Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term “show trials” suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era’s great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages? In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich (...) archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, creating a durable, civil public world was of utmost importance. Though many have discussed Arendt's relevance to the contemporary work of politics, Eric Gorham is the first to examine her ideas of the "space of appearance" in the context of the university classroom. In The Theater of Politics, Gorham examines in detail Arendt's dramaturgical theory of politics and her method of political criticism and maintains that politics can be observed in the classroom, in which students are (...) future political actors and spectators in training. Using Arendt as a theoretical platform, Gorham offers innovative ideas for politicizing the classroom and for reconceptualizing faculty and student community service: If professors and administrators can imagine their tasks in light of lessons learned from classical theater, then students will benefit from a renewed emphasis on teaching. Gorham moves to redraw the basis of political citizenship, criticizing arguments offered by civic republican and communitarian theorists and crafting a richer, more judicious concept of citizenship—one that can be learned and practiced in the political science classroom in particular and in the university in general. (shrink)

RESUMO O objetivo desse artigo é fundamentar uma avaliação sobre o final do século V a.C. em Atenas pelas lentes de uma comédia aristofânica. Atenta-se para a atuação das facções políticas (ou hetaireías), que não se restringiam apenas ao espaço das assembleias públicas, mas consolidavam, pelo financiamento das obras dramáticas, uma forma de atingir o público politicamente de maneira persuasiva: os cidadãos que poderiam votar nas ideias debatidas dentro das assembleias. Para tanto, propõem-se uma reflexão acerca do sistema da choregía (...) como forma de dominação, uma análise acerca das orações de Andócides de 415 a.C. sobre as disputas pelo espaço político - seja atuando no teatro, seja de forma oculta, pela ação de grupos de sublevação de poder - e, por fim, uma investigação do tema no exame discursivo da comédia As rãs de Aristófanes (Bátrachoi - 405 a.C.). (shrink)

From the Federal Theater Projects of the Great Depression to the disruptive performances of the 1960s and 1970s, theater has played an important role in American radicalism. This special issue of_ _Theater_ reports on socially conscious, politically active theaters in the United States. Despite the evaporation of Cold War passions and the rise of conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, such theater work remains a persistent and evolving presence on the political landscape. Since the first inauguration of George W. (...) Bush, new opportunities have arisen for political performance and for significant new challenges to these artists. T_heater and Social Change_ not only tracks the historical evolution of political theater but also explores the current state and future prospects of different modes, including agit-prop, demonstrations, solo performance, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, and community-based production. With such notable contributors as Anna Deavere Smith, Jonathan Kalb, Holly Hughes, and Tony Kushner, the issue offers a diverse assemblage of personal statements, conversations, photographs, interviews, and performance text. _Contributors include:_ Reverend Billy, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Arlene Goldbard, Sharon Green, Lani Guinier, Holly Hughes, Jonathan Kalb, Tony Kushner, Judith Malina, Robbie McCauley, John O'Neal, Claudia Orenstein, Bill Rauch, Julie Salverson, Anna Deavere Smith, Alisa Solomon, Roberta Uno. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science by Ann BlairPeter DearAnn Blair. The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv + 382. Cloth, $45.00.Jean Bodin’s Universae naturae theatrum (1596) is the least celebrated of all the major publications by this outstanding figure of the French renaissance. It lacks the apparent political, historiographical, and philosophical relevance of Bodin’s (...) well-known earlier works (the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem of 1566, Les six livres de la République of 1576, and De la démonomanie des sorciers of 1580, all receiving much more attention then as now). Ann Blair focuses our attention on the Theatrum, as a text whose significance for her book exists on at least three interrelated levels: there is its relation to Bodin’s views in the more famous texts; its advantage as a treatise on natural philosophy about whose author we know much more (intellectually) than those of most such works; and in connection with the last, there is above all its value as a distinguished representative of a genre of natural philosophical writings that was prominent in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.It is the third consideration that motivates Blair’s book most centrally. She declares her wish to enrich our view of the history of science with works, like the Theatrum, that were not made by subsequently regarded stars such as Galileo or Descartes; the very typicality of its genre makes the Theatrum, she argues, a valuable window on contemporary understandings of what natural knowledge was and should be about. Bodin’s enterprise possessed a religious core: natural philosophy was for him a tool to be used in shoring up broadly irenical positions (of the kind associated with the Colloquium heptaplomeres, usually attributed, as here, to Bodin). This kind of “natural theology” avant la lettre characterized a good number of different thinkers and writers on natural philosophy in this period, many of them German (besides their discussion here, Blair is considering such people, and their project of pia philosophia, more fully in her current work). It is a subject that, more than anything, stands at the heart of her study.Bodin, rather conventionally, tried to establish a close liaison between natural philosophy and religious knowledge—that is, between those things to be inferred from experience of the natural world and the central dogmas of faith. Less conventionally, he attempted to demonstrate on occasion truths that were far from orthodox. Regardless of whether Bodin was “really” a Catholic or a Protestant (and Blair observes the great interest in the Theatrum shown by German Calvinists in the first few decades after its original publication), his general religious stance was one of accommodation. Thus good philosophizing could demonstrate (in the weak, rhetorical sense of that term) such doctrines as the existence and providence of God; contentious issues, such as the correct interpretation of the Eucharist, were left aside. Nonetheless, Bodin also argued, at such length and with such vigor as to have the propositions condemned by the Catholic church, that human souls and angels (as well as, more usually, demons) were corporeal beings. The importance to Bodin of this position stemmed from its sociopolitical implications: in particular, if human souls were incorporeal, it became unclear how rewards and punishments—necessary sanctions for restoring the social order threatened by the Wars of Religion—could be meted out after death. Curiously, such a view seems to imply that pleasure and pain are inextricably connected to bodies alone. [End Page 363]Among the historiographical strands informing Blair’s approach is recent literature on the “history of the book,” best known through the work of Roger Chartier. Accordingly, Blair discusses the vicissitudes of production of Bodin’s book in its various editions and emissions, and carefully considers, along with the likely reading practices by the aid of which Bodin came to compose it, the various uses to which its first readers put it. Her major interpretive trope is that of the commonplace book. While acknowledging the lack of direct material evidence for Bodin’s use of such a technique as his chief means of... (shrink)

The flood of events rivetingthe Great Lakes Region since the late 1980s hasattracted much attention. Countries in thisregion have been in a proverbial greenhousehighlighted by the well-publicized crimesagainst humanity in Rwanda. In Burundi to date,more than 200,000 have died as victims of thepower struggle. While Burundians and theinternational community analyze the best waysto bring the country back on the developmenttrack, the primarily agrarian nation wrestleswith its new and fragile institutions. Thosenew institutions replaced elements that onceserved as a social cement for (...) the Bahutu,Batutsi, and Batwa. Resulting from thissituation are "killing fields'' instead ofgrounds for planting and harvesting. Anassessment of some root causes of the currentcrisis in Burundi can be seen by a briefdescription of some of the country's historywith conflicts. The implications of some of themajor elements at play (e.g., Burundi's civilsociety, NGOs, etc.) can be seen more clearlywith the help of this description. There arefive strategies that might help to alleviatethe civil unrest and war theaters endemic tothis country. (shrink)

A common theme conspicuously emerges from the few translated and published narratives of Vietnamese who participated in resistance against French colonialism in the 1950s. These narratives tend to identify moments of being an audience member to theater as having significant roles in these individuals’ political awakening and desire to sacrifice themselves for anticolonial struggle. Drawing on these narratives, this essay shows how some audience members engage in an empowering kind of political theorizing that elicits cross-cultural revelation, is progressive, (...) generates feelings of solidarity, and inspires them to engage in political action. In showing how being an audience member can lead to revolutionary action, these cases exceed the expectations of theorists of revolutionary theater such as Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal. They also offer a direct refutation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous claim that being an audience member at a theatrical performance is politically and morally enervating. (shrink)

This article argues that political performance reveals the significance of the emotions, emotional feelings, affect and mood in relation to the censorship of democratic expression. Belarus Free Theatre performers spoke about fear as they gave personal accounts of imprisonment and undertook extreme physical action on aerial ropes, creating performances that evoked both emotionally felt responses and bodily affect. The aesthetic mood effect in these performances shifted from amusing audiences with the absurdity of political censorship to alarming them (...) with the terror of political persecution. Antonio Damasio points out that although aspects of the emotions merge in everyday life, ideas or impressions need to be separated out from the physiology of emotional feeling in their study. While the turn to affect emphasizes convergence and, importantly, recognizes human sensitivity to nonhuman energies, an impersonal energetic field can be distinguished from the personal and the psychological. This analysis of theatrical performance reveals the ways in which it presents social ideas of the emotions and aesthetic moods, as well as elicits the affect of bodily sensation and invites the emotionally felt responses of audience members. Theatrical performance offers a space for expressing emotions in political protest. (shrink)

Held at Philadelphia for promoting useful knowledge.

Foucault only refers to Shakespeare in a few places in his work. He is intrigued by the figures of madness that appear in King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. He occasionally notes the overthrow of one monarch by another, such as in Richard II or Richard III, arguing that “a part of Shakespeare's historical drama really is the drama of the coup d’État.” For Foucault, the first are illustrations of the conflict between the individual and the mechanisms of discipline. The second (...) are, however, less interesting than moments when the sovereign is replaced, not with another sovereign, but with a different, more anonymous, form of power. Yet, in his 1976 Collège de France course, Society Must Be Defended, where he treats the theme at most length, he intriguingly suggests that Shakespearean historical tragedy is “at least in terms of one of its axes, a sort of ceremony, or a rememorialization of the problems of public right.” Foucault was long fascinated by the theatre, and especially its relation to political ceremony. Drawing especially on his 1972 lectures in Paris and a related presentation in Minnesota, this paper asks how we might understand the relation between ceremony, theatre, and politics in Foucault and Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare's plays, both histories and tragedies, thus demonstrate the importance of ritual and ceremony, a political theatre. Examining the disrupted ceremony of King Lear, the repeated ceremony of King John, the denial of ritual in Coriolanus, and the parody of the ceremonial in Henry IV, Part One opens up a range of historical, theoretical, and political questions. (shrink)

This essay describes a performance by the Greek theatre collective, Blitz Theatre – Late Night – as constituting a theatrical response to current political crises in Europe. What I call a ‘theatre of the impasse’ seeks to bear witness to the experience of impasse, where impasse and crisis must be fundamentally distinguished. Impasse is revealed where crisis admits of no decision adequate to the situation; and, correspondingly, where theatre loses faith in the power of decision (...) to resolve its conflicts. I situate these claims with reference to Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s dispute over political theology, arguing that a theatre of the impasse might be thought as an ‘allegorical’ theatre in Benjamin’s terms. Blitz Theatre’s Late Night reveals, thereby, the concealed truth of the impasse: a founding human sociality experienced as world immanence. In doing so doing, I argue, this theatre frustrates every hope for the kind of political theology of the stage envisaged by Schmitt. I read the performance, instead, as an elegy to Nancy’s inoperative community, at the centre of which are the figure of lovers, bound to, yet unable to take possession of, one another. Staging impasse, Late Night allegorises the fragile human community, exposed in its fundamental precarity. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction brings together eighteen essays written by an internationally acclaimed team of scholars to provide a comprehensive overview of the work of Gilles Deleuze, one of the most important and influential European thinkers of the twentieth century. Each essay addresses a central issue in Deleuzeʹs philosophy (and that of his regular co-author, Félix Guattari) that remains to this day controversial and unsettled. Since Deleuzeʹs death in 1994, the technical aspects of his philosophy have been largely neglected. (...) These essays address that gap in the existing scholarship by focusing on his contribution to philosophy. Each contributor advances the discussion of a contested point in the philosophy of Deleuze to shed new light on as yet poorly-understood problems and to stimulate new and vigorous exchanges regarding his relationship to philosophy, schizoanlysis, his aesthetic, ethical and political thought. (shrink)

The article argues that the theory of plebiscitary leader democracy, originally developed by Max Weber, is in its somewhat rejuvenated version a helpful framework in interpreting longer-term and more recent empirical trends in contemporary democracies, such as the growing personalization of politics, the emergence of populist leaders, rising levels of polarization, and the growing importance of social media. However, to realize the potential of the theory, it should be detached from Jeffrey Green’s most original, yet insufficiently realistic elaboration of plebiscitary (...) democracy that he made a decade ago. The article argues that instead of a passive and unifiable entity, the citizenry should be thought of as reactive and deeply divided, a setting which can be characterized by the metaphor of the infamous Byzantine chariot races rather than that of the theater, implicit in Green’s theory. Plebiscitary democracy should be thought of as representational, where popular control is manifested as the veto power of the popular voice. Additionally, despite its realist minimalism, the theory we propose may still have some critical potential, because it adopts the refurbished ideal of competition. The article closes by identifying further avenues of theoretization leading towards a more elaborate view of PLD. (shrink)

Since the 1990s, there has been an extended debate among feminists and left-wing thinkers concerned with notions of justice and equality about the relationship between ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition’ in contemporary politics. In this article, I examine the ways in which the issues of redistribution of resources and recognition are articulated in plays by contemporary Black and Asian women playwrights such as Rukhsana Ahmad, Tanika Gupta, Winsome Pinnock, and Zindika. I shall suggest that their theatre work, and experience of working (...) in the theatre, produce a dynamic and interdependent model of the relation between redistribution and recognition that ultimately suggests the need for recognition as the continuing primary concern of Black and Asian communities in Britain. This is evident in the plays’ contents, the theatrical forms employed by Black and Asian women playwrights (often naturalistic and issue-based), and the funding and theatre policies with which they engage. These, as I shall argue, produce tensions between the collective identities which they hail, for instance, through the appellation ‘Black playwright’, and the individual identities the playwrights seek to assert, requiring negotiations between the empowering as well as constraining demands of collective identities and the post-‘cultural diversity’ aspirations of long-term theatre politics. (shrink)

Shakespeare’s plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of other playwrights of the era as well, Marlowe’s Edward II and Tamburlaine among them. But Elizabethan playwrights were not alone in realizing that a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power. Real rulers knew it, too, and none better than (...) Queen Elizabeth. In this fascinating study of political stagecraft in the Elizabethan era, Garry Wills explores a period of vast cultural and political change during which the power of make-believe to make power real was not just a theory but an essential truth. Wills examines English culture as Catholic Christianity’s rituals were being overturned and a Protestant queen took the throne. New iconographies of power were necessary for the new Renaissance liturgy to displace the medieval church-state. The author illuminates the extensive imaginative constructions that went into Elizabeth’s reign and the explosion of great Tudor and Stuart drama that provided the imaginative power to support her long and successful rule. (shrink)

_A penetrating study of the images, symbols, pageants, and creative performances ambitious Elizabethans used to secure political power_ Shakespeare’s plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of other playwrights of the era as well, Marlowe’s Edward II and Tamburlaine among them. But Elizabethan playwrights were not alone in realizing that a (...) sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power. Real rulers knew it, too, and none better than Queen Elizabeth. In this fascinating study of political stagecraft in the Elizabethan era, Garry Wills explores a period of vast cultural and political change during which the power of make-believe to make power real was not just a theory but an essential truth. Wills examines English culture as Catholic Christianity’s rituals were being overturned and a Protestant queen took the throne. New iconographies of power were necessary for the new Renaissance liturgy to displace the medieval church-state. The author illuminates the extensive imaginative constructions that went into Elizabeth’s reign and the explosion of great Tudor and Stuart drama that provided the imaginative power to support her long and successful rule. (shrink)

This article addresses cultural memory’s ability to address past and present injustices by focusing on the artistic-political practices displayed by the professional actresses of Roma descent from the independent theater the Giuvlipen in Bucharest. The founders of this Romani women-centered theater also have ‘invented’ the word ‘Giuvlipen’ – ‘feminism’ in the Romani language – because there had previously been no word to connote both the forms of oppression and the consciousness raising politics performed by Romani women. By applying the (...) lens of intersectional feminism, the argument this article aims to put forth is that Giuvlipen’s artistic performances can foster the awareness raising of the Romani women’s ‘double jeopardy’. At the same time, the artistic performances displayed by the Giuvlipen Theater challenge the habits of historical remembering and its politics of oblivion, which can in turn promote experiential forms of knowledge and new structures and archives of feelings. (shrink)

At a time when a "return to Sartre" is being heralded in France and elsewhere in preparation for the celebration of the centennial of his birth, it seems appropriate to ponder the nature and tenor of this renewal. To which aspects of Sartre's work are we returning as the centennial approaches, and are we doing so with fresh eyes or with the same critical prejudices that have obscured our appreciation of this work in the past? If one looks for answers (...) to Bernard-Henri Lévy (aka BHL), the principal instigator of this current renewal, with specific regard to the genre that interests us in these pages—the theater—one is going to be sorely disappointed. For while Lévy considers Sartre "the first [writer]—the only [writer]—to know how to split himself equally well between being a theoretician and an accomplished storyteller," he lavishes this praise solely on the theory and practice of Sartre's novels: "The concept of engagement is not a political concept stressing the social duties of the writer; it is a philosophical concept highlighting the metaphysical powers of language. … Sartre … has never really written a novel with a [totalizing] thesis or message" (BHL 85, 86). (shrink)

The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art's politics is limited to a recondite space of 'autonomous resistance'. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art's exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural (...) theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to 'effect' to offer a nuanced account of art's political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the 'new' through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator. (shrink)

Based on video-recordings of several weeks of rehearsals of a Japanese theater piece played by French actors, and adopting an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, this paper focuses on how the same few lines of a scene are subsequently enacted. In particular, it explores how the scene is played, not only in relation to the script but also to the situated moment-by-moment unfolding of embodied movements constituting the actions and achieving their detailed formatting and meaning. Whereas the dialogue refers to (...) the scripted text, we argue that the multimodal details of each scene constitute a unique situated course of action achieved for ‘another first time,’ whose multimodal configuration depends on the temporality and the shape of each step, gesture, and body posture, as they are embodied and responded to in the vivid present and its contingencies. We demonstrate this by revealing how variations of the scene are performed, explored, and serendipitously found by the actors. We focus in particular on embodied details like walking, sitting, hugging and kissing, and the sequential and temporal positions at which they co-occur with the lines of the script. The analysis demonstrates both the indexicality of the script interpretations and the creative contingencies of the embodied work of the actors. In this way, it aims at contributing to current growing literature revisiting theater rehearsal as a situated activity and an interactional multimodal achievement. (shrink)

Aristophanes' comic masterpiece Thesmophoriazusae has long been recognized amongst the plays of Old Comedy for its deconstruction of tragic theatricality. This book reveals that this deconstruction is grounded not simply in Aristophanes' wider engagement with tragic realism. Rather, it demonstrates that from its outset Aristophanes' play draws upon Parmenides' philosophical revelations concerning reality and illusion, employing Eleatic strictures and imagery to philosophize the theatrical situation, criticize Aristophanes' poetic rival Euripides as promulgator of harmful deceptions, expose the dangerous complicity of Athenian (...) theatre audiences in tragic illusion, and articulate political advice to an audience negotiating a period of political turmoil characterized by deception and uncertainty. The book thereby restores Thesmophoriazusae to its proper status as a philosophical comedy and reveals hitherto unrecognized evidence of Aristophanes' political use of Eleatic ideas during the late fifth century BC. (shrink)

Although utopian and dystopian elements are a prominent characteristic of twenty-first-century British plays, there is still a significant research gap on these works, as the conference's organizers, Merle Tönnies and Eckart Voigts, pointed out in their introductory remarks. Bringing together drama and theatre studies, cultural studies, and political sciences/sociology, Tönnies and Voigts agreed to convene a conference to address this topic in an interdisciplinary and comprehensive manner. It was originally intended to take place at the Centre for Interdisciplinary (...) Research at the University of Bielefeld in April 2020, which would have provided a space to bring together not only different... (shrink)

This article analyses some of the shifts in tone and argumentation in Derrida's work by comparing the treatment of the topics of theatre and theatrical representation in his early writing on literary and philosophical texts with the conception of a politically committed ‘ethics’ in his late work. The topic of theatrical representation is particularly useful for a critical assessment of Derrida's later ethics because it allows us to give careful consideration to his position on different types of, and contexts (...) for, involvement. I argue that some of the important differences in tone and argumentation in Derrida's work arise not just because of the different exigencies that distinguish readings of literary/philosophical texts from analyses of political circumstances and events. There is also a shift in his work from attempting to account for the aporetic economy that supports positions held and defended to the terms of his advocacy for ethical commitment. In the case of his early writing the emphasis falls on accounting for meaning in terms of a typology of conversion effects; positive values are aporetically joined with negative ones. In his later work aporias do not present occasions for examining conditions of meaning. Rather, they become compelling imperatives to act. Despite the differences between these perspectives they both articulate an important role for aesthetic experience in meaning. I conclude by considering the consequences that such a position on meaning imposes on Derrida's use of the vocabulary of injunctions and imperatives to ‘compel’ a response. (shrink)

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, policy makers and others have debated the question of whether or not the United States should torture in an effort to prevent terrorist attacks. In a series of controversial essays, the legal theorist Alan Dershowitz argues that, if a democratic society is going to torture, it should at least be done under the cover of law. To that end, he recommends establishing a legal mechanism by which a judge could issue torture warrants—much as (...) they do now for search warrants. In this essay, I examine Dershowitz's proposal in light of Michael Walzer's classic essay on dirty hands. Just as Walzer uses political theater as a lens for viewing the issue of political assassination, I similarly draw upon a dramatic response to Dershowitz's proposal to think through the issue of torture warrants. (shrink)

A central frustration of recent political discourse is the consistent reduction of politically relevant factual and critical speech to mere expression of partisan commitment. Partisans of “the other side”—members of the other tribe—are viewed as de facto wrong, because partisans, even when their speech invokes mere facts or purportedly shared political principles. Ideally, democratic political discourse operates along at least two central dimensions: a dimension of shared factual, historical, and political assumptions, and a more contested dimension (...) of interpretation, prioritization, and evaluation that results in diverse and often competing understandings of what is good, and so of what is best to collectively pursue. Debates among advocates of competing conceptions of the good and partisans of diverse world views identifiable in terms of the second dimension are, on this picture, constrained and grounded by the shared factual and political commitments of the first, thus ensuring a meaningful basis for ongoing political engagement. While there is little reason to think this ideal has ever been perfectly realized, in recent political discourse statements that events have occurred, drugs are effective, or transparency is important in political conduct cannot seem to get uptake except as mere expressions of political partisanship any more than an actor on stage trying to convince her audience of the danger of a real fire that has broken out in the theater can get uptake for this claim except as an expression in a theatrical performance. In both cases, the real content and discursive intent of speech is undermined by the context in which it occurs. In the case of the actor on stage, the appropriate rules for uptake and interpretation are being followed, just to unfortunate effect. However, in the case of political discourse something seems to be wrong with the rules for uptake and interpretation that have come to dominate in many quarters. This essay relies on recent discussions of silencing and epistemic injustice to introduce the ideas of partisan silencing and hyper-partisan silencing in an attempt to say more precisely what has gone wrong with the rules for uptake and interpretation in political discourse. It then relies on Hannah Arendt’s analyses of truth and lies in politics to connect these phenomena to underlying features of political action and speech. Conditions of partisan and hyperpartisan silencing turn out to be a natural, if not inevitable, consequence of the relationship of truth-telling and deception to political action itself as Arendt understands this. Finally, the essay elaborates on two suggestive passages from Arendt’s 1967 essay “Truth and Politics” to propose potential strategies for resisting conditions of hyperpartisan silencing. Because hyper-partisan silencing itself imposes a certain discursive logic, there are kinds of political speech and action that might succeed in being understood as sincere and so in being persuasive—even in the face of hyper-partisan silencing—precisely because they challenge the assumptions that underpin this discursive logic itself. (shrink)

In _Elementary Aspects of the Political_ Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of the global South. Drawing on Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banerjee identifies four elements of the political: the self, action, the idea, and the people. She examines selfhood in light of precolonial Indic traditions of renunciation and realpolitik; action in (...) the constitutive tension between traditional conceptions of karma and modern ideas of labor; the idea of equality as it emerges in the dialectic between spirituality and economics; and people in the friction between the structure of the political party and the atmospherics of fiction and theater. Throughout, Banerjee reasserts the historical specificity of political thought and challenges modern assumptions about the universality, primacy, and self-evidence of the political. In formulating a new theory of the political, Banerjee gestures toward a globally salient political philosophy that displaces prevailing Western notions of the political masquerading as universal. (shrink)

Using multimodal conversation analysis, we investigate how novices learning the “inner body” acting technique in the context of a community theater project share their experiences of the bodily exercises through verbal and embodied conduct. We focus on how verbal description and bodily enactment of the experience mutually elaborate each other, and how the experienced sensorimotor and affective qualities are made to be witnessed and recognized by the others. Participants describe their experiences without naming qualities. Instead, a display of the experienced (...) qualities is made accessible to others through coordinating the unfolding talk and bodily conduct. In particular, we show how grammatical and action projection is fulfilled by interconnected verbal and embodied conduct, with body movement and posture giving off ineffable experiential qualities. The moving body appears both as a source of the experience and as a resource for depicting perceived qualities to others; additional resources (non-specific person reference and gaze aversion) contribute to organizing the subjective and intersubjective layers of the reflection of the experiences. The study contributes to and extends recent research on sensoriality in interaction by focusing on phenomena of proprioception and interoception. The data are two cases drawn from 60 h of video-recordings made in the context of a devised community theater project. The data are in Finnish with English translations. (shrink)

ExcerptExisting analyses of Carl Schmitt's account of representation tend to treat together Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), which is concerned with the Catholic Church's “representation,” and Constitutional Theory (1928), which touches on representation vis-à-vis more traditional political questions.1 Such treatments typically lean heavily on a particular passage from the later text to explicate the earlier: To represent means to make an invisible being visible and present through a publicly present one. The dialectic of the concept is that (...) the invisible is presupposed as absent and nevertheless is simultaneously made present. That is not possible with just…. (shrink)

Prologue. Setting up the stage : "beauty is in the street" in Istanbul -- Democratic action, spontaneity, and the intermediating practices of political friendship -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau : from the unsettling reality of the theater to the dream of immediacy -- Antonio Negri : insurgencies, the multitude, and the search for permanence -- Jürgen Habermas : embracing transience, containing unpredictability -- Jacques Rancière : the theatrical paradigm and the messiness of democratic politics -- Enacting political friendship in Gezi (...) -- Epilogue. Fanning the spark of hope. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: I II III.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. My interest in aesthetic philosophy and performance theory has offered me the opportunity to engage with the recent work of political philosopher Charles Taylor and performance theorist Jill Dolan.2 As I read these studies, I see interesting and potentially useful contributions to be drawn from their philosophical investigations toward the beginning moments of a new philosophy of drama education that is rooted in the collective creation of socially imagined performative utopias. It (...) is through this process that I arrive at the understanding that the very nature of the dramatic education process embodies and defines socially committed moral values of active and.. (shrink)

The article reflects on the nature of the political in theatre, assessing the notion that theatre is the last free public space and evaluating the claims to be political of rival, problematic modes of writing—the theatre of fact or verbatim theatre and the allegorical late plays of Bond, Pinter and Churchill, turning to consider the problematic legacy of Brecht, the avatar of the political. The discussion turns to writers often excluded from the (...) class='Hi'>political nomenclature, developing the notion of the centrality of critique and offering an argument for the Naturalist writers as propagators of true ‘thinking aloud’, thereby suggesting they provide a model for theatre as such. The piece concludes with a discussion of the author’s own contribution to the genre in the light of these analyses. (shrink)

Theatre & the Visual argues that theatre studies' preoccupation with problems arising from textual analysis has compromised a fuller, political consideration of the visual. Johnson examines the spectator's role in the theatre, exploring pleasure, difficulty and spectacle, to consider the implications for visual experience in the theatre.

This article argues that Pulcinella, a figure of classical Italian commedia dell’arte, could also be considered as emblematic for the reordering of politics in the early-modern and modern periods. By placing emphasis on the common underlying theatrical aspects of ‘representation’, it effectively connects the absolutist and democratic periods and helps us to understand why actors and acting came to play such a prominent role in contemporary politics, whether as politicians imitating actors, or as actors actually becoming politicians. The article also (...) shows that this sublimation of theatre into politics is not even a contemporary phenomenon but can be traced back to the ancient mime, following the origins of Pulcinella, and the first crisis of democracy, in classical Athens, in the footsteps of Plato. (shrink)

Metaphor theory claims that there is no any construct of reality outside of domination of a picture orimage. At the bottom of any philosophical system lays an image or a picture. Analysis of thinking relatesto the analysis of metaphorical aspects of that thinking. Every concept that pretends to be abstract becomes a consequence of a concrete image. The canon of philosophy no longer lays at depth but isaroused from surface. Hana Arendt is one of the most interesting and most complicated (...) politicalphilosopher in the 20th century. This study is going to examine the role of theater metaphor in her politicalphilosophy. Arendt’s political philosophy is influenced by theater metaphor. This study aimed to examinethis by using the works of Flydenberg and Blumenberg. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the concept of collective improvisation and draws out its potentials for social and political theory. Translating the ideas of collective improvisation from their original context in the theatre into the field of political thought, I argue that they offer a new understanding of political action by reevaluating the concepts of dissensus and community, as well as the ways in which politics as a system needs to produce collectively binding decisions. I conclude that the (...) ideas inherent in the practice of collective improvisation, as it has been developed within the tradition of modern theatre improvisation, subvert our intuitive ways of thinking about politics and thereby offer an alternative model of being and acting together. nema. (shrink)

In 300 BCE, the tutor of the heir-apparent to the Chu throne was laid to rest in a tomb at Jingmen, Hubei province in central China. A corpus of bamboo-strip texts that recorded the philosophical teachings of an era was buried with him. The tomb was sealed, and China quickly became the theater of the Qin conquest, an event that proved to be one of the most significant in ancient history. For over two millennia, the texts were forgotten. But in (...) October 1993, they were unearthed. The discovery of the Guodian texts, together with other recently discovered Warring States manuscripts, has revolutionized the study of early Chinese intellectual history. Kenneth Holloway argues that the Guodian corpus puts forth a political philosophy based on the harmonious interconnection of individuals engaged in moral self-cultivation. This unique worldview, says Holloway, cannot meaningfully be categorized as "Confucian" or "Daoist," because it shares important concepts and vocabulary with a number of different textual traditions that have anachronistically been characterized as competing or incompatible "schools" of thought. He finds that within the Guodian corpus familiar philosophical concepts and texts are applied in distinctive ways, presenting a worldview that is quite different from the received textual traditions. In the corpus, the most important function of government is to assist in the harmonization of state and family relations. It sees the relationship between these two entities - the family and the collection of families that ultimately constitute the state - as being inherently conflicting social groupings. The texts posit an interesting solution: State and family disharmony can be overcome by developing a hybrid government that employs both meritocratic and aristocratic methods. Without knowledge of the emphasis on hybridization found in the Guodian texts, however, scholars were unable to understand the interrelationships between these two methods of government. This new understanding illuminates central issues of government, religion, and philosophy in early China that were overlooked in received texts. As part of the contribution to our understanding of this particular body of texts, Holloway proposes a methodology for assessing a corpus of texts without relying on assumptions and definitions that derive from two thousand years of scholarship. The Guodian corpus, and Holloway's analysis of it, are now absolutely indispensable to any student or scholar of ancient Chinese intellectual history. (shrink)

In this article, I address Rousseau's evolution as a political thinker between the years 1750 and 1753, during which time his critics challenged him to square the radical implications of his Discours sur les sciences et les arts with the realities of eighteenth-century European life. It was in the course of replying to his critics that Rousseau first adopted what I refer to as a more contextual orientation to political institutions. I argue that Rousseau's ostensibly Montesquieuian turn in (...) the replies sustained his claim in the Lettre a d'Alembert that theatre, the scourge of Geneva's republican simplicity, might nevertheless serve a useful function in Paris, where meurs, in Rousseau's estimation, had lapsed already to a point of irreversible corruption. I conclude that this contextual orientation to institutions guided much of Rousseau's subsequent thought about political reform in the modern republic. (shrink)

The subject of intercultural exchange is complex and demands that we keep the basic issues that shape our views of the world in mind. And one of these basic issues is what we mean by “European identity.” The ideological concerns over the norms of identity became necessarily entangled in the post-1989 interests and agendas of Europe’s various nations. So the great challenge for us as academics as well as for the policymakers in Brussels and Strasburg is to focus on these (...) dialectics. European identity is too varied to be a unitary and homogenous thing; indeed, one of the battles within it is between the advocates of a unitary identity and those who see the whole as a complex that is irreducible to a unified identity. In this article I explore how the theatre, in the aftermath of the Second World War, served as a laboratory for the investigation, analysis, and constuction of dramatic models that became a means of transcultural communication. As attested by the continuing success of the experimental approaches of Brecht, Grotowski, La Mama, and Suzuki, this endeavour reflected the struggle of people from different cultural backgrounds to understand and accept each other. One of the reasons the theatre continues to have the potentiality to promote transcultural integration is that it deals in concrete particulars with universal resonances. As I will demonstrate with examples from my own work in various countries, the production and directing of plays by these and other dramatists shows that it is only in the performance—by transforming the familiar into the unfamiliar, by making the habitual and customary seem strange and unexpected—that the motives, relationships, and events enclosed in the written play are released so as to stimulate the audience to re-examine their own contemporary realities. Transcultural theatre thus creates dramatic experiences that are adequate and responsive to the changing world of migration and mobility in which both practitioners and audiences actually live. As such it offers the kind of transcultural education that promotes communication and understanding and that fosters an open-eyed and open-hearted attitude to the changing realities of Europe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd 76 Reviews REAPPRAISING GILBERT MURRAY Louis Greenspan Religious Studies / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4k1 [email protected] ChristopherStray,ed.GilbertMurrayReassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2007. Pp. xii, 400. £65; £27.50 (pb). Cdn. $156 (hb). us$55 (pb). isbn 978-0-19-920879-1 (hb). For much of the Wrst half of the twentieth century Gilbert Murray was a leading Wgure in (...) British academia, in British theatre, on the British and American lecture circuits and even in British politics. He was admired by the community of scholars as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, the most prestigious position in classical scholarship in the English-speaking world. He was also esteemed by a wider reading public as the champion of a magisterial liberalism rooted in classical Greek culture. Finally he was respected by the world at large as a liberal activist who, during World War 1, wrote well-argued pamphlets in support of the war and who later became co-chairman of the League of Nations Union, an organization that in the ’20s and ’30s attracted 400,000 members. Among his companions were George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, both of whom remained his friends for life. As chief editor of the Home University Library he commissioned Russell’s The Problems of Philosophyz, which is still unsurpassed as an introduction to this subject. Today he is forgotten. Younger classical scholars would endorse the statement by Fowler (quoted in this volume): “in spite of his great fame when he was alive, he might never have written, so far as most scholars are concerned today” (p. 58). His role as the public intellectual who connected modern liberalism with Hellenism has been taken over by the followers of Leo Strauss who view this connection rather diTerently than Murray did. As for his liberal activism, when he died in 1957 Murray was regarded aTectionately as a noble ghost of Victorian liberalism past, whose passionate advocacy of the League of Nations was seen as well meaning and futile as the organization he had championed. In the ’60s and ’70s his words and deeds were swept away in the tides of anti-liberal fervour that inspired the newly emerging leftist revolutionaries and neo-conservatives. At Wrst perusal Gilbert Murray Reassessed zhas the format of festschrifts and other scholarly reviews of the accomplishments of a particular writer. There are articles on every aspect of Murray’s activities: his translations of Greek drama, his critical editions of Euripides, his views of Hellenism, his post-World War 1 September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd Reviews 77 internationalism and even his lectures on the bbc, all by specialists in these topics. But this volume is more than a summing up of Murray’s contributions to scholarship. The aim of the volume is to revive Murray the public intellectual, a voice of liberalism that deserves a new hearing. The book could have been entitled Gilbert Murray Retrieved for Our Timesz: a contribution to the struggle to Wnd a liberalism that addresses the anti-liberal, anti-intellectual forces that threaten us today. In this spirit the volume is dedicated to those who died in the London terrorist attack of July 2005. The volume opens with two sets of memoirs, one by Murray’s grandchildren Ann Pauladan and Alexander Murray, the other Francis West’s account of Murray ’s reXections on an Australian childhood. The memoirs of his grandchildren, aTectionate and charming, seem less interested in refashioning Gilbert Murray for our time. They still portray Murray as one who inhabited a world that is no more, the proponent of a liberalism that was naively optimistic and top heavy with reason at the expense of the emotions. Murray’s optimism is evident in their anecdote about an encounter between Murray and Sir Edward Grey, during a summer walk in 1914. Murray opened the conversation by scoUng at rumours of impending war in Europe, for him impossible between civilized powers. Grey closed it by assuring him that war was certain, thus causing the speechless and horriWed Murray... (shrink)