Kélina Gotman | King's College London (original) (raw)
Papers by Kélina Gotman
Studies in Theatre and Performance , 2019
Award-winning French-Senegalese playwright Marie NDiaye's language is, arguably, foreign to itsel... more Award-winning French-Senegalese playwright Marie NDiaye's language is, arguably, foreign to itself: Les Serpents (The Snakes) stages an implacably harsh world, meticulous precision, turns of phrase nearly stilted - inhabiting French like a stiff cloak, a rough mantle, a too-parched frock. NDiaye's language is fastidious: every comma provokes a breath, a shift in rhythm, replicating the stultifying spirit of longing and wait the author's three protagonists subject one another to in the hot sun - a transgenerational game of radical dispossession. In this article, reflecting on my translation of the play, I probe questions of language and alterity, seeing in the author's work subtle occupation of nationalistic fantasies of monolingualism, as well as the ambivalent time and place of revolutionary America/France, neither of which emerges exactly on the page, as much as do the crisp clarity of a blazing sun, a cage, an open horizon, moulting, an impossible landscape. Rather than stage, naturalistically, a heterogeneous dialect or slang, or setting the play in one realm, NDiaye inhabits the French language so completely it becomes nearly rebuffing: at once the place and medium of performance, and the occasion for criticism itself, against the grain of theoretical monolingualism, also to moult.
Comparative and Continental Philosophy , 2019
In this fictional conversation with Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of The Unwoma... more In this fictional conversation with Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of The Unwomanly Face of War and Second-Hand Time, the author meditates on the lived simplicity of a ‘conversation’ between women, such as Alexievich weaves through her writing, as she interviews older women who had volunteered to fight on the Soviet front. Weaving between anecdote, memoir and ‘empty time’ spent in Athens reading, writing, the author thinks how to articulate another genre of ‘philosophy’ that would not be heroic but intimate, a space opening between two, as if under the shelter of a shady awning, in the sun – stretching across geography and time to think also the taboos of philosophical discourse: confession, ‘personal life’, the space and place of writing, doubt, fear – we arrive at a ‘bare’ space of philosophical address, in which care takes the place of boasting or authority and nothing very much happens except time spent. What is enacted then is the moment of address, the confidence, as between a mother and daughter, across generations, revealing a gulf and desire for proximity, for hearing and being heard. Enacting also Heraclitus’s dictum – to search (for) oneself – this letter-essay seeks its aim, its end, its center, just as it unfolds.
Performance Research, 2018
What were to happen if we were to unravel the concept of ‘medicine’ – and with that, writing? And... more What were to happen if we were to unravel the concept of ‘medicine’ – and with that, writing? And with that, philosophy? In ‘On Medicine’, Kélina Gotman journeys through philosophical concepts of medicine and health, to see where these meet – in Michel Foucault’s terms – the ancient notions of ‘care’. ‘Care of the self’, like ‘truthful’ or ‘fearless speech’, implicated intimately in practices of critique, become devices for rethinking politics and aesthetics – performative entanglements that embroil bodies into histories and histories into ecologies. Unpeeling layer after layer of discursive mythologies – the structuring systems that enable us to see (or believe we see) ‘health’ as distinct from ‘medicine’, ‘science’ as distinct from ‘art’, ‘religion’ as distinct from ‘philosophy’ and more – this performative essay shifts the gaze towards an ethics of research that refuses to parse, or else parses other ways, revealing other geographies and anatomies – other forms of knowing. An-archaeologically, this method offers a way to see ‘performance’ not so much as layered on top of histories of theatre, embodied being, or what have you; but as an epistemic mode that zigzags – refusing the failures of closure.
Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Livre’ constitutes a set of notes towards a performance project that was nev... more Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Livre’ constitutes a set of notes towards a performance project that was never realized. This essay reads these notes as schizotheatre: a theatre of crisis in which the poet, as Orchestrator, sits at the center of a web of processes and procedures designed at once to obliterate him and enable a series of audience and performer connections. Mallarmé experienced a spiritual crisis in the late 1860s, leading to his depersonalisation and derealisation, as well as his belief that he was in the midst of construing a Grand Oeuvre or great work. The Livre was to be the culmination of this, at once an impossible and, as this essay shows, an intensely pragmatic project.
While Mallarmé’s work has been widely celebrated in poetry and to a lesser extent in music, this essay seeks to reposition him at the vanguard of what I call a choreographic textual practice, in which the mise en scène of language fragments on the page constitute a ‘reading’ dance.
![Research paper thumbnail of Corpus- [corpus]: hand, handiwork, Habitat, gifts, feet, footnotes, and the 'ob-scene'](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/54723258/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This fictocritical essay offers a dramaturgy of reading in which Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus serves a... more This fictocritical essay offers a dramaturgy of reading in which Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus serves as the scene or setting for a whole set of philosophical acts of inscription, moments in which the author recalls other places of reading and writing and other drafts. The essay then serves at once to meditate on Jacques Derrida’s trilingual thoughts on gesture, hands and (in this author’s reading) footnotes, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s writing on gesture, mediality and thumbs, by way of the author’s own artist’s book, ultimately to argue that we read and write presently, attentive to genealogies of reading which are themselves tactile instances of political and affective embeddedness :“ob-scene,” marginal, yet subtly and powerfully constitutive of the material substance of our thought, our memory, and the way we write.
This intervention considers the Medieval Latin concept of translatio, relatively well-rehearsed i... more This intervention considers the Medieval Latin concept of translatio, relatively well-rehearsed in literary, cultural and historical studies of the Middle Ages, but comparatively absent from performance and dance history and theory. Alternately described as translatio studii, to denote the translation or passage from one discipline to another, and translatio imperii, to denote the same from one imperial realm to another, translatio can also productively be deployed to describe disciplinary and geopolitical passage in performance studies broadly construed. More specifically, translatio enables choreographic or choreopolitical (and choreo-geopolitical) thinking-through the passage of concepts from one discursive realm to another, i.e. between “fields.” These may be taken ethnopoetically, following James Clifford, as sites of temporary residence, cultivation and passage (Routes [1997]). Translatio then suggests a kinetic moment and movement, at once the de- and reterritorialization of thought-images, a displacement and transformation of concepts, but also a meeting-point between language use, a state of perpetual transit or transitoriness and transgeography. Translatio signals the movement of concepts, but also their reculturation on exogenous terrain. Taken as a concept of motility and a mobile concept and method in the expanded fields of dance and performance studies, translatio then informs choreogeopolitical thinking about the micro-translations, the code-switchings, writers and artists (as well as artist-writers) perform everyday between “fields.” In this way, the notion of translatio may enable us to reconfigure the way we understand performance and dance – and scholarly practice more broadly – not as institutional and discursive sites but as translational events, discourses and homes or oikoi perpetually migrating. Translatio then suggests a way of rethinking disciplinary (trans-) history in performance: as a set inter-articulated re-locations.
Paj-a Journal of Performance and Art, 2010
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2010
Paj-a Journal of Performance and Art, 2007
... 68 ■ PAJ 86 Witness Relocation, Dancing vs. The Rat Experiment. Top: From left to right: Mike... more ... 68 ■ PAJ 86 Witness Relocation, Dancing vs. The Rat Experiment. Top: From left to right: Mike Mikos, Laura Berlin Stinger (with back to camera), Sean Donovan, Abby Browde, Orion Taraban, Heather Christian, and Emmitt George; Bottom: Mike Mikos, Heather Christian, Orion ...
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2007
... 68 ■ PAJ 86 Witness Relocation, Dancing vs. The Rat Experiment. Top: From left to right: Mike... more ... 68 ■ PAJ 86 Witness Relocation, Dancing vs. The Rat Experiment. Top: From left to right: Mike Mikos, Laura Berlin Stinger (with back to camera), Sean Donovan, Abby Browde, Orion Taraban, Heather Christian, and Emmitt George; Bottom: Mike Mikos, Heather Christian, Orion ...
Books by Kélina Gotman
Studies in Theatre and Performance , 2019
Award-winning French-Senegalese playwright Marie NDiaye's language is, arguably, foreign to itsel... more Award-winning French-Senegalese playwright Marie NDiaye's language is, arguably, foreign to itself: Les Serpents (The Snakes) stages an implacably harsh world, meticulous precision, turns of phrase nearly stilted - inhabiting French like a stiff cloak, a rough mantle, a too-parched frock. NDiaye's language is fastidious: every comma provokes a breath, a shift in rhythm, replicating the stultifying spirit of longing and wait the author's three protagonists subject one another to in the hot sun - a transgenerational game of radical dispossession. In this article, reflecting on my translation of the play, I probe questions of language and alterity, seeing in the author's work subtle occupation of nationalistic fantasies of monolingualism, as well as the ambivalent time and place of revolutionary America/France, neither of which emerges exactly on the page, as much as do the crisp clarity of a blazing sun, a cage, an open horizon, moulting, an impossible landscape. Rather than stage, naturalistically, a heterogeneous dialect or slang, or setting the play in one realm, NDiaye inhabits the French language so completely it becomes nearly rebuffing: at once the place and medium of performance, and the occasion for criticism itself, against the grain of theoretical monolingualism, also to moult.
Comparative and Continental Philosophy , 2019
In this fictional conversation with Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of The Unwoma... more In this fictional conversation with Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of The Unwomanly Face of War and Second-Hand Time, the author meditates on the lived simplicity of a ‘conversation’ between women, such as Alexievich weaves through her writing, as she interviews older women who had volunteered to fight on the Soviet front. Weaving between anecdote, memoir and ‘empty time’ spent in Athens reading, writing, the author thinks how to articulate another genre of ‘philosophy’ that would not be heroic but intimate, a space opening between two, as if under the shelter of a shady awning, in the sun – stretching across geography and time to think also the taboos of philosophical discourse: confession, ‘personal life’, the space and place of writing, doubt, fear – we arrive at a ‘bare’ space of philosophical address, in which care takes the place of boasting or authority and nothing very much happens except time spent. What is enacted then is the moment of address, the confidence, as between a mother and daughter, across generations, revealing a gulf and desire for proximity, for hearing and being heard. Enacting also Heraclitus’s dictum – to search (for) oneself – this letter-essay seeks its aim, its end, its center, just as it unfolds.
Performance Research, 2018
What were to happen if we were to unravel the concept of ‘medicine’ – and with that, writing? And... more What were to happen if we were to unravel the concept of ‘medicine’ – and with that, writing? And with that, philosophy? In ‘On Medicine’, Kélina Gotman journeys through philosophical concepts of medicine and health, to see where these meet – in Michel Foucault’s terms – the ancient notions of ‘care’. ‘Care of the self’, like ‘truthful’ or ‘fearless speech’, implicated intimately in practices of critique, become devices for rethinking politics and aesthetics – performative entanglements that embroil bodies into histories and histories into ecologies. Unpeeling layer after layer of discursive mythologies – the structuring systems that enable us to see (or believe we see) ‘health’ as distinct from ‘medicine’, ‘science’ as distinct from ‘art’, ‘religion’ as distinct from ‘philosophy’ and more – this performative essay shifts the gaze towards an ethics of research that refuses to parse, or else parses other ways, revealing other geographies and anatomies – other forms of knowing. An-archaeologically, this method offers a way to see ‘performance’ not so much as layered on top of histories of theatre, embodied being, or what have you; but as an epistemic mode that zigzags – refusing the failures of closure.
Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Livre’ constitutes a set of notes towards a performance project that was nev... more Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Livre’ constitutes a set of notes towards a performance project that was never realized. This essay reads these notes as schizotheatre: a theatre of crisis in which the poet, as Orchestrator, sits at the center of a web of processes and procedures designed at once to obliterate him and enable a series of audience and performer connections. Mallarmé experienced a spiritual crisis in the late 1860s, leading to his depersonalisation and derealisation, as well as his belief that he was in the midst of construing a Grand Oeuvre or great work. The Livre was to be the culmination of this, at once an impossible and, as this essay shows, an intensely pragmatic project.
While Mallarmé’s work has been widely celebrated in poetry and to a lesser extent in music, this essay seeks to reposition him at the vanguard of what I call a choreographic textual practice, in which the mise en scène of language fragments on the page constitute a ‘reading’ dance.
This fictocritical essay offers a dramaturgy of reading in which Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus serves a... more This fictocritical essay offers a dramaturgy of reading in which Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus serves as the scene or setting for a whole set of philosophical acts of inscription, moments in which the author recalls other places of reading and writing and other drafts. The essay then serves at once to meditate on Jacques Derrida’s trilingual thoughts on gesture, hands and (in this author’s reading) footnotes, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s writing on gesture, mediality and thumbs, by way of the author’s own artist’s book, ultimately to argue that we read and write presently, attentive to genealogies of reading which are themselves tactile instances of political and affective embeddedness :“ob-scene,” marginal, yet subtly and powerfully constitutive of the material substance of our thought, our memory, and the way we write.
This intervention considers the Medieval Latin concept of translatio, relatively well-rehearsed i... more This intervention considers the Medieval Latin concept of translatio, relatively well-rehearsed in literary, cultural and historical studies of the Middle Ages, but comparatively absent from performance and dance history and theory. Alternately described as translatio studii, to denote the translation or passage from one discipline to another, and translatio imperii, to denote the same from one imperial realm to another, translatio can also productively be deployed to describe disciplinary and geopolitical passage in performance studies broadly construed. More specifically, translatio enables choreographic or choreopolitical (and choreo-geopolitical) thinking-through the passage of concepts from one discursive realm to another, i.e. between “fields.” These may be taken ethnopoetically, following James Clifford, as sites of temporary residence, cultivation and passage (Routes [1997]). Translatio then suggests a kinetic moment and movement, at once the de- and reterritorialization of thought-images, a displacement and transformation of concepts, but also a meeting-point between language use, a state of perpetual transit or transitoriness and transgeography. Translatio signals the movement of concepts, but also their reculturation on exogenous terrain. Taken as a concept of motility and a mobile concept and method in the expanded fields of dance and performance studies, translatio then informs choreogeopolitical thinking about the micro-translations, the code-switchings, writers and artists (as well as artist-writers) perform everyday between “fields.” In this way, the notion of translatio may enable us to reconfigure the way we understand performance and dance – and scholarly practice more broadly – not as institutional and discursive sites but as translational events, discourses and homes or oikoi perpetually migrating. Translatio then suggests a way of rethinking disciplinary (trans-) history in performance: as a set inter-articulated re-locations.
Paj-a Journal of Performance and Art, 2010
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2010
Paj-a Journal of Performance and Art, 2007
... 68 ■ PAJ 86 Witness Relocation, Dancing vs. The Rat Experiment. Top: From left to right: Mike... more ... 68 ■ PAJ 86 Witness Relocation, Dancing vs. The Rat Experiment. Top: From left to right: Mike Mikos, Laura Berlin Stinger (with back to camera), Sean Donovan, Abby Browde, Orion Taraban, Heather Christian, and Emmitt George; Bottom: Mike Mikos, Heather Christian, Orion ...
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2007
... 68 ■ PAJ 86 Witness Relocation, Dancing vs. The Rat Experiment. Top: From left to right: Mike... more ... 68 ■ PAJ 86 Witness Relocation, Dancing vs. The Rat Experiment. Top: From left to right: Mike Mikos, Laura Berlin Stinger (with back to camera), Sean Donovan, Abby Browde, Orion Taraban, Heather Christian, and Emmitt George; Bottom: Mike Mikos, Heather Christian, Orion ...
With Anti-Oedipus in 1972, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze instigated one of the most daring in... more With Anti-Oedipus in 1972, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze instigated one of the most daring intellectual adventures of our time, updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and "constructivist" vision of capitalism. Assembled here for the first time, Guattari's notes, addressed to and annotated by Deleuze, reveal an inventive, visionary "conceptor," arguably one of the more enigmatic figures in philosophy and social-political theory today. The Anti-Oedipus Papers (1969-1973) are supplemented by substantial journal entries describing Guattari's turbulent relationship with his teacher Jacques Lacan, apprehensions about Anti-Oedipus and personal accounts of his life.
Félix Guattari (1930-1992), political activist and anti-psychiatrist, met well-known philosopher Gilles Deleuze in Paris in May 1968 and co-authored with him five landmark works including the infamous Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). He also wrote Chaosophy and Soft Subversions, both published by Semiotext(e).
Translated by Kélina Gotman
Tdr-the Drama Review-a Journal of Performance Studies, 2008
... Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities, edited by Theresa Jill Buckland fo... more ... Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities, edited by Theresa Jill Buckland for the Society of Dance History Scholars series ... for productions including The People Next Door (Yale Repertory Theatre), Black Snow (Yale Repertory Theatre), and Titus Andronicus (Yale ...