Thinking Without Authority: Performance Philosophy as the Democracy of Thought (original) (raw)
Related papers
Performance Thinks: Theatre, Philosophy & the Nonhuman
This is a transcript of an unpublished talk presented in Frankfurt in November 2015. The paper draws from the principles of François Laruelle's non-standard philosophy to develop a critique of recent philosophies of theatre, both analytic and continental.
This article draws from François Laruelle's non-standard philosophy to locate gestures of philosophical 'authority' or 'sufficiency' within recent work in the philosophy of theatre – including material from contemporary Anglo-American philosophical aesthetics, and texts by Alain Badiou, such as In Praise of Theatre (2015). Whilst Badiou initially appears magnanimous in relation to theatre's own thinking-famously describing theatre as 'an event of thought' that 'directly produces ideas' (Badiou 2005: 72)-I argue that this very benevolence, from a Laruellean perspective, constitutes another form of philosophical authoritarianism. In contrast, I indicate some affinities between Laruelle's non-standard aesthetics and the emerging field of Performance Philosophy-one aim of which, as distinct from the philosophy of theatre, would be to allow performance to qualitatively extend our concepts of thinking and/or to be attentive to the ways in which performance has already provided new forms of philosophy.
Notes toward The Philosophy of Theatre
Anglia
This article draws from the contemporary French thinker François Laruelle to perform a ‘non-philosophical’ analysis of recent literature from the analytic or Anglo-American philosophy of theatre. Much of this literature, I argue, suffers from the problem of application, namely: non- or extra-theatrical assumptions are both brought to bear upon and remain unchallenged by the philosopher’s encounter with theatre – particularly in the form of assumptions as to the nature of philosophy or the role or position of philosophy with respect to other forms of thought, such as theatre and performance. Having sought to articulate some of the problems arising from the conception of the philosophy of theatre as a definitional project, the article then considers – via Laruelle – what kind of ‘stance’ a philosophy of theatre might need to occupy in order not to impose its thought on theatre but to be open to theatre’s thoughts.
Performance-Philosophy: the philosophical turn in Performance Studies
Martin Puchner’s The Drama of Ideas (2010), Freddie Rokem’s Philosophers and Thespians (2010), and Simon Bayly’s The Pathognomy of Performance (2011) are only three recent publications that one could cite as evidence that the international field of Theatre and Performance Research is undergoing what we might call ‘a philosophical turn’: an intensification of its long-standing interest in and engagement with philosophy, as a source of diverse concepts, plural methods and multiple ontologies that can be productively explored in relation to performance. But what is at stake in this turn? What relationship between performance and philosophy is being staged in this work? In this presentation, I will suggest that we need to move beyond the mere application of philosophy to performance, beyond an approach to philosophy determined by a pursuit of the next new and fashionable method of performance analysis. In particular, I will propose that our experiments with what I am calling ‘performance-philosophy’ need not begin with clear and distinct definitions of each term. We do not yet know what either performance or philosophy can do; it is precisely the indeterminacy of the distinction between the activities that we call ‘performance’ and ‘philosophy’ (as exposed in the ‘nonart’ of Allan Kaprow) that makes performance-philosophy an exciting prospect. Ultimately, I will argue that the encounter between performance and philosophy is at its richest and most egalitarian if philosophy is willing to encounter performance as thinking, and as that which might extend what philosophy counts as thinking – a discussion that will also lead us to question the implications of the provocative idea that everything (not just the theatrical subject or philosophical mind) thinks. In this way, I hope to address not only the philosophical turn in performance, but also the non-philosophical turn in philosophy: the democratization of thought that has recently been called for by the French (non-) philosopher, François Laruelle. Non-philosophy will meet nonart, then – but as its equal, not as its illustration.
Thinking Without Authority: Performance Philosophy as the Democracy of Thought
Performance Philosophy, 2015
Perhaps nowhere else does the controversy of performance philosophy show itself so explicitly as at the moment of its very first utterance: in the announcement -as contentious to some as it is impertinent, no doubt, to others -that performance philosophy 'stages a new field.' What does such an announcement betray if it is not the presumption of foundation: that a new discipline has
Oxford Bibliographies, 2020
organic. Philosophy of theater is also sometimes referred to-or is argued to be subsumed, more broadly, in-"performance philosophy," which also refers to a network of academics and practitioners that publishes a book series and a journal of the same name. Regardless of what it is called or how it is classified, scholarship has coalesced around some fundamental preoccupations, which are not too dissimilar to questions that arise in other philosophies of.. . (e.g., art, film, dance, etc.). The debates in philosophy of theater mostly fall into three of the main branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. The major metaphysical debates center on an ontological question: What is theater? Epistemological studies tend to focus on audience reception and/or how meaning is made and/or transmitted. Finally, studies in aesthetics focus on two main questions: (1) What is theater as an art form? (2) What is the relationship between dramatic text and theatrical performance? This article is intentionally narrow in its scope, focusing on philosophy and theater traditions that came out of Greek theater and philosophy, in order to ensure a sufficient amount of depth, not (merely) breadth. General Overviews While the epic work of the history of theater criticism, Carlson 1993, traces many of the lines of thought explored in the philosophy of theater, any self-aware semblance of a field did not really happen until the publication of the edited collection Krasner and Saltz 2006, which seems to have almost singlehandedly put its finger on the pulse of this emergent field. Hamilton 2007 is the first book on theater by a contemporary philosopher, which is based on an earlier work (Hamilton 2001, cited under Dramatic Text and Theatrical Performance). It is in the mid-2010s that reflections on, theorizations of, and major contributions to the field begin to come to prominence: Puchner 2013, Stern 2014, Saltz 2015, Stern 2017). Carlson 2018, the third edition of a classic text on performance theory, which intersects in some key ways with the philosophy of theater, is also released around this time. Hamilton 2019 provides the decade with a retrospective and a future path to inquiry.