The 2005 Avignon Theatre Festival sparked a vast controversy about the insistent presence of bodies (whether wounded, broken, or humiliated) on stage. Without subscribing to the reactionary critical response to the Festival, it is legitimate to return to the debate in order to question the ubiquity of the “victim body” in contemporary theatre. Such representations, far from being heterodox, are in fact part of the massive ideology of “the ethical”, as diagnosed by Alain Badiou. The oppressed body thus tends to (...) be assimilated to the body of the victim. The result is the obliteration of the resistance of subjects to their oppression, or of their active response to it, theatre being reduced to the maxims of a democratic materialism: “there are only bodies and languages”. (shrink)

State Violence, Coalitions, Subjects After a consideration of the reception of her work in France , Judith Butler assesses the political contribution of queer movements and minority struggles. She addresses the need for the left to reappropriate the forthright critique of the State and its violence and to examine the way minorities are produced. To do so, her analysis starts from the question of immigrant persons. She highlights the issues and the difficulties which are involved, if there is to be (...) a productive critique of the State, the aim of which is to contest it. As part of a dynamic political perspective, she proposes the creation of coalitions. She outlines the main lines of such a coalition, its dynamics and singularities, its articulation with the subject, but also its limits. In conclusion, she examines the issue of revolution and her relation to Marxist thought, indicating the outlines of her current thinking. (shrink)

The Arts and the Revolution. Some Theoretical and Practical Elements of the Overall Problematic In the strict sense, there is no “Marxist aesthetics”. The writings of Marx and Engels on the question, whatever their riches, are too disparate and fragmentary to amount to a system. What does however exist is a history of the links and articulations between art, creation, and the perspectives of emancipation, and in this history the writings of Marx and Engels can legitimately claim a place. This (...) history is neither linear nor homogenous. The purpose of the introduction is thus to address four major debates which resonated through the 20th century: about the avant-gardes, about realism, about militant art, about the utopian dimension of art. These debates, whose importance and influence is variable, mobilised artists and thinkers in the 20th century. They could either crystallise in a particular time and place or, on the contrary, they could span several decades. Unresolved, these debates still remain, today, laden with productive contradictions. (shrink)

How are we to understand the idea of a « political theatre », an idea which can be traced back to Erwin Piscator, the communist stage-director? How indeed, now that the very meaning of « the political » appears to have undergone a sea-change, so that it encompasses a series of heterogeneous practices and modalities, and when the event of October 1917 no longer suffices to signpost the perspectives of struggle? Such a question assumes a particular resonance in the theatre (...) of Alain Badiou. Badiou’s political and philosophical engagement stands out from any ordinary, routine grammar of political or revolutionary discourse. His theatre bears the implicit traces of this rupture with the ordinary expectations of the political and the revolutionary. Badiou’s play, Ahmed le subtil, thus appears to enact a singular gesture, offering as it does the example of a militant theatre bound by its pledged fidelity to the emancipatory event (such as the 1984 labour strike in the Talbot factory). This fidelity resists any thematic capture on the part of the « capitalist-parliamentary » regime, while also exceeding the frame of an explicitly militant theatre. (shrink)

The 2005 Avignon Theatre Festival sparked a vast controversy about the insistent presence of bodies (whether wounded, broken, or humiliated) on stage. Without subscribing to the reactionary critical response to the Festival, it is legitimate to return to the debate in order to question the ubiquity of the “victim body” in contemporary theatre. Such representations, far from being heterodox, are in fact part of the massive ideology of “the ethical”, as diagnosed by Alain Badiou. The oppressed body thus tends to (...) be assimilated to the body of the victim. The result is the obliteration of the resistance of subjects to their oppression, or of their active response to it, theatre being reduced to the maxims of a democratic materialism: “there are only bodies and languages”. (shrink)