Volume 40, Issue 1

A comparative reading of Goethe’s Werther (1774) and Yu Dafu’s Sinking (1921) reveals how modern Chinese literary discourse emerged from an at once invigorating and torturous encounter with modern European literature in the May Fourth period. Reading European literature, as the case of Yu Dafu indicates, is a communicative process that involves complex negotiations on perceptual, libidinal, institutional and other levels. Any act of writing oriented towards a European model necessarily inscribes within itself all the tensions, conflicts, and negotiations attendant upon the reading of European texts. Modern Chinese writing that seeks to model itself on a European literary form is never a copy of this form, but always a protocol of reading it.

Jan Fabre is a Belgian artist who is fond of dismantling the traditional representational codes of theater. His theater work can be ‘labeled’ as post-representative throughout; it moves beyond traditional representation and Aristotelian dramatic aesthetics. Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetics of intensities provides an alternative theoretical framework to analyze Fabre’s As Long as the World Needs a Warrior’s Soul (2000). Since performances like these move away from a cognitively based methodology, traditional semiotics are inadequate to get a grip on them. Deleuze’s theoretical framework proves to be fruitful, for it provides terminological tools such as the Body-without-Organs, rhizomatic bodyscapes, etc. Together with Foucault’s discourse theory this terminology gives insight into the biopolitics that are at stake in Fabre’s Warrior’s . In a most fascinating way, the performance foregrounds the regulating processes of sexual discourses and their suffocating effect on disciplined and normalized bodies – bodies that are molded and fixed to ‘fit’ into a class, a genus, or a species.