Anna Street

This book offers a glimpse of new perspectives on how philosophy performs in the gaps between thinking and acting. Bringing together perspectives from world-renowned contemporary philosophers and theorists – including Judith Butler, Alphonso Lingis, Catherine Malabou, Jon McKenzie, Martin Puchner, and Avital Ronell – this book engages with the emerging field of performance philosophy, exploring the fruitful encounters being opened across disciplines by this constantly evolving approach. Intersecting dramatic techniques with theoretical reflections, scholars from diverse geographical and institutional locations come together to trace the transfers between French theory and contemporary Anglo-American philosophical and performance practices in order to challenge conventional approaches to knowledge. Through the crossings of different voices and views, the reader will be led to explore the in-between territories where performance meets traditionally philosophical tools and mediums, such as writing, discipline, plasticity, politics, or care.

This collection gathers a set of provocative essays that sketch innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to Genre Theory in the 21st century. Focusing on the interaction between tragedy and comedy, both renowned and emerging scholarly and creative voices from philosophy, theater, literature, and cultural studies come together to engage in dialogues that reconfigure genre as social, communal, and affective. In revisiting the challenges to aesthetic categorization over the course of the 20th century, this volume proposes a shift away from the prescriptive and hierarchical reading of genre to its crucial function in shaping thought and enabling shared experience and communication. In doing so, the various essays acknowledge the diverse contexts within which genre needs to be thought afresh: media studies, rhetoric, politics, performance, and philosophy.

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.

Following the inaugural symposium entitled Thinking Through Tragedy and Comedy - Performance Philosophy and the Future of Genre hosted by the Performance Philosophy Working Group “Genres of Dramatic Thought” which took place at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin in December 2014, this contribution is a series of attempts to both recapture the debates of the symposium and stake out the field of inquiry for our Working Group’s engagement within Performance Philosophy. By tracing philosophy’s dramatic heritage within the history of genre theory and pointing to its current and future developments, this piece suggests how attention to genre can work to deepen and expand the emerging landscape of Performance Philosophy.

Tragedy’s overwhelming presence, presaged by the conspicuous absence of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy, has dominated the debate between philosophy and poetry ever since Plato, making tragedy the dominant paradigm for philosophical and performance practices. Over the last century, the gradual blurring of genre distinctions has led to George Steiner’s declaration of the ‘death of tragedy’ and to J. L. Styan’s recognition of the emergence of ‘dark comedy’, giving rise to a growing body of research on comedy. Nevertheless, despite the unprecedented attention, the prejudices against comedy run wide and deep, from philosophical neglect to high-brow conceptions of art all the way to underlying economies of power and social regulation. In consequence, comedy has been side-stepped as an inferior genre or mode, or rehabilitated as a truer or newer form of the tragic. The present study attempts to frame this prejudice as the result of theories of aesthetics and ethics which systematically exclude the comic vision, claiming that it is possible to trace a distinct corollary between the development of theories of genre and the development of philosophical aesthetic categories. The emphasis on the beautiful and the sublime, and its corresponding brand of ethics, can be linked to the flourishing of theories of tragedy, while the systematized rejection of the ugly, the ridiculous, and the ethically ambiguous can be shown to correspond to the floundering of theories of comedy, which remained largely neglected for over two thousand years. Much more than mere literary genres, the terms comedy and tragedy, when applied to the history of Western civilization, reveal the extent of our penchant for the speculative to the detriment of the actual.