of its here the other point toward which it is continually displacing itself” (Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 241/271–72).Introduction
1. Such privileging is at work even today, in the development of a term such as television to designate a medium that involves sound as much as sight, and its fascinating power persists in the vogue of what is blithely called “visual culture.”
2. Plato, The Republic, book 7, trans. Paul Shorey, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 747ff.
3. See the discussion of “Being John Malkovich” in Chapter 13 of this book.
4. On the relation of “medium” and “transparency,” see my discussion of Aristotle in “The Virtuality of the Medium,” Sites 4, no. 2 (2000): 297–317.
5. Nowhere perhaps is the theatrical singularity of the event more clearly staged than in the first act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when the Ghost of King Hamlet pursues his son and the other spectators by moving invisibly under the floorboards of the stage, thereby setting a farcical, undramatic, but eminently theatrical counterpoint to his appeal to be remembered—and perhaps to the entire tragic drama that responds to that appeal. I will return to the theatrical significance of “farce” in Chapter 7.
6. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 21–22. See also J. Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston: North-western University Press, 1988), pp. 16ff.
7. Ibid., p. 17 et passim. Judith Butler, in a series of incisive and influential writings that build upon Derrida’s emphasis on iterability, has shifted the focus of “performativity” from its initial dependence on an informing intention to the social and political effects produced by linguistic performances. Noting that “we have yet to arrive at an account of the social iterability of the utterance” (Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative [New York: Routledge, 1997], p. 150), she sees the direction of such an account proceeding from the insight that “speech is bodily, but the body exceeds the speech it occasions” (p. 156). One question raised by such an assertion is whether the enabling conditions of such excess are to be related primarily to “the body” or to its situation, construed as the staging of a theatrical medium, of which, in English at least, the present participle and gerund provide exemplary (although by no means exclusive) articulations. Such an approach is, of course, by no means absent in Butler’s work, as when name-calling in hate speech is described as “producing a scene of agency” (Excitable Speech, p. 163).
8. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 14.
9. “The sun … never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe” (ibid., p. 15).
10. “The spectacle is self-generated, and it makes up its own rules: it is a specious form of the sacred” (ibid., §25, p. 20).
11. “La Double Séance,” in: J. Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 220. English translation: “The Double Session,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 193. Future references to this work, first English, then French, are given in parentheses in the body of the text. The translation has been modified where necessary.
12. This is why “deconstruction” cannot be equated with “criticism” or even with “critical theory” in the strict sense. It is also, however, why it is not “performative,” but rather trans-or de-formative. It is the staging of a textual encounter—here, of the entre —and hence is theatrical. Two recent essays dealing with “The Double Session” make this point in differing ways. Gerald Wildgruber traces a trajectory that leads “From the Notion/Performance of Theater to the Theory of the Text” (“Von der Vorstellung des Theaters zur Theorie des Textes,” in G. Neumann, C. Pross, and G. Wildgruber, eds., Szenographien: Theatralität als Kategorie der Literaturwissenschaft (Freiburg i. Breisgau: Rombach, 2000), pp. 113–44). Whereas, as his title indicates, Wildgruber reads Derrida’s text as moving “from” a notion-performance of theater “to” a “Theory of the Text,” Geraldine Harris reads a contemporary play, Rose English’s The Double Wedding, as a theatrical repetition that, among other things, repeats and transforms “The Double Session” and thereby calls into question the origin of all repetition, including its theoretical origins. Harris notes that the problematic origin of such repetition can be traced back to the Platonic cave, which she justly finds reinscribed in “The Double Session” in the play on entre and antre: “Throughout ‘The Double Session’ Derrida constantly plays on the similarity between entre and antre, which is Latin for ‘cave,’ so that, like The Double Wedding, Mallarmé’s’ ‘Mimique’ and indeed ‘The Double Session’ can both be said to start in Plato’s cave” (Geraldine Harris, Staging Femininities: Performance and Performativity [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999], p. 112).
13. Note how, in the following commentary, Derrida resorts to the present participle to describe the singular movement involved: “As pirouette, the dance of the hieroglyph can never play itself out entirely inside. Not simply because of the ‘real space, or the scene,’ nor because of the point that perforates the page or the illustration of the book, but above all because of a certain lateral displacement: in turning incessantly [en tournant incessamment] on its point, the hieroglyph, the sign, the cipher leaves its here, as though not caring [se fichant], always here in passing from here to there, from one here to another, inscribing in the stigm of its here the other point toward which it is continually displacing itself” (Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 241/271–72).
14. Derrida returns to it not often, but at decisive junctures in his argument: first, to describe the Platonic effort to control mimsis by subordinating the imitant to the imité (p. 190/216); second, to describe the manner in which the “double remark withdraws from the pertinence or authority of truth: not by overturning it but by inscribing it in its play as a piece or a function” (p. 193/220); and finally to describe “what Mallarmé read in the libretto (of Paul Margueritte),” namely “the prescription erasing itself, the order given the Mime not to imitate anything that in any way could antedate his operation” (p. 198/225).
15. A relatively recent example is Derrida’s elaboration of the notion of the arrivant—literally, “the arriving”—in Aporias (trans. Thomas Dutoit [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], pp. 33ff). Although this text, which contains a critical reading of Heidegger (and Levinas) on death, does not explicitly link the arrivant to a theatrical context, it does define it in relation to a certain experience of space and place, of the threshold as a non-place where identity has not yet become identifiable or nameable: “Since the arrivant does not have any identity yet, its place of arrival is also de-identified” (p. 34). The word interprets and transforms the Heideggerian notion of Ereignis, event, in terms of taking place and the place thereby taken. But as we will see shortly, the French word arrivant could also be read as an elaboration of some of the implications of the German word used by Heidegger to define the “fold”—Zwiefalt—to which Derrida here refers, namely, Anwesen: on-coming or on-going. Both in German and in French, when the infinitive is used as a noun, it is generally rendered in English by the gerund, a nominalization of the present participle. The clearest—and murkiest—instance of this is Sein, “Being,” or as I prefer to translate it, “to be.” I will explain this choice later.
16. See Chapter 2 of this book.
17. This phrase is both unusual and enigmatic in German: “ohne daß der grammatische Begriff schon eigens in das sprachliche Wissen eingreift” (Martin Heidegger, “Moïra,” in Early Greek Thinking, trans. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975], p. 86). The translation has been modified. For the translation of Sein as “the to be,” see Chapter 2, n. 8, below.
18. And a bit later on in the text: “Like modern society itself, the spectacle is at once united and divided. In both, unity is grounded in a split” (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, §54, p. 36).
19. For the record, this word is not to be found in Heidegger’s essay, although it is implicit throughout.
20. “Vorliegen-Lassen … zum-Vorschein-Bringen” (Heidegger, “Moïra,” p. 41).
21. “Der muthos [ist] Sage, das Sagen aber das rufende zum-Scheinen-Bringen” (ibid., p. 44). In English, cf. “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” in Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 96–97.
22. Heidegger quotes Hegel, who, in passing from Parmenides to Heraclitus, exclaims: “Here we see land; there is no sentence in Heraclitus that I would not have included in my Logic” (“Moïra,” p. 32). In his essay, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” Heidegger quotes a similar passage, also from Hegel’s History of Philosophy, but this time apropos of Descartes: “Only now do we really come to the philosophy of the new world, which begins with Descartes. With him we enter into a philosophy that is genuinely independent, stands on its own two feet [selbständig], which knows that it comes from reason, moving on its own two feet [selbständig] and that self-consciousness is an essential moment of the true. Here, we can say that we are at home, and like sailors after long wanderings [Umherfahrt] on a stormy sea, we can finally call out, ‘land ahoy!’ (M. Heidegger, “Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung,” Holzwege [Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1963], p. 118).
23. See Chapter 3 of this book.
24. Cited in Pan Xiafeng, The Stagecraft of Peking Opera (Beijing: New World Press, 1995), pp. 16–17. Brecht’s remarks were occasioned by a tour of the troupe of the famous actor Mei Lanfang, which performed Fisherman’s Revenge in Moscow in 1935. Mei Lanfang was renowned for playing female roles and was the first to introduce the Peking Opera to foreign audiences. Much of what Brecht saw, therefore, as well as much of what is played today, goes back to innovations introduced by Mei Lanfang, in part in order to accommodate audiences who did not speak Chinese. The role of the “western” audience in determining the theatrical style developed by Mei Lanfang does not, however, negate the importance of the distinctively Chinese traditions these innovations presupposed even while transforming them. Rather, this history of the Peking Opera demonstrates how the theatrical medium is constituted, above and beyond any specific instance, by the interaction of audience and staging.
25. “The custom of the Chinese stage to preserve certain gestures and attitudes of stage figures for several generations of actors seems at first glance a very conservative habit.” Brecht argues, however, that this is a specious impression: the constancy of gesture produces two major effects. First, the gestures are separated from their individual realizations: they are not understood to be the property of an individual, but of a tradition. Second, in defining that tradition, they establish the possibility of altering it. In the West, by contrast, it is far more difficult to transform radically the art of acting, “since it is difficult to transform something that isn’t there to be transformed” (“On Chinese Theater,” in B. Brecht, Schriften zum Theater [Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1963], 4:53–55.
26. Debord, The Society of Spectacle, §178, p. 126.
27. Brecht, Schriften zum Theater, 4:38 (“Über die Zuschaukunst,” “On The Art of Regarding”).
28. The Liyuan Theater, its program states, is “jointly run by the Qianmen Hotel and the Beijing Opera Institute of Beijing with the initiation and support of the Beijing Tourism Bureau and the Beijing Cultural Bureau” (Beijing Opera of China, program of the Liyuan Theater [Beijing, 1999], p. 73).
29. Although I lack the concepts with which to analyze it, the fascinating intonation of the voice in the Peking Opera derives, in part at least, from a vocal equivalent of such “hollowness” in the abrupt modulations of the voice, recalling to Western ears certain “expressionist” dynamics, for instance in Schoenberg’s “Erwartung,” although precisely without the expressive “pathos.”
30. It should be noted that the etymology of gerun
a “tense” that is profoundly bound up with theatricality, is from gerere, to bear, or be borne along: the movement associated with the verb carries along that which is named by the noun rather than deriving from it.
31. Certain texts on Walter Benjamin’s approach to theater that otherwise could and should have been included in this book have been reserved for a book on Benjamin that I am completing and that will appear under the title Benjamin’s –abilities. For an outline of part of the project of that book, although not including its theatrical dimension, see the article “Benjamin’s Style,” in Michael Kelly, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1:261–64.
Chapter 1
1. In various Western languages, including English, naturalization is, of course, the political process of giving “aliens” the same rights as “nativeborn” citizens.
2. An important exception to and critique of such political thought is to be found in the work of Carl Schmitt, who, in Political Theology (Politische Theologie [Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1934]), places the “exception” at the core of his theory of sovereignty. In his The Concept of the Political (trans. George Schwab, foreword by Tracy Strong [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], p. 27), where he derives the “political” from the friend-enemy relation, Schmitt writes also of political “groupings” (Gruppierungen), a term taken over by Benjamin, reader and admirer of Schmitt, to describe the formation of “groupings” through Brecht’s “Epic Theater.” This term, grouping, is thus intended to replace the traditional notion of “audience” (Publikum). See W. Benjamin, “Theater und Rundfunk” (“Theater and Radio”), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 2.2:775; hereafter GS.
3. Plato, The Laws, trans. A. E. Taylor, 700 a-d, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 1293.
4. Ibid., p. 1294.
5. In his “Critique of Force,” Benjamin designates “the setting of limits (borders)”—die Grenzsetzung—as the “originary phenomenon of all legislative power [rechtsetzender Gewalt].” The rule of law accordingly consists in the setting and maintaining of stable borders. Which is why Carl Schmitt, a decisive source for Benjamin’s thinking on violence, emphasizes that the title of Plato’s text, nomoi, does not simply designate “the laws,” as commonly translated and understood, but rather the parceling out and distribution of space. See Carl Schmitt, “Der Nomos der Erde,” in Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997).
6. Plato, Philebus, trans. R. Hackforth, in Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. 1131.
7. See the discussion of “pure and impure pleasures” in the Philebus, 52c et passim.
8. The power of noise is a persistent motif wherever theatricality, in the strong sense, is involved: see the blaring of the untuned trumpets in Kafka’s “Theater of Oklahoma” and Chapter 2 of this book.
9. Plato, The Laws, p. 1294.
10. Ibid., p. 1372.
11. One is reminded of Walter Benjamin’s account of the tendency of the modern “masses” to break down distance in “bringing closer” all things (Das Kunstwerk, GS, 1.2:479).
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Das Geburt der Tragedie, §8, in M. Montinari and G. Colli, eds. Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1972), II.2:56–57 (my translation).
13. Nietzsche’s description of the Dionysian Rausch, the ecstasy that strives “not only to unite, reconcile, and fuse with the other [mit seinem Nächsten], but to become one with it” (I.1:26), renders a feeling, a self-perception and desire to overcome the limits and separation of the individual (“Jetzt … fÜhlt sich jeder”), but this in no way negates the constitutive reliance of that feeling upon precisely what it seeks to exclude: separation, individuation, the Apollonian.
14. “The place of a thing is the innermost motionless boundary of what contains it. … If then a body has another body outside it and containing it, it is in place” (Aristotle, Physics, book 4, 212a).
15. This is why Benjamin, in describing the medially specific form of “collective” called upon to take the place of the ostensibly monolithic “audience” (in German, Publikum), resorts to the gerund, in designating it as a grouping (Gruppierung)—a term that, as noted, is also employed at crucial points by one of Benjamin’s major intellectual inspirations, Carl Schmitt. See note 2, above.
16. Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. ix (my emphasis).
17. On the Genealogy of Morals, book 2, §7: “In order that hidden, undiscovered, unwitnessed suffering might be banned from the world and honorably negated, one was at the time virtually constrained to discover the Gods, and all the intermediary beings [Zwischenwesen] of the heights and depths, in short something that moves around even in hidden places, sees even in the dark and wouldn’t miss out on an interesting painful spectacle [Schauspiel]. With the aid of such discoveries life was able to … justify itself. … ‘Every evil is justified, whose sight is uplifting for a God.’ … The Gods as friends of cruel spectacles. … What ultimate sense did the Trojan Wars and other such tragic horrors at bottom have? There can be little doubt: they were designed as festival plays [Festspiele] for the Gods. … Virtue without witnesses was entirely unthinkable to this thespian people [für dies Schauspieler-Volk)” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed Colli and Montinari, 2:320–21; my translation).
18. See Chapter 2 of this book.
19. Walter Benjamin, “Was ist episches Theater?” GS, 2.2:539; “What is Epic Theater?” (first version), in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: The Gersham Press, 1977), p. 1 (translation modified).
20. “Cette relation particulière / déroutante et attirante à la fois / entre les vivants et les morts” (Tadeusz Kantor, “Le Théâtre de la mort,” in Le Théâtre de la mort, ed. Denis Bablet [Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1977], pp. 215–24). Kantor links the theatrical function of “the dead” with the use of marionettes in place of “living actors,” citing Kleist and the early-twentieth-century English drama theorist and stage designer, Edward Gordon Craig, as antecedents.
21. Benjamin, GS, 2.2:536; “What is Epic Theater?” (first version).
22. Ibid., 525.
23. Aristotle, Physics, book 4, 3.210a, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in Jonathan Barnes, ed., Aristotle, Complete Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
24. For an explanation of the translation of Zustand as “stance,” see Samuel Weber, “Benjamin’s Excitable Gestures,” in Eckart Voigts-Virchow, ed., Mediated Drama / Dramatized Media (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2000), pp. 15–30.
25. Two of the texts Freud cites, in discussing the “literary” aspects of the uncanny, involve severed hands: “The Tale of the Severed Hand,” by Wilhelm Hauff, and a story told by Herodotus, “The Treasure of Rhampsenitus.” In the latter narrative, Freud notes, the detached hand does not produce an uncanny effect, whereas in the Hauff story it does (S. Freud, “Das Unheimliche,” Gesammelte Werke [Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1966], 12:259, 267). I have discussed this briefly toward the end of my essay “Uncanny Thinking,” which serves as introduction to the second edition of The Legend of Freud (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–31.
26. I discuss the significance of touch in connection with Benjamin’s theory of translation as “syntactic literalness [Wörtlichkeit der Syntax]” in “A Touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator,’” in Teresa Seruya, ed., Estudos de Tradução em Portugal (Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, 2001), pp. 9–24; also published as “A Touch of Translation,” in Sandra Berman and Michael Wood, eds., Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). On touching, see J. Derrida, Le toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000).
27. “There and then” is my, admittedly idiosyncratic, proposal to translate the Heideggerian notion of Dasein.
28. See Chapter 13 for a discussion of a few recent instances of this tendency.
29. A recent example has been the development of new audiovisual technologies of reproduction in the consumer electronics industry: recently, techniques of audio-recording, SACD, DVD-A, etc., have been developed in view of the possibility of “copy protection.” As technology makes copying easier and more efficient, producers must devise new techniques to keep control of property rights, even at the detriment of the “quality” of the reproduction—such as “watermarking” digital recordings to prevent “pirating.” In a discussion of Sony-Philip’s SACD, David Rich concludes: “It is likely that SACD was brought to market not as a way of bringing audiophiles closer to the music, but of making digital audio more difficult to copy” (Stereophile, November 2000, p. 71).
Chapter 2
1. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and introd. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), p. 35 (here and throughout, translations have been modified where necessary to better reflect aspects of the original that are under discussion). Further page references will appear in the text, preceded by QT. For my translation of das Wesende der Technik as “the goings-on of technics,” see “Upsetting the Setup,” in Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 55–75. The present essay picks up where the earlier one left off.
2. “Entbergen connotes an opening out from a protective concealing, a harboring forth,” notes the translator, William Lovitt. See QT, p. 11, n. 10.
3. Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1967), p. 67. Further page references will appear in the text, preceded by OA.
4. The same word is used in German to designate the “withdrawal” from addictive habits.
5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), §§38, 72, pp. 219–24, 424–29.
6. For a Heideggerian reading of the significance of “security” in international relations, see Michael Dillon, Politics of Security (London: Routledge, 1996).
7. See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), chap. 2, “On the Grammar and Etymology of the Word ‘Being,’” pp. 52–74. “But the transformation of the infinitive into the verbal substantive further stabilizes as it were the emptiness that already resided in the infinitive: ‘sein’ [to be] is set down like a stable object. The substantive ‘Sein’ implies that what has thus been named itself ’is.’ Now ‘to be’ itself becomes something that ‘is’ ”(p. 69).
8. Virtually all translators of Heidegger reject the translation of Sein as “to be.” “Literally translated, das Sein would be “the to be,” but this would be far too clumsy a rendering” (Translator’s Introduction to Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000], xi). This clumsiness, however, may be a price worth paying for the recovery of a proximity to contemporary English usage that is totally lost when the decisive Heideggerian distinction between Sein und Seiendes is made to depend on a stylistic device—capitalization—that has no general currency in contemporary English. Moreover, the English infinitive “to be” has the advantage of connoting the futurity of Sein, upon which Heidegger places great emphasis. For these reasons, wherever Sein is emphatically distinguished from Seiendes, I will use the to be and beings to render that distinction, reserving the word being to designate the disjunctive juncture of the two. Similarly, for reasons that will emerge at the end of this chapter, I prefer to translate the title of Heidegger’s lectures literally, as Introduction into Metaphysics.
9. In Being Singular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy radicalizes the Heideggerian notion of to-be-with (Mitsein) elaborated in Being and Time by designating the “with as the essential trait of being and as its own singularly plural essence” (trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000], p. 34). For Nancy, this plural singularity and singular plurality of the with implies a disjunctive spatio-temporal simultaneity that calls for “a scenographic praxis” on the part of society, once its collective appearance (comparution) is no longer determined as self-expression but as theatrical exposure.
10. “Art is the setting-fast of truth instituting itself in the figure [Kunst ist das Feststellen der sich einrichtenden Wahrheit in die Gestalt]” (OA, p. 81).
11. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 2.2:420; hereafter referred to as GS. Further references to this essay will be given in parentheses in the text. Benjamin had already used the phrase in a text written in 1932, “Theater and Radio,” p. 775 of the same volume.
12. “Was ist episches Theater?” (“What Is Epic Theater?”), first version, in Benjamin, GS 2.2:519.
13. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Mourning Play, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), p. 182.
14. Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared, trans. Michael Hoffmann (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1997).
15. Franz Kafka, Der Verschollene, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1983). Citations in this text refer to the reprint of this edition by Reclam Verlag (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1997).
16. In a forthcoming book, Benjamin’s –abilities, I hope to demonstrate that Benjamin should be read above all as a “virtual thinker”: a thinker of possibilities whose medium is inextricably bound up with writing as a medium of signifying rather than as the production of meaning. Such possibilities cannot be measured in terms of their ability to actualize themselves as comprehension but rather register in terms of their resistance to such expectations. For an initial outline of part of this project, see Samuel Weber, “Benjamin’s Style,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1:261–64.
17. When Benjamin showed his essay on Kafka to Brecht, the latter was openly critical, both of Kafka and of his interpreter. According to the notes Benjamin wrote during his 1934 visit to Brecht in Svendborg, Brecht dismissed his Kafka essay as symptomatic of a more general tendency to “journal jottings [tagebuchartigen Schriftstellerei].” By taking Kafka seriously, Brecht argued, Benjamin’s essay promoted “Jewish Fascism.” Whereas the genuine article looked to “heroism” for a way out of the insecurity of petit-bourgeois existence, Jewish Fascism “asked questions.” But both looked to a Führer to provide the answer. See: Walter Benjamin, “Svendborg Diaries,” GS, 4:526–30. For a comprehensive and well-informed discussion of the extremely complex relationship between Benjamin and Brecht, see the excellent study by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Das Theater des “dekonstruktiven Defaitismus” (Frankfurt a. M.: Stromfeld/Nexus, 2002), pp. 175–230.
18. This would be Benjamin’s version of Max Weber’s notion of “rationalization.”
19. This classical approach to the work of art is of course called into question by the Jena Romantics, in particular by Friedrich Schlegel, whose notion of the “criticizability” of works occupies a central position in Benjamin’s thesis “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” (Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996], pp. 116–200). Benjamin contrasts Schlegel’s notion of “criticizability” with Goethe’s idea of the immanence of the artwork, and then points to Hölderlin as providing a possible way beyond the opposition of classical and romantic conceptions of the work. Benjamin’s construction of the German baroque “mourning play” (Trauerspiel) as “allegorical” demonstrates a major consequence he will elicit from this problematizing of the work, one that runs through his writings from beginning to end.
20. In an early text, “Typographies,” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe points out the relation between Heidegger’s conception of posis as “a mode of installation in general” and mimsis, which Heidegger mistrusts, in the Platonic tradition, as a mode of disinstallation. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Typographies,” in S. Agacinski, J. Derrida, et al., Mimesis Desarticulations (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975), p. 206.
21. “The absolute arrivant does not yet have a name or an identity. This is why I call it simply the arrivant, not someone or something that arrives, a subject, a person, an individual or a living thing” (Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], p. 34).
22. It should be noted that in French the verb arriver also signifies “to attain a goal or fulfill an intention”: the arrivant is thus that which is constantly reaching its goal, without ever attaining it.
23. Franz Kafka, Erzählungen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), p. 187; “The Next Village,” in Franz Kafka, The Metaphorphosis, The Penal Colony and Other Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), p. 158. Translation modified.
24. Ibid., p. 43.
25. Derrida relates the mysterium tremendum to the trembling of the earth as that “strange repetition that ties an irrefutable past … to a future that cannot be anticipated” (The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], p. 54). Derrida traces the motif back to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (2:12).
26. Cited from “Er,” “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer” (“Constructing the Great Wall of China”), in Benjamin, GS, 2.2:435. In To Be and Time, §15, Heidegger also cites the example of hammering to illustrate the nature of Zeug, “stuff” or, as it is usually translated, “equipment.” This nature resides in the relationship “in order that,” um zu, which, according to Heidegger, pertains to the essence of “hammering.” A notion of a “hammering” separated from such a relationship would, for Heidegger, be secondary and derived. This is why Heidegger’s discussion of “hammering” is couched in the present indicative and its derivatives, whereas Kafka’s account, situating “hammering” in the dimension of desire, tends toward the present participle and toward “becoming” rather than “being” in the sense of “is,” as the following assertion demonstrates: “Hammering does not simply have a knowledge concerning the character of the hammer as stuff, but rather has assimilated [zugeeignet] this stuff as adequately [angemessen] as possible. … Hammering itself discovers the specific ‘handiness’ of the hammer. The mode of being of stuff, in which it reveals itself on its own [von sich her] , we call ‘ready to hand’ [Zuhandenheit]” (To Be and Time, p. 98). In the structure of stuff, which is that of referring (Verweisen), there lies, according to Heidegger, the reference “of something to something.” For Kafka, by contrast, the process of “referring,” of Verweisen, no longer presupposes that “something,” which is why it can be said to be more “real” and yet also “more insane”: it is missing precisely the “self” that Heidegger invokes (“Hammering itself discovers”). The reality of the present participle, of the gerund, Seiend, cannot be measured in terms of the self of a Seiendes as either subject or object. This will lead Kafka to the theater, and perhaps drive Heidegger to avoid it.
27. The noun act has been affected by the very spread of theatricality that I am investigating. An “act” can be something that is not “real” or “true,” but merely feigned. Yet “action” seems to have retained—for the time being, at least—its value of designating something unambiguously “real.”
28. Of course, the two can and do converge, and increasingly do so in American politics, where Ronald Reagan can be identified as the first “acting president” who served his full term while acting the part. Theatrical acting as the way to invulnerability is what the phrase teflon president both designates and technologically dissimulates. Vulnerability and mortality thus become “roles” that can be discarded at will, like a bad dream from which one awakes. Could this be the appeal of “politics” in an age of “media”?
29. The standard English translation of this passage can be found in Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2: 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 814.
30. The standard English translation can be found in ibid., p. 802.
31. “Hence we conclude that the innermost motionless boundary of what contains is place” (Aristotle, Physics, bk. 4, chap. 4, 212a 20–21, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon [New York: Random House, 1941], p. 278).
32. Kafka, Der Verschollene, p. 7.
33. This phenomenon recurs today on a global scale in the remarkable cacophony of boom-boxes, walkmen, and mobile phones, devices that quite literally “drown out” one’s relation to the immediate environment and thus make flagrant the indifference to place that is one of the hallmarks of the Heideggerian Gestell.
34. Benjamin, The Origin of the German Mourning Play, p. 80.
35. In French public television, those who are considered to have “creative” or “artistic” functions, such as directors, are ineligible for long-term contracts and the status of civil servant. Job security is thus considered incompatible with creativity. The Theater of Oklahoma, like most private enterprises today, applies this principle to all labor contracts, whether “creative” or not.
36. S. Freud, “Fetischismus,” Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1948), 14:316.
37. On July 16 and 17, 1942, the Vichy police rounded up some eight thousand Jews, including over four thousand children, and held them in the Winter Stadium (Vel d’Hiv[er]) in Drancy, a northern suburb of Paris, before deporting them to Auschwitz. The National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, was only one of many stadiums throughout the country that served as mass detention, torture, and execution centers following the coup d’état led by General Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973. During the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, public executions and amputations were held in the Ghazi Stadium in Kabul prior to soccer matches.
38. It is unnecessary to insist on the feminine overtones of this darkly glimmering “box,” with its “pillars” and “pleats.” See “The Meaning of the Thallus,” in S. Weber, The Legend of Freud (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 101–20.
39. The same “into” marks the title of Heidegger’s lectures, Introduction into Metaphysics.
40. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” GS, 2.2:422.
Chapter 3
1. I note in passing that today there is a tendency to assume that any reference to “bodies” necessarily implies human bodies, as though the human body were somehow the privileged, exemplary body. This generalized and very deep-rooted assumption must itself be opened to questioning if the relation of “theater” to the “electronic media” is to be productively explored.
2. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerald Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), p. 91.
3. To avoid “idealistic” misinterpretation: the “influence” of this theoretical text need not be exercised directly. There is no need for a theatrical director to have “read” the Poetics to be “influenced” by the tradition it articulates.
4. Stephen Halliwell translates the beginning of this passage: “They [the Dorians] cite the names [tragedy and comedy] as evidence” (Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995], p. 37).
5. “There are jests which you would be ashamed to make yourself, and yet on the comic stage, or indeed in private, when you hear them, you are greatly amused by them and are not all disgusted at their unseemliness … there is a principle in human nature which is disposed to raise a laugh, and this which you once restrained by reason, because you were afraid of being thought a buffoon, is now let out again; and having stimulated the risible faculty at the theatre, you are betrayed unconsciously to yourself into playing the comic poet at home” (Plato, Republic, book 10, trans. Paul Shorey, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961], p. 606).
6. Sophocles, The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1947), p. 25. Page references to this edition will henceforth be given in the text.
7. Although I cannot go into this in detail, I should note that Hölderlin singles out this point as Oedipus’ tragic error, his hamartia: “Oedipus interprets the Oracle’s message too infinitely” he notes in his “Remarks on Oedipus,” explaining that Oedipus responds both too generally and too particularly, jumping from the general, the need for purgation, to the particular, the need to identify the impure element as an individual person or culprit. See Friedrich Hölderlin, Werke und Briefe, ed. Friedrich Beissner and Jochen Schmitt (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1969), pp. 731–32.
8. Theodor Adorno, “Prolog zu Fernsehen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.1, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II, ed. Rold Tiedemann, with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 507.
9. Walter Benjamin, “Theater und Rundfunk” (“Theater and Radio”), in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 2.2:774; hereafter referred to as GS. The standard English translation can be found in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2: 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others; ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 584. Future references to this work will include both English and German page numbers, with the English preceding.
10. Benjamin’s German formulation, den Einsatz der lebendigen Mittel, has been overtaken by history and resonates differently in an epoch that must look back on Einsatzkommandos.
11. Benjamin actually refers to the phrase “sacred sobriety,” heilige NÜchternheit, at the end of his early essay, “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin,” GS, 2.1, 125–26.
12. Hölderlin, “Remarks,” p. 730. The notion of “pure word” here is a forebear of the “pure language” that Benjamin introduces in his early essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,”’ in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 62–74.
13. “However, in addition to the concept of synthesis, what will become of increasing systematic importance is that of a certain non-synthesis of two concepts in another, since apart from synthesis another relation between thesis and antithesis is possible” (Benjamin, “Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie,” GS, 2.1, 166).
14. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies de la télévision, entretiens filmés (Paris: Galilée–INA, 1996), back cover text, my translation.
15. Ibid.
16. I return to some of these issues in Chapter 6, below, concerning Benjamin’s study of the German Trauerspiel, and more extensively in a forthcoming study, Benjamin’s —abilities, which will discuss the “medialization” of his thinking and writing that allows him to address the “media” in such prescient and challenging ways.
Chapter 4
1. The presidential election of 2000 is only the most recent, and problematic, instance of this tendency, which continues unabated.
2. Ismene reminds Antigone, at the outset, “how our father / Perished in shame and misery” before the suicide of Jocasta (ll. 49–50), whereas in the Oedipus plays Oedipus survives Jocasta, goes into exile, and dies peacefully in Oedipus at Colonus. Barring a memory blackout on the part of Sophocles, this provides compelling internal evidence that the play was written before the other two. Even more, it indicates the mutability of the myth with respect to its theatrical staging. Throughout this chapter, I have used Sophocles, Plays, Antigone, trans. R. C. Jebb, introd. Ruby Blondell (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2004); references are given by line number in the text. The play is also available on the Internet at http://www.chlt.org/cgi-bin/ptext?-doc = Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0185.
3. Although autodelphon is usually translated without reference to the “brother”—Jebb, for instance, renders it simply as “my own dear sister”—Nicole Loraux insists that a literal rendition would, in French, be “You are my dearly fraternal head, Ismene [Tu es ma chère tête fraternelle, Ismene]” and that “from the very start” Polyneices is present as “the brother who will not be able to be buried” (Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Paul Mazon, introd. Nicole Loraux [Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997], p. 2, n. 1).
4. To have insisted on the importance of the family is the merit of Jean Bollack: “Neither parricide nor incest constitutes the tragedy, since they are not in themselves tragic events; they also do not constitute the myth, which is above all one of a family, in particular that of the Labdacides. … The tragic inscribes itself in the myth, but it is not the myth” (La Naissance d’Oedipe [Paris: Gallimard, 1995], pp. 242–43).
5. In Euripides, Laius is said to have abducted the young son of his friend Pelops, Chrysippus, who in shame commits suicide, whereupon his father calls down on Laius the curse that eventually destroys his house (Charles Segal, Oedipus Tyrannos [New York: Twayne, 1993], p. 46).
6. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). Page numbers will be given in the text; the translation has been changed where necessary to better reflect features of the original that are under discussion.
7. Cf. A. de Tocqueviille, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage, 1945), 2:4: “In most of the operations of the mind each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding. America is therefore one of the countries where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best applied. … It is not only the confidence in this or that man which is destroyed, but the disposition to trust the authority of any man whatsoever. Everyone shuts himself up tightly within himself and insists upon judging the world from there.”
8. See Loraux’s brief hint in Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Paul Mazon, p. 15, n. 16.
9. In book 2, section 7 of The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche surmises that “in order to abolish hidden, undetected, unwitnessed suffering … one was in the past virtually compelled to invent gods and genii of all heights and depths” (On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman [New York: Vintage, 1969], p. 68).
10. Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law,” in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–67; “Before the Law,” in J. Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 181–22. For Derrida, there is not simply a distinction between justice and law, but rather an aporetic relation: “For in the founding of law or in its institution, the same problem of justice will have been posed and violently resolved, that is to say, buried, dissimulated, repressed” (p. 23). Burial is precisely what Antigone strives to do to serve “justice,” even if it means breaking the law proclaimed by Creon.
11. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Antigone,” Werke und Briefe, ed. F. Beißner and J. Schmitt (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1969), 2:752: “Mein Zeus berichtete mirs nicht.”
12. Jacques Lacan, L’Ethique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1986), p. 324.
13. Not “individual selfhood,” as Baillie translates (Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 477).
14. Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974), p. 161.
15. Antigone, in Sophocles, The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1974).
16. “The feminine element, therefore, in the form of the sister, anticipates and foreshadows most completely the nature of ethical being. She does not become conscious of it, and does not actualize it, because the law of the family is her inherent implicit inward nature, which does not lie open to the daylight of consciousness but remains inner feeling and the divine element exempt from actuality” (Hegel, Phenomenology, 476).
17. Jebb adds the following footnote to this speech: “Few problems of Greek Tragedy have been more discussed than the question whether these verses, or some of them, are spurious. Aristotle (Rhetoric 3. 16–9) quotes verse 911. … Interpolation, then, if such it be, must have been made soon after the poet’s death; and has been imputed to his son Iophon (ho psuchros), or some other sorry poet, or to the actors. I confess that, after long thought, I cannot bring myself to believe that Sophocles wrote 905–12, with which 904 and 913–20 are in organic unity, and must now stand or fall. … The main points (to my mind) are briefly these. (1) The general validity of the divine law, as asserted in 450–60, cannot be intelligibly reconciled with the limitation in verses 905–7. (2) A still further limitation is involved in verse 911 and following. She has buried her brother, not simply as such, but because, while he lived, he was an irreplaceable relative. Could she have hoped for the birth of another brother, she would not, then, have felt the duty to be so binding. (3) The composition of vv. 909–12 is unworthy of Sophocles.” What Jebb and so many other commentators overlook is that Antigone never says just in what the divine laws might consist. Most commentators simply assume that they consist in the general obligation of family members to bury their dead. But in her response to Creon, Antigone is much more specific, referring her obligation to “my mother’s son” (ll. 466–74) and thus to the common and irreplaceable parent invoked in her “calculation.” It is this law, which is not a law, this “woman’s rule,” that continues to derange. To Jebb’s credit, he concludes his discussion of this passage by acknowledging that “Goethe’s wish [that the passage be removed from the text as inauthentic] can never be fulfilled. No one will ever convince everyone that this passage is spurious. But every student of the Antigone is bound to reflect earnestly on this vital problem of the text—the answer to which must so profoundly affect our conception of the great drama as a whole” (Sophocles, Plays, Antigone, trans. R. C. Jebb, ed. P. E. Easterling, introd. Ruby Blondell [London: Bristol Classical Press, 2004], p. 263). Although it is over a century since Jebb wrote these words, his conclusion remains at least as timely today as it was in 1900.
Chapter 5
1. Sophocles, Plays, Oedipus Coloneus, trans. R. C. Jebb, introd. Ruby Blondell (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2004). References to this text give the line numbers and unless otherwise indicated follow the Jebb translation.
2. Lowell Edmunds, Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 16.
3. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 70.
4. Sophocles, Plays, Antigone, trans. R. C. Jebb, introd. Ruby Blondell (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2004).
5. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, §261 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969), p. 213.
6. Ibid.
7. See Kurt Steinmann, Afterword to his German translation, Oedipus auf Kolonos (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), p. 115, and Lowell Edmunds, Theatrical Space and Historical Place in Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), p. 96.
8. At least one commentator has attempted to offer an explanation: “The place of Oedipus’ grave had to remain a state secret, and neither the Athenians nor the Thebans were allowed to honor Oedipus’s grave, because precisely the absence of such honors to the dead sustained the hatred of the Theban king, buried in foreign earth, against his countrymen and thus guaranteed the Athenians victory over the Thebans” (F. W. Schneidewin-Nauck, 1883, cited in Steinmann, Oedipus auf Kolonos, p. 107). But this interpretation lacks any basis in Sophocles’ text, in which the very keeping of the secret by Theseus and his “chosen successors” assumes a ritual value and indicates respect for the dead. Schneidewin-Nauck was probably on the right track, however, in seeking to relate the power of the secret to the form of mourning that it permits. What seems to be implied, however, is a change in the kind of mourning rather than its simple absence or presence. We will return to this later. On the relation between the oligarchic movement of the 400 and the notion of the savior, see Edmunds, Theatrical Space, p. 145.
9. Karl Reinhardt, Sophokles (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1947), p. 229.
10. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 5.1:461.
11. Edmunds, Theatrical Space, p. 51.
12. Ibid., p. 50, n. 30, quoting l. 138.
13. See Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerald Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), p. 20.
14. Glossing the local details in the messenger’s description of Oedipus’ last movements, Steinmann notes: “All of these precise topographical indications are no longer intelligible to us, but the places were, as the scholiast reports, “known to the natives” (Steinmann, Oedipus auf Kolonos, p. 108).
15. Edmunds, Theatrical Space, p. 91.
16. Ibid., p. 102.
17. Sophocles, Oedipus Coloneus, trans. Jebb, p. 21.
18. See also ibid., 269–91, 521ff.
19. In the second chorus from Antigone, to which Heidegger has devoted considerable commentary (in An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961], chap. 4, “The Limitation of Being,” pp. 146–65, and, at greater length, in his 1942 seminar on Hölderlin’s poem Der Ister, in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 53: Hölderlins Hymne, “Der Ister” (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984), pp. 63–152), the chorus describes man “everywhere setting forth, underway, but with no way out [pantoporos aporos]” (Antigone, 359).
20. See Jacques Derrida, Le toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000).
21. Hamlet, 1.5.91.
22. Leo Meyer, Griechische Aoriste (Greek Aorists) (n.p., 1879), pp. 124–25.
23. Following and slightly modifying a suggestion of Haun Saussy, the combination of the aorist participle here with a verb in the optative perfect—memnisthe, “may you be mindful of”—suggests a situation that can best be described by varying the Freudian “Wo Es war, soll ich warden” (“Where It was, I shall come to be”) to become: “Where I was, the memory of my being dead shall come to be.”
24. Edmunds, Theatrical Space, p. 82.
25. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 42: “Hegel, who is often said to have ‘forgotten’ about writing, is unsurpassed in his ability to remember that one should never forget to forget.”
Chapter 6
1. The notion of the Treuga Dei, “truce of God,” has been traced back to Aquitaine, where, following a terrible famine in 1033 and the violence and chaos that ensued, the clergy made efforts to prohibit all feuds for a limited period of a few days, on pain of excommunication. The movement spread first through Burgundy, then through France as a whole, until the Synod of Clermont (1095), under the lead of Pope Urban II, made the Truce of God the general law of the church. The duration of the truce was extended but remained limited to certain holiday periods (Advent to Epiphany, Ash Wednesday to the close of Easter week). (History of the Christian Church, vol. 4, Medieval Christianity, §78, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc4.i.vi.vi.html#fnf_i.vi.vi-p11.1). “Admittedly, these rules applied only to conflicts among Christians” (Walter Z. Lacqueur, “Terror’s New Face: The Radicalization and Escalation of Modern Terrorism,” Harvard International Review, http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/?id = 307&page = 5). See also Hartmut Hoffman, Gottesfriede und Treuga Dei (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1964).
2. Asja Lacis, Revolutionär im Beruf (Profession: Revolutionary) (Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1971), pp. 43–44. Cited in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 1.3:879–80. (Abbreviated GS in later references.)
3. In his “Epistemo-Critical Preface” to The Origin of the German Mourning Play, Benjamin designates “allegory” as an “Idea,” a term that he takes from Plato and Kant, then reworks to distinguish it from both the empirical given and the theoretical “concept.” As an idea, Benjamin’s notion of the Trauerspiel entails what he calls Darstellung, which might be translated as “exposition” or, perhaps better, as “staging.”
4. For an earlier attempt to discuss Benjamin’s relation to Heidegger, see Samuel Weber, “Der posthume Zwischenfall: Eine Live-Sendung,” in Zeit-Zeichen, ed. G. C. Tholen and M. Scholl (Acta Humaniora: Weinheim, 1990), pp. 181–95.
5. “For all that the increasing worldliness of the Counter-Reformation prevailed in both confessions, religious inclinations did not lose their importance: only a religious solution was denied them by the century, which demanded of them or imposed on them a worldly one instead” (W. Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne [London: Verso, 1985], p. 79).
6. Cf. GS 1.3:888, where Benjamin asserts that works of art are essentially unhistorical and “intensive.”
7. See GS, 1.3:891–95.
8. It should be noted, in passing, that although Rang’s use of this term in a letter to Benjamin is free of any immediate political connotations, this of course does not exclude the question of the political ramifications of such a conception. Rang died in 1924, shortly after writing these letters, while Benjamin was still working on his study. With Rang’s death, Benjamin writes Scholem, his book has lost its “true reader” (GS, 1.3:883).
9. Quoted in GS, 1.3:891. Future references to this source will appear in the text.
10. This is why there can be nothing strictly individual in a theater of this kind, something that led Aristotle already to de-emphasize the character of the hero with respect to the “action.” See Chapter 3, above.
11. GS 1.3:891.
12. The position outlined by Benjamin here seems in large measure to accord with that proposed by Max Weber in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958; orig. pub. 1904–5). In that book, Weber emphasizes that Calvinism, rather than Lutheranism, contributed to the evolution of modern capitalism. Luther’s attitude toward everyday activity was far too ambivalent, Weber stresses, to encourage anything like the Calvinist “work ethic.” Luther, for instance, still understands the notion of “calling” in terms of obedience to a divine ordinance, rather than as a “profession” in the modern sense. (See chap. 3, “Luther’s Conception of the Calling: Task of the Investigation,” pp. 79–92.) The relation between Benjamin’s interpretation of Luther’s “storming of the work” and the Calvinist “work ethic” merits further investigation.
13. See the remarkable study by Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Chapter 7
1. Despite the absence of any direct or explicit indication that Hamlet has succeeded in getting Horatio and Marcellus actually to swear the oath he proposes—in the Quartos and Folio there is neither a stage direction to that effect (this has been “corrected” by subsequent editors) nor any dialogue—most editors seem not to have doubted that the oath is indeed sworn, even if they have to go to great lengths to argue it, as in the following remark by the editor of the Arden edition of Hamlet, Harold Jenkins: “When and how many times they swear must, in the absence of a stage-direction, be inferred from the text.” Only Dover Wilson, he notes, appears to have envisaged the possibility of the oath having been interrupted by the Ghost. Jenkins counters: “Yet they have placed their hands on the cross of the sword (cf. l. 166) and though the text gives them no word …, it subsequently seems to regard them as actually having sworn.” He bases this argument on the repetition of Hamlet’s injunction to “lay your hands again upon my sword” (1.5.166) or, a few lines later (“But come: / Here as before, lay your hands”). “What I therefore think must happen,” Jenkins concludes, “is that the injunction to swear is echoed by the Ghost and obeyed by Hamlet’s companions simultaneously.” One can only envy Jenkins an ear subtle enough to discern the oath that is, as it were, drowned out by the Ghost’s reiterated echoing of Hamlet’s injunction, which changes subtly but significantly each time, so that it becomes increasingly difficult to know just what the terms of this oath actually might be (Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins [London: Methuen, 1982], p. 459).
2. Andere Schauplätze, the term Freud borrows from Fechner to describe the topology of the unconscious.
3. An act or action can be considered finite; acting, by contrast, is intrinsically open and indeterminable, determinable only with respect to the space-time of its enunciation.
4. More precisely, perhaps: “here and wherever.” The force of this “and wherever” can be compared to the vogue in contemporary American slang for what can be called the “terminal whatever” : that is, the use of the adverbial phrase “or whatever” to conclude an assertion with an interrogative turn. To be sure, the differences between this current American idiom and Hamlet’s et ubique are at least as illuminating as the similarities. By concluding an assertion with the phrase “or whatever,” the speaker disclaims responsibility for the assertion just made. In contrast to such a disclaiming function, hic et ubique points to the difficulty of assuming responsibility for words whose effects cannot be unambiguously localized—but it does not attempt to avoid that responsibility.
5. A “stage,” as divisible, is also a “stage” in the temporal sense: always on the way to somewhere else. Another indication that time and space are both “out of joint,” not just in this particular play, but in theater in general.
6. In this context it might be of interest to reread Walter Benjamin’s description of what in his writings on the Paris Passages is called the “loquacity of place [die Kolportage des Raumes]” : the promise of places to tell stories about what has taken place in and around them. The medium as haunted place also suggests a link with the notion of “medium” as intermediary between the living and the dead. Not for nothing is this sort of medium always tied to a particular place and placement: for instance, seated around a table.
7. Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1984), p. 66.
8. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 1.1:318. (Abbreviated GS in later references.)
9. Benjamin’s German here is, to say the least, unusual but, as usual, significantly so: he begins by describing Hamlet as “Zuschauer von Gottes Gnaden,” which Osborne, understandably, translates as “a spectator by the grace of God” (W. Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne [London: Verso, 1985], p. 158). However, in the following phrase, the third-person plural pronoun, sie (“aber nicht was sie ihm spielen”) seems to have Gnaden only as proximate antecedent, which would make the latter a dative plural rather than dative singular and change the meaning to “spectator of the graces of God” rather than “spectator by the grace of God.” In my translation I have chosen to retain both possibilities, since this would reflect the experience of a reader of the German text, who would initially read the phrase as “by the grace of God” and then re-read it as “of the graces of God.” The two versions do not exclude each other, since Benjamin seems to be arguing that it is the grace of God that allows Hamlet to become the spectator, not of those “graces” as individual events, but of “his own destiny” as “enclosed in a happening that is entirely homogeneous with his view [das Geheimnis seines Schicksals [ist]beschlossen in einem Geschehen, das diesem seinem Blick ganz homogen ist]” (GS, 1.1.334). The “grace of God” here would thus consist in Hamlet’s ability to see (but also to stage) his destiny in a way that allows it to conform to his vision qua spectator. It is the “homogeneity” of the “destiny” of spectacle and spectator—in short, of a certain theatrical reflexivity—that is at issue here.
10. Aristotle, Poetics, 11 (7), trans. G. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 30.
11. King Oedipus, ll. 1528–30, in Sophocles, Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1974), p. 68.
Chapter 8
1. The continued force of this tradition can be seen even in works that explicitly seek to call the tradition into question, such as Jacques Taminaux’s Le Théâtre des philosophes: La Tragédie, l’être, l’action (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995), a book for which the “theater” of philosophy is synonymous with tragedy, as indicated by its subtitle: “Tragedy, Being, Action.”
2. This is the “good Danish word” that Kierkegaard uses as the title of the study generally translated, in English, as Repetition. For reasons that will emerge in the course of this reading, I will often use the Danish term instead of its established English translation.
3. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 131. Page references to this work will be given in parentheses in the body of the text. All translations of this and other works have been modified where necessary to better reflect aspects of the text that are being discussed.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), §2, pp. 10–11.
5. Plato’s Republic, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Modern Library, 1982), bk. 3: 393–94, pp. 92–95.
6. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.2.39. Hegel also cites this passage in his History of Philosophy (Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (New York: Humanities Press, 1955), 1: 267.
7. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud recognizes that the repetition of traumatic experiences can diminish their pain by submitting them to a certain control of the ego: “It is striking that repetition, the rediscovery of identity, can itself signify a source of pleasure” (Freud, Gesammelte Werke [Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1967], 12:37). The happiness that Constantin here associates with repetition and that motivates him to seek a confirmation of its reality is of this “egological” nature. What he discovers is that there is repetition, but that it is by no means necessarily a source of happiness.
8. The difference between the Hegelian dialectic and Kierkegaard’s way of thinking could be pinpointed as that between the “negation” and the “extreme,” which inform the movements of “mediation” and “repetition,” respectively.
9. See the Introduction to this volume for a discussion of the significance of this scene for the relation of philosophy to theater.
10. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 74.
11. “Man saetter … man betragter … man seer … man føler en Lyst…. Man gjør det ikke, man seer blot,” etc. (S. Kierkegaard, Gjentagelsen, in Samlede Vaerkerd [Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962], 5:133).
12. R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. George Heffernan (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), Second Meditation, p. 113. Future references to this work will be given in parentheses in the body of the text.
13. Nestroy was also a great favorite of Freud and Wittgenstein. Freud’s fondness for theater is almost always associated with serious, respectable theater, above all with tragedy, whereas his relation to the Possen of Nestroy is largely ignored. See Chapter 10 of this volume for an attempt to demonstrate that the theatricality of psychoanalysis is at least as possenhaft as it is tragic.
14. These reflections on the relation of the exception to the rule will provide Carl Schmitt with a methodological conclusion to his discussion of sovereignty at the end of the first chapter of Political Theology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 15. For Schmitt, however, the relation between exception and Posse disappears entirely.
15. “The historical is always raw material which the person who acquires it knows how to dissolve in a posse and assimilate as an esse” (quoted in the appendix to Repetition, p. 359). Posse, possibility, involves the “dissolving” of “raw material,” whereas esse entails its assimilation.
16. Introduction, Hegel’s Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 8.1.c, 1:79.
17. The entire text of Gjentagelsen can in this sense be considered to be a Posse, as Constantin’s concluding Letter shows when it reminds the “reader” that “we are after all entre nous. Although you are indeed fictional, you are by no means a plurality to me but only one, and therefore we are just you and I” (Repetition, p. 225).
18. This also describes the style in which the text itself is written: “copious” discussion “of the abstract” interrupted periodically by the “interjection of tangible actuality” (p. 161).
19. Søren Kierkegaard, Die Wiederholung, trans. Emanuel Hirsch (Düsseldorf: Eugen Diederichs), p. 37.
20. “Rehearsal” would not be the worst English translation for Kierkegaard’s Gjentagelsen.
Chapter 9
1. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. Edward V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 151–52.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), 2:9–10. Future page references to this edition will be given in the body of the text.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction, Phänomenologie des Geistes, cited in M. Heidegger, “Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1963), p. 106 (my translation).
4. Theodor W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1971), 5:326–80. Future references to this work will be given in the body of the text.
5. Adorno gives the following example, from book 2 of the Greater Logic: “Becoming in Essence, its reflecting movement, is therefore the movement from nothing to nothing and therein back to itself. Turning-into or coming-to-be suspends and surpasses itself in [its] turn; the other that in such turning-into comes to be is not the nonbeing of a being, but the nothing of a nothing, and this, the negation of a nothing, is what constitutes being.—Being is only as the movement of nothing to nothing, [and only] so is it essence; and the latter does not comprehend movement within itself, but rather is it as absolute semblance itself, pure negativity, which has nothing outside of itself to negate, but negates only its [own] negative, which is only in this negating” (G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, first part, in Hegel, Jubiläumsausgabe, ed. Hermann Glockner (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1927), 4:493.
6. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1987), 5:144.
7. Theodor W. Adorno, “Das Schema der Massenkultur,” appendix to Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), 3:331. Future page references will be given in the text.
8. This was obviously long before Adorno discovered the jargon of authenticity …
9. For a similar, but more interesting and more productive sleight of hand with the same Benjaminian categories, see Adorno’s essay on Wagner, In Search of Wagner (New York: Norton, 1991), in which the notion of “allegory” is transformed into a critical and geschichtphilosophisches tool.
10. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 1.1:351.
11. Given the insistent pathos of such admonitions to “awake” in the writings of both Adorno and Benjamin, we should remember that the first line of the Horst Wessel Lied also demands that “Germany awake … out of your bad dream!”
12. According to Duden: Das Herkunftswörterbuch (Mannheim: Dudenverlag, 1989), “viewed etymologically” Gehalt is “the same word” as Behälter, Behältnis, Aufbewahrungsraum: that is, as a “container,” a place in which things are conserved and saved (p. 224).
13. Theodor W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), 5:351. Future page references will be given in the text.
14. Søren Kierkegaard, “Une première et dernière explication,” from Post-Scriptum aux miettes philosophiques, trans. Paul Petit (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 425.
15. See Plato’s remarks on the corruption of the home by theatrical mimesis in Republic, 10.605–6. See also my discussion of these passages in “Nomos in The Magic Flute,” Angelaki 3, no. 2 (1998): 61–68.
16. Kierkegaard, Repetition, p. 152.
Chapter 10
1. Joyce McDougall, Théâtres du Je (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), pp. 9–10 (my translation).
2. Sigmund Freud, “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Words of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 14: 53; Freud, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1968), 10:97, hereafter GW; my translation.
3. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerald Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 48 b 12–19, p. 20.
4. Philologists have often questioned the authenticity of the last two words, tous mimoumenous, judging them to be an incoherent scribal addition that renders Aristotle’s text incoherent. Whatever their authenticity may be, however, the fact that someone felt it necessary to add these two words is indicative of the problematic relation of the mimetic to the pragmatic, a relation that Aristotle addresses but by no means resolves.
5. Roselyne Dupont-Roc and Jean Lallot, eds., Aristote, La Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 160.
6. To soften the shock of this admittedly bizarre noun, let me recall that Saussure has recourse to a similar gerund in describing the function of language as a system of signs that involves both signifiants and signifiés. To translate signifiant as “signifier” is, of course, to move it away from the present participle and gerund, and consequently to make it more familiar and reassuring. A more idiomatic translation, “agent,” suggests that those who are acting are doing so in the service of another subject (although not necessarily an individual or even human one), and since it is precisely the status of the subject that is in question here, “actings,” for all of its bizarre and unfamiliar quality, is to be preferred.
7. “For tragedy is the imitation not of men but of a life [bio
], of an action [praxeos]” (Aristotle, Poetics, 50 a 15).
8. Plato, Republic, 3.393b–396.
9. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos, ed. and trans. R. C. Jebb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), l. 362, 85.
10. Freud, GW, 5:218 n.
11. Oedipus’ hubris consists in seeking to repeat his success with the Sphinx in a situation that is radically different, insofar as it calls, not for a generic response, “man,” but for a singular one, “this man, here.” This response entails acknowledging the implication of the knower in that which is to be known, an implication that excludes any definitive knowledge, as the final Chorus makes clear.
12. Interestingly enough, Freud prefers the notion of “network [Netzwerk]” to that of “chain [Kette],” doubtless because of the latter’s linearity (Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism [New York: Vintage Books, 1967], p. 138; GW, 16:215.
13. Aristotle, Poetics, 48 b 1, p. 20.
14. Oedipus Tyrannos, l. 1524–30.
15. Ibid., p. 157.
16. This is also the “pleasure” of watching the nightly news on television, and probably the organizing principle of information as broadcast by the commercial media.
17. In the perspective unfolded by this analysis, it becomes significant that Oedipus does not take his life at the end of Oedipus Tyrannos, but instead puts out his eyes. His death will be reserved for Oedipus at Colonus, where he will choose a place hidden from all eyes, in order better to keep its secret: a secret, he will claim, that has greater power than armies to save cities from destruction. Oedipus’ insight, which is also his “secret,” returns today with a vengeance in the power of the media to keep (the) secret (of) what they ostensibly display.
18. Jacques Lacan, “L’Instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient,” Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 511.
19. I have discussed certain ramifications of this in Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud, 2d ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 104 ff.
20. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 528; GW, 2–3:494.
21. Ibid., p. 529; GW, 2–3:495.
22. Ibid., p. 528; 2–3:494.
23. Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Collier Books, 1972), pp. 176–82. Future page references will be given in the body of the text.
24. “Das Unheimliche,” GW, 12:227–68. Future page references to this edition will be given in the body of the text.
25. E. Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 3:408: “He was fond, especially after midnight, of regaling me with strange or uncanny experiences with patients, characteristically about misfortunes or deaths supervening many years after a wish or prediction. He had a particular relish for such stories and was evidently impressed by their more mysterious aspects. When I would protest at some of the taller stories Freud was wont to reply with his favorite quotation: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ “
Chapter 11
1. A. Artaud, “No More Masterpieces,” The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958), pp. 78–79. For this and all other works, the translation has been modified where necessary for the discussion. Future references to this edition will be given in the body of the text.
2. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerald Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 50a, p. 27. Future references to this work will be given by section number (e.g., 50a) in the body of the text.
3. See also Poetics, 59b: “It must be possible for the beginning and the end to be seen together in one view.”
4. http://hypermedia.univ-paris8.fr/pierre/virtuel/virt0.htm. Document and page references to this work will be given in parentheses in the body of the text.
5. Translated into English by Willa and Edwin Muir as “Cares of a Family Man,” in Franz Kafka, ‘The Metamorphosis,’ ‘In the Penal Colony,’ and Other Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), pp. 160–61.
6. I have discussed this text further in Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 30–35.
7. Cf. the discussion of “installation” as a theatrical process in Chapter 2 of this volume, “Theatrocracy.”
Chapter 12
1. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerard Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 48a-b, p. 19. Further references, by section, will appear in the body of the text.
2. “Home theater” can, however, be seen as the culmination of a specifically modern tradition of theater, going back to the eighteenth century, to the emergence of domestic drama in France and England and of the bürgerliches Trauerspiel in Germany.
3. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 53; Ingram Bywater, Aristotle on the Art of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909).
4. Drama, to be sure, derives from the Greek verb drao, “to do or to act”; but dramatic and theatrical are not necessarily equivalent terms, as is often supposed—a supposition that continues the Aristotelian tradition of equating the two and thereby marginalizing everything theatrical that is not also dramatic.
5. Aristotle unequivocally emphasizes the decisive structural importance of “action [praxis]” as distinct from “character [ethos]” in imparting unity to tragic drama, whereas what “characterizes” Western theater since the Renaissance is the increasing emphasis it places on character rather than action.
6. Gerard F. Else, note to Aristotle, Poetics, p. 9, n. 73.
7. Else himself emphasizes that key Aristotelian terms such as poisis, “the actual process of composition,” and mimsis, which, despite being a noun, is “also active in force,” both contain “the same suffix, -sis,” the Greek equivalent of the English ending “-ing.” Although Else does not mention it explicitly, the peculiarly “active force” he attributes to nouns such as poisis and mimsis is related to the dynamics of the gerund and of the present participle: its actuality is all the more immediate and energetic for being, by definition, unfinished and incomplete, and this ongoing incompletion distinguishes the gerund from more traditional nouns. (Else refers to “presentation” and “representation” as too static to render what is meant by mimsis; p. 79.) The “presence” of the present participle, by contrast, is tied to the quasi-simultaneity of the process of uttering with the utterance. As a result, such presence is intrinsically open-ended, situated by the split of its articulation and hence never self-contained.
8. Gerard F. Else, note to Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 85, n. 31.
9. Genet published the text first in Tel Quel (1966), then in his Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 4:9–18. In English, both texts are published in Jean Genet, Reflections on the Theater, trans. Richard Seaver (London: Faber & Faber, 1972). Future references to the English edition will be given in the body of the text. All translations have been modified throughout as needed for the discussion.
10. “For if the theater is like the plague, it is not only because it affects important collectivities and overwhelms them in an identical way. In the theater as in the plague there is something both victorious and vengeful: we are well aware that the spontaneous conflagration which the plague lights wherever it passes, is nothing other than an immense liquidation” (A. Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards [New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958], p. 27).
11. Genet, Reflections on the Theater, p. 73.
12. I have discussed this passage in “The Undoing of Form,” in Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 30–35.
13. Jean-Bernard Moraly, “Genet urbaniste: Vers un nouveau théâtre sacré,” in Les Nègres au port de la lune: Genet et les différences (Bordeaux: Editions de la Différence, 1988), p. 184.
14. Ibid.
15. On the notion of theater as dislocation, see Samuel Weber, “Taking Place: Toward a Theater of Dislocation,” in David J. Levin, ed., Opera through Other Eyes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 107–43. The conception of theater as interruption and fixation informs Benjamin’s reading of Brecht’s Epic Theater (Walter Benjamin, “Was ist episches Theater,” Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 2.2:519–39); hereafter abbreviated GS. Benjamin locates the “epic” dimension of Brecht’s theater in its “interruption of sequences,” resulting in a disruption of the “dramatic” progression and opening the way to a theatricality structured in other than narrative (Aristotelian) terms. The decisive concept elaborated by Benjamin is that of the “citable gesture.” It is closely related to Genet’s notion of the arresting and fixation of the theatrical “act”—just as his conception of the linguistic “war of words” bears a close resemblance to Benjamin’s analysis of “allegory” in German baroque theater. The “baroque” dimension of Genet’s writing and theater invites comparison with Benjamin’s discussion of the German Trauerspiel.
16. “With the exception of a handful of paintings—or fragments of paintings—few artists who painted before the discovery of photography have left us any tangible evidence of a vision and a kind of painting freed from the slavish concern with copying natural likenesses. Not daring to tamper with the face—with the exception of Franz Hals (The Regents)—the painters daring enough to serve both the object painted and the painting (Velasquez, Rembrandt, Goya) used as a pretext a flower or a dress” (Genet, Reflections on the Theater, p. 67). Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,” similarly identifies the face as the bastion of “cult value,” besieged, he argues, by the new media of “reproducibility” (besieged, but never conquered, like the Alcazar of Toledo in the Spanish Civil War). One finds echoes of similar considerations in the mouth of the Chief of Police, who seeks to create an “image” for himself, in The Balcony. I have discussed this play in “On the Balcony: The Theater of Technics,” in L. Lambrechts and J. Nowé, eds., Bild-Sprache: Texte zwischen Dichten und Denken (Leuven: Louvain University Press, 1990), pp. 283–97.
17. “It must be possible for the beginning and the end to be seen together in one view” (Aristotle, Poetics, 59b).
18. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, GS, 1.1:392.
Chapter 13
1. It would be instructive to pursue a comparison between the practice, common in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century bourgeois households, of organizing theatrical representations in the home—“theater” at home”—and “home theater” at the start of the twenty-first century. Without anticipating all the results, one in particular seems relatively clear: the replacement of staging and playing by installing and receiving. Although it is still too early to be certain, it seems unlikely that the “interactive” possibilities opened by digitally recorded DVDs will alter the predominantly passive spectator role in electronic “home theater.”
2. “From its origins, cinema took over the theaters and turned the public away from living spectacles. It would seem, however, that theater, kicked out the front door, has returned by the window of the screen, by, so to speak, occupying cinema from within, through its subjects no less than through the tenacity of dramaturgical forms” (Jacques Gerstenkorn, “Lever de Rideau” [“Curtain Raiser”], in Christine Hamon-Sirejols et al., eds., Cinéma et Théâtralité, Cahiers du Gritec [Lyon: Aléas, 1994], p. 13). GRITEC is the acronym of the Groupe de Recherches sur l’Interférences du Théâtre et du Cinéma (Research Group on the Interferences of Theater and Cinema), founded in 1991 at the University Lumière (Lyon-2).
3. For instance, Allardyce Nicoll, Film and Theater (New York: Arno Press, 1972).
4. Before his God, in the Protestant version.
5. In his essay “What Is Epic Theater?” this is how Walter Benjamin describes the function of the Brechtian actor (“aus der Rolle mit Kunst zu fallen,” my emphasis, W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften [Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980], 2.2:538).
6. The project of Dr. Lester can be seen as an effort to extend the certitude Descartes attaches to the cogito to the res extensa that is the body. Descartes, it may be recalled, makes perfectly clear that the certitude of the cogito only obtains during the time of self-consciousness, a time that requires the present participle to be properly articulated: “I am, I exist: it is certain. But for how long? So long as I am cogitating of course. … I am a true thing and truly existing. Yet what kind of thing? A thinking thing, I have said [Dixi cogitans]” (Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. George Heffernan [Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1990], p. 105). The present participle, cogitans, describes an indefinite period that is present only with reference to its articulation—hence, as self-consciousness, but one that is defined by the simultaneity of act and enunciation. The act can only be considered “certain” so long as it is at least the potential object of an enunciation. That such an enunciation could be of a radically different order from what it enunciates, and that it therefore cannot provide the kind of evidence that Descartes assumes it can, is an issue not further explored in the Meditations, but one that marks the history of post-Cartesian philosophy. In our film, it returns as the usurpation of Malkovich’s body by Dr. Lester and his friends: there may be “self-consciousness” and it may be thinking, but it is not necessarily the property of an “ego.”
7. This is, of course, one of the main motifs of Heinrich von Kleist’s famous essay, “On the Marionette Theater.”
8. In 1922 Vertov insisted that “the material” of film was “the intervals [the transitions from one movement to another] and in no way the movements themselves” (D. Vertov, “We: Variation of a Manifesto,” in Texte zur Theorie des Films, ed. Franz-Josef Albersmeier [Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jr., 1979], p. 21).
9. Metallic blue—the color of Allegra’s boot, in which she carries her “pod,” but also of Yevgenji’s shirt, as well as of the black (or, rather, blue) board upon which he writes, imparting its hue to the initial scene—is doubtless the dominant color of the film.
Chapter 14
1. Presidential statement following a meeting with his National Security Team, September 12, 2001, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/#.
2. In his remarkable book Politics of Security (London: Routledge, 1996), Michael Dillon, one of the organizers of the forum “War, Terrorism, Spectacle” at which this paper was first delivered at the University of Lancaster on December 15, 2001, argues persuasively, following Heidegger, that the concern with “security” is rooted in Western modernity and the metaphysical tradition from which it emerges.
3. George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and of the American People,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010920–8.html.
4. A recent example is “Echelon,” the worldwide system of surveillance put into place by the United States, in collaboration with Great Britain and the other countries of the Commonwealth, which apparently has served as much to gather economic information used to advantage American (or British) corporations as to provide political or military intelligence. For details, consult the webpage of “Echelon Watch,” a discussion forum sponsored by the ACLU (www.echelonwatch.org).
5. And sometimes even against them. Here a precise analysis would have to bring out the dissymmetry in the respective roles of the hegemonic superpower and the subordinate allied countries. Thus it appears that the Echelon information-gathering system may have been used to help the Boeing corporation compete successfully against Airbus, in which British interests are largely represented.
6. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 26. Future references to this work will be given in parentheses in the body of the text.
7. Carl Schmitt, Theory of Guerrilla Warfare (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1975), p. 87.
Chapter 15
1. A remark by Professor Robert Precht is worth noting in his context. Prof. Precht served as public defender of one of those accused in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. His conclusion about the state of mind and motivations of those involved in this attack can serve as a valuable warning against easy stereotypes:
“The things that struck me were the very complicated feelings the people who commit these acts have for America,” he said. “Our leaders describe them as evildoers and say they hate everything our country stands for …. That was not my experience.”
He said several of the defendants admired the US system of government and law and had a real knowledge of American history. But they resented US policies.
The dispute terrorists have with America is really more a political one and has nothing to do with Islamic beliefs, Precht said. Instead, he said, “these are simply people who develop political agendas and then dress them up in a cloak of righteousness.”
(“Attacks Remind Professor of 1993,” Kathy Barr Hoffmann, AP, Oct. 1, 2001). See also Robert E. Precht, Defending Mohammed: A Defense Layer’s Account of the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing Trial (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
2. ATTAC is the acronym standardly used to designate the original French name of the Association pour une Taxation des Transactions financières pour l’Aide aux Citoyens et Citoyennes (the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Good of Citizens), founded in December 1998 and now represented in thirty-three countries, not, however, including the United States.
3. In the time since this interview was held, Nicholas Royle has published a remarkable book-length study of this topic: The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003).
4. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 130, my emphasis.