Abstract
For the book’s coda, the co-editors conduct a roundtable interview with David Zerbib, a French scholar specializing in performance theories. “Performance Knots: Crossed Threads of Anglo-American Thought and French Theory” sheds light on the French perspective as Zerbib tries, carefully, to draw out different strands of thought that weave both accord and discord in transcontinental theories and practices. Situating French Theory as an American invention, Zerbib nonetheless recognizes that Anglo-American influences are slowly making inroads in French culture and its institutions. Yet, despite the growing impact, angles of approach remain remarkably different across the traditions. Evoking the 1966 symposium organized at John Hopkins University where French Theory first took flight, he describes how the encounter between American and French trends reveals a confrontation between what he calls “forms of truth and forces of thought.” Heralding the misunderstandings between philosophy and performance theories around embodied presence, linguistic efficacy, and the event of the sign that were to ensue, this initial exchange stands in contrast to the contemporary evolutions to which Performance Philosophy bears witness.
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Notes
- 1.
Catherine Malabou, “La génération d’après”, in Fresh théorie, ed. M. Alizart and C. Kihm (Paris: Scheer, 2005), 543. See also Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, trans. Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
- 2.
There are, of course, other answers to this crisis (neo-positivism, Marxism, phenomenology, etc.), but these two parallel lines are of crucial importance in addressing the question of a philosophy of performance and in understanding some of the constitutive paradoxes of American postmodern thought.
- 3.
See François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
- 4.
Jacques Derrida, Mémoires. Pour Paul de Man (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 41.
- 5.
Leading one to decide whether to rebuild the ego, the consciousness as centre, or to let it go as in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the fusion in the “world’s flesh” (participating in the flesh of the world is not like defining the position of a body).
- 6.
Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1967), 227.
- 7.
Even beyond the famous struggle between Searle and Derrida about the meaning of the performative.
- 8.
For more details, see my: “Dionysus in 1966. The force of performative circumstances,” in Performance Studies in Motion. International Perspectives and Practices, ed. A. Citron, S. Aronson-Lehavi, D. Zerbib (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
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Zerbib, D., Alliot, J., Pauker, M., Street, A. (2017). Performance Knots: Crossed Threads of Anglo-American Thought and French Theory. In: Street, A., Alliot, J., Pauker, M. (eds) Inter Views in Performance Philosophy. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95192-5_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95192-5_27
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