Volume 136, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Drama, Theatre, and Philosophy

This article draws from the contemporary French thinker François Laruelle to perform a ‘non-philosophical’ analysis of recent literature from the analytic or Anglo-American philosophy of theatre. Much of this literature, I argue, suffers from the problem of application, namely: non- or extra-theatrical assumptions are both brought to bear upon and remain unchallenged by the philosopher’s encounter with theatre – particularly in the form of assumptions as to the nature of philosophy or the role or position of philosophy with respect to other forms of thought, such as theatre and performance. Having sought to articulate some of the problems arising from the conception of the philosophy of theatre as a definitional project, the article then considers – via Laruelle – what kind of ‘stance’ a philosophy of theatre might need to occupy in order not to impose its thought on theatre but to be open to theatre’s thoughts.

The article deals with the question of how to define and understand the concept of a philosophical theatre, in order to apply it productively to performances. To this end, theoretical reflections and the analysis of several productions of Greek tragedies that might qualify as philosophical theatre, are related to each other. Proceeding from Brecht’s ideas on a philosophical theatre, Schiller’s reflections on an aesthetic education and Goethe’s deliberations on Bildung , a first tentative definition of the concept is undertaken. In order to further substantiate the understanding of the concept, the tentative definition is applied to two productions of Greek tragedies that were mounted in order to realize the respective ideas – Brecht’s The Antigone of Sophocles (Chur 1948) and Goethe’s Ion (Weimar 1802). In light of the perspectives opened up by the conclusions regarding the concept, still another production of a Greek tragedy is discussed – namely, Klaus Michael Grüber’s The Bacchae (Berliner Schaubühne 1974), which the director never claimed to be philosophical theatre. Still, from it important insights regarding the concept can be derived that demonstrate its crucial, even if ever-changing meaning. Some of the arguments brought forward by this article have already been published in my book Tragedy’s Endurance (2017).

The article thematizes the uniquely complex relation between theory and theatre by focusing on the specific case of theory presented on stage. Part One exposes an aporia of classical aesthetics: the aesthetic object is conceived as different from thought but at the same time it is demanded that its nucleus is thought. Commenting on a particularly telling example of theory on stage: Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Erster Band von Rimini Protokoll (2006), it is argued that the power of the performance is able to uncover under the surface of a seemingly well-known and well-ordered theory a mostly overlooked element of madness. Part Two deals with the Aristotelian gesture of thinking tragedy as a para-logical reality. The ‘logification’ of the aesthetic overlooks (or ‘forgets’) that all theoretical positing loses necessarily its earnest when appearing on stage. The paper concludes with a reflection on the enduring ‘unconscious’ Aristotelianism of the discourse on theatre and tragedy. Drawing on the research of Ulf Schmidt, the irreconcilable contradictoriness of the concepts of nous and fantasia is exposed which leads time and again to the hatred for the unruly playfulness of theatre in the classic tradition. The nobilitation of tragedy by Aristotle as more ‘philosophical’ than historiography must be unmasked as a ‘Trojan horse’ which serves the subordination of the tragic play to the jurisdiction of the philosophical discourse. Resisting theory’s attempt to transform the theatrical play into a mere double of a conceptual contradiction, theatre must insist on its moment of opaqueness, sheer materiality, defiant unreasonability.

Tragedy’s overwhelming presence, presaged by the conspicuous absence of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy, has dominated the debate between philosophy and poetry ever since Plato, making tragedy the dominant paradigm for philosophical and performance practices. Over the last century, the gradual blurring of genre distinctions has led to George Steiner’s declaration of the ‘death of tragedy’ and to J. L. Styan’s recognition of the emergence of ‘dark comedy’, giving rise to a growing body of research on comedy. Nevertheless, despite the unprecedented attention, the prejudices against comedy run wide and deep, from philosophical neglect to high-brow conceptions of art all the way to underlying economies of power and social regulation. In consequence, comedy has been side-stepped as an inferior genre or mode, or rehabilitated as a truer or newer form of the tragic. The present study attempts to frame this prejudice as the result of theories of aesthetics and ethics which systematically exclude the comic vision, claiming that it is possible to trace a distinct corollary between the development of theories of genre and the development of philosophical aesthetic categories. The emphasis on the beautiful and the sublime, and its corresponding brand of ethics, can be linked to the flourishing of theories of tragedy, while the systematized rejection of the ugly, the ridiculous, and the ethically ambiguous can be shown to correspond to the floundering of theories of comedy, which remained largely neglected for over two thousand years. Much more than mere literary genres, the terms comedy and tragedy, when applied to the history of Western civilization, reveal the extent of our penchant for the speculative to the detriment of the actual.

Naturalist theatre, in its late-nineteenth-century incarnation, and particularly in the work of Émile Zola, is often seen as advancing a physicalist view of the mind, where all mind states can be reduced to brain states. The novels and the plays do not uniformly or unambiguously support this analysis, so is the theory or the practice wrong? Physicalism is an idea that has had a recent renaissance, helped by the discoveries of neuroscience. Nevertheless I express some caution about the claims made for the eradication of free will. A range of thought experiments in the philosophy of mind have cast doubt on physicalism, culminating in David Chalmers’s much-debated zombie argument. I argue that zombies and their analogues represented deep social anxieties in the late nineteenth century, and make repeated appearances in Naturalism. The essay goes on to suggest that Naturalism should be considered to have conducted thought experiments, rather than just to have attempted to embody the theory on stage. Turning to John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment, I suggest that theatre-making itself may be a kind of thought experiment model of the mind.

The concept of illusion has long been associated with the theatre. Sometimes this has had positive connotations (of escape, dream or pleasant intoxication), but more often than not it is used as a prelude to some charge or complaint (notably of lies, deception, cheating). Some philosophers have argued that, in fact, there are no illusions at the theatre, that the term is completely inappropriate. This paper argues that the concept of illusion at work in these claims is not univocal. In fact, I argue, there are a number of very different phenomena which go by the name of ‘illusion’, when applied to theatre. By exploring these different phenomena, their relation to each other and their relation to the charge of deception, I claim we can get clearer about what we see at a theatrical performance – and about what we think we see.

This essay seeks to propose an alternative to the established connection between theatre and theory through the sense of sight by turning to recent developments in sound studies and analyzing theatrical performance that privileges an aesthetic of aurality over that of vision. In taking Complicite’s The Encounter as a primary example of aural immersion and connecting it to philosophies of listening from Jean-Luc Nancy to Hans-Georg Gadamer but also to the complex media history of sound, the essay offers a theoretical revaluation of the concept of resonance. Resonance opens up an alternative approach to performing thought and thinking in performance. Instead of championing the distance of reflection and critique alone as the core engagement shared by philosophers and theatre audiences, the listening practices in theatre return philosophy as much as cultural practice to a renewed emphasis on mutual responsiveness and dialogue. I am fundamentally indebted to Anna Street, with whom I collaborated on a joint conference presentation that framed questions of aurality, theatre and philosophy in British theatre of the 21st Century. Many of the questions we discussed then have influenced my thinking for this article, and I would not be as perceptive on any of them without her philosophically driven perspective and our engaged discussions.

The debate about the relationship between theatre and democracy rests on a presumption that both the artform and the political form share an intertwined history, based in their co-appearance in Greece. Equally well-known is the antagonism towards both theatre and democracy that emerges at the same moment, most clearly found in Plato. This essay revisits this history in order to set up an examination of two contemporary theatre performances that explicitly raise the relationship of democracy and theatre, the British company Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man and the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed’s Fight Night . Both, in very different ways, approach democracy through a focus on audience experience. How, then, might these productions be read in terms of a democracy-to-come and a theatre-to-come?

This paper addresses the strained relationship between parrhesia and actorship and analyzes its political implications. These two terms seem to be antipodes: parrhesia emphasizes the presence of a speaker or author whereas actorship deploys representation . As their relation can be explained by means of the concept of representation it is worthwhile considering the two settings in which representation matters: theater and politics. These settings will be explored in case studies on Hobbes’s, Rousseau’s, and Diderot’s accounts of parrhesia and actorship. Hobbes dismisses parrhesiastic freedom, minimalizes political authorship and favors a model of representation featuring a peculiar, powerful actor: the State. Rousseau criticizes actorship and representation, and seeks to re-install the people as sovereign author. This author is equipped with a strangely distorted form of parrhesia . Diderot takes neither Hobbes’s nor Rousseau’s side. He hints at the political potential of the author-actor relationship and paves the way to a revised notion of parrhesia.