs – in other words, to suffer a hierarchy between brain, stomach, anus, etc. – even though he saw himself as utterly porous, without differentiation and without hierarchy. Returning to the concept of judgment and to Artaud’s final years, this paper offers a schizoanalytic reading of this tragedy of individuation, to ask whether Artaud’s theatre of cruelty – finally manifest in Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu – can be read as a performance philosophical act without drama and without philosophy. In other words, it asks whether we might conceive of the pure drama of disindividuation – Artaud’s vision of a porous, horizontal self – eschewing the very philosophical and dramatic acts imputed to it
Laruelle’s ‘Criminally Performative’ Thought: On Doing and Saying in Non-Philosophy
Get PDFFrançois Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophical’ practice is connected to its performative language, such that to the question \u27what is it to think?, non-philosophy responds that thinking is not “thought”, but performing, and that to perform is to clone the world “in-Real”’ (François Laruelle, ‘What is Non-Philosophy?’ in From Decision to Heresy [2012], 233).Non-philosophy is equally described by Laruelle as ‘transcendental practice’, an ‘immanent pragmatics’, or a ‘universal pragmatics’ that is ‘valid for ordinary language as well as for philosophy:’ He insists that we look at ‘that-which-I-do-in-saying and not just what I say’ – for the latter is simply what happens when thought is ‘taken hold of again by philosophy.’ Resisting this hold, non-philosophy performs re-descriptions of philosophy that, in doing so, produce effects on how philosophical texts are seen. Of course, whether these effects are always desired or are merely nominally considered ‘effects’ such as any description might create (misunderstanding, disbelief, dismay, boredom) is entirely debatable (and a matter for this paper). In accordance with this, however, it is notable that Laruelle objects to the focus on activity within the concept of a speech act, and instead emphasizes the ‘descriptive passivity’ that an immanent pragmatics obliges. Laruelle calls this a ‘Performed-Without-Performation’ which would be an action of the Real: philosophical language seen as a performed, but without a ‘we’ – or any others – performing (or ‘cloning’) it. It is this notion of the performative without either active human or philosophical adumbration, which is the topic of this paper
From Semiotics to Philosophy: Daring to Ask the Obvious
Get PDFFrom the late 1960s through the 1980s a steadily-expanding group of international scholars joined forces to develop a comprehensive and unified semiotic theory of theatre. The semiotic wave had largely subsided by the early 1990s, leaving in its wake a profound, and largely justified, scepticism about universal, essentialist, and ahistorical theoretical models. It is possible, however, to ask basic philosophical questions about the ‘nature’ of theatre and performance without falling into the trap of universalizing or essentializing what are, in fact, historically and/or culturally specific practices and biases. In this essay, I advocate an open-ended and dialogic process that characterizes the work of many contemporary philosophers, in both the analytic and continental traditions, and in particular those who have been inspired by the late-Wittgensteinian notion of philosophy as a kind of conceptual therapy