Abstract
This section deals with certain preconceptions concerning thought, affect, and physicality. The jouissance of actors at play is examined: the knowledge and intelligence of their bodies, and their linguistic abilities in dialogue and communication with one another, as well as the art within their repetitions. All of these qualities and skills are accompanied by a physical feeling of not being the sovereign subject of one’s own acting. The embodied dispositif of the Enlightenment proves to be an illusion when tested on one’s own body, a chimera that gets in the way of acting.
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Notes
Plato, The Laws, Book II, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Prometheus Books, 2000), 34. See also Johannes Bilstein, “Spiel-Glück und Glücks-Spiele,” in Maske und Kothurn, Dies ist kein Spiel 4 (2008), 69.
Max Reinhardt, “Rede über den Schauspieler,” in Hugo Fetting (ed.) Leben für das Theater. Briefe, Reden, Aufsätze, Interviews, Gespräche, Auszüge aus Regiebüchern (Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1989), 436.
Arno Böhler, “TheatrReales Denken,” in idem., and Susanne Granzer (ed.), Ereignis Denken. TheatRealität–Performanz–Ereignis (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2009), 11.
Christoph Menke, “Subjektivität und Gelingen: Adorno – Derrida,” in Eva L.-Waniek and Erik M. Vogt (eds.), Derrida und Adorno – Zur Aktualität von Dekonstruktion und Frankfurter Schule (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2008), 190. Unpublished translation by Gerrit Jackson.
“Language belongs in its origin to the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology: we find ourselves in the midst of a rude fetishism when we call to mind the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language – which is to say, of reason. It is this which sees everywhere deed and doer; this which believes in will as cause in general; this which believes in the ‘ego’, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and which projects its belief in the ego-substance on to all things [ ... ].” Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin 1990), 48. Italics in the original.
Sybille Krämer, “Was ist ein Medium? Über Boten, Engel, Viren, Geld und andere Medien,” in GRENZ-film (ed.), Philosophy On Stage (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2007).
Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, trans. Stefan Brecht, (Oxford: Heinemann, 1976).
On the 20th-century rediscovery of the “flesh” as a philosophical category, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
On the transvaluation of the ideal body–mind relationship in Nietzsche’s philosophy, see Volker Gerhardt, “Die ‘große Vernunft’ des Leibes. Ein Versuch über Zarathustras vierte Rede,” in idem (ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2000), 123–163.
For Immanuel Kant, pleasure, which determines taste, is completely uninteresting, a purposeless purposiveness. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer (ed.) and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 89f.
On the construction of gender norms, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Peter Handke, Voyage to the Sonorous Land or The Art of Asking, trans. Gitta Honegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 61–62.
On this, see Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
On mind or spirit as a question of nutrition and digestion, see Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21f.
Georg Büchner, Danton’s Death, trans. Henry J. Schmidt, in Walter Hinderer and Henry J. Schmidt (eds.) Georg Büchner. Complete Works and Letters (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1986), 123.
Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version, Drafts, Materials, trans. Pierre Joris, Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull (eds.) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 193.
Dieter Mersch, “Schönheit oder die ‘Blöße’ der Form,” in Ereignis und Aura (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 127.
Walter Otto, Dionysus Myth and Cult, trans. Walter Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 90.
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2001), 35.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Exteriority and the Face,” section III in Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 187–253.
On the ecstatic unity of temporality and the ordinary (vulgar) concept of time, see section IV of Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, in The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare (London: Chancellor Press, 1992), 264–289.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, trans. Bayard Taylor (Renaissance Classics, 2012), 63–64. Italics in the original.
On the intellectualist image of language, see Sybille Krämer, Sprache, Sprechakt, Kommunikation. Sprachtheoretische Positionen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001).
F.W.J. Schelling, Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), 38.
Georg Büchner, Leonce and Lena, trans. Henry J. Schmidt, in Walter Hinderer and Henry J. Schmidt (eds.), Georg Büchner. Complete Works and Letters (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1986) 165.
“But we come now to a new and remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure.” Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1971), 20.
For a concept of thought that matches this, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Athlone Press, 1994).
Jean Paul, Flower, Fruit and Thorn-Pieces, trans. Alexander Ewing (London: George Bell, 1892), 280–281.
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Valerie, S. (2016). The Gift of Acting. In: Actors and the Art of Performance: Under Exposure. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137596345_7
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