Subject: dissertation proposal (in progress)
From: JM Lozano (rsoab@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Feb 11 2000 - 01:07:52 CST
Please, take it as a work in progress:
Dissertation proposal(DRAFT)
Live philosophy!
(Is theatre a philosophical task?)
“WHY ETHICS REQUIRE A THEATRE?
AND WHY ETHICS, THE ETHICAL GAZE, DOES NOT WISH TO KNOW ANYTHING OF THIS
THEATRE?”
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1)
As a theatre/performance practitioner, I have found out that there is
something that for a long time has constraint me and limit my work within
theatre. And that is ‘what contemporary theatre itself is’ and the
epistemological ground of thought from where we speak about it. Because (I
reveal again what my hidden agenda as a practitioner is) at the ‘bottom of
my heart’: I hate theatre and even more performance in its most conventional
sense.
But then, why do I still do theatre/performance?
Perhaps, because what I am looking for within theatre, is not really
theatre.
“In the statement ‘science is the theory of the real”, Heidegger asks, what
does the word theory mean? He explains that ‘theory’ stems form the Greek
‘Theorein’, which grew out of the coalescing of ‘thea’ and ‘horao’. ‘Thea’
(cf. Theatre) is the outward look, the aspect, in which something shows
itself’’”
Gregory Ulmer (2)
In many ways, the scenic practice has been ‘my own personal’ possibility of
including ‘the flesh’ within theory. As if the stage was the place where
‘theoretical embodiments’ could be lived out and also as if it was the
concrete ground where anybody could be able to give actual birth to diverse
“conceptual personaes” as part of a certain “geo-philosophy”, that is, “a
thinking that take place in the relationship of territory and thought, where
there are conceptual personaes, the real subject’s of the philosopher’s
philosophy” (3)
I am interested in researching about the different main attempts that there
have been, to develop a theoretical framework within what we could call a
theatrical mode of operation. A ‘live philosophy’, that definitely is
neither performance art nor theatre.
From this perspective, what my presupposition is:
-An ‘ethical act’ needs a theatre, but for that, theatre must get rid of
itself-
“THE REGISTER OF BEING, THAT WHICH COULD BE LOCATED THROUGH A NAME, MUST BE
PRESERVED BY THE ACTS OF FUNERALS”
Jacques Lacan (4)
What I will try to do is to research the possible relations between what
Lacan calls that “which could be located through a name” and the act that
supposedly “preserves” it.
This leads me to study what Zizek has called the “ethical acts”. Those
special acts that “occur as a totally unpredictable acts” that are “not an
end in itself” and that if they are authentic they do not presuppose their
agents ‘on the level of the act’ (...) -it is not only possible, even
inevitable, that the agent is not ‘on the level of its act’, that he himself
is unpleasantly surprise by ‘the crazy thing he has just done’, and unable
fully to come to terms with it. An act where “the highest freedom coincides
with the utmost passivity, with a reduction to a lifeless automaton that
blindly performs its gestures” (5).
But then the question rises: is then any act ethical? The answer as Zizek
himself presents it, is no. That is, the “ethical act” somehow needs a
theatre to operate, in the sense that it requires:
* Autonomy to operate.
* A certain closure of its operation.
* An auto-construction of its structure.
* Self-referentiality.
That is, it needs to be autopoietic as the biologist Humberto Maturana (6)
would put it: the act must have the characteristics of a ‘living social
organism’.
What I believe (at this moment) is that philosophy needs the act, in terms
of getting rid at last of metaphysics (perhaps at the beginning by being
aware of the act of doing philosophy itself) and in the other hand that
theatre must apply Nietzschean ethics in terms of developing what would be
something, that at the present moment and following Ulfers interpretation of
Nietzsche, I would call a re-birth of the tragic (that is, the theatre
excess, always that “excess reveals itself as truth”).
(1) Lacoue-Labarthe in “Lacan con los filósofos”, Siglo XXI, 1997.
(2) Ulmer G. “Applied Grammatology. Post (e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida
to Joseph Beuys”, The John Hopkins University Press, 1985.
(3) Deleuze G; Guattari F. “What is philosophy?”, Verso, 1994 (trans.
Burchell,Tomlinson).
(4) Lacan J. Seminar 7 “The ethics of psychoanalysis”.
(5) Zizek S. “The Ticklish Subject”, Verso, 1999.
(6) Maturana H. “La realidad: ¿objetiva o construida”, Nueva Ciencia, 1996?
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