Drama and Philosophy

At least since German idealism and Hegel’s fascination with Greek tragedy, thinkers have increasingly turned to drama. The first point we want to focus on is whether the issue may not be deeper: if drama is in fact part of philosophy. In 2002, Martin Puchner made a very intelligent review of how, since Plato, philosophy is at the same time dependent on theatre but always denying the theatre that exists. “Heidegger had captured the turn of the ontology for the philosophy of language with the wording ‘language is the house of being’, a different tradition of philosophy appears to believe that this is a home theatre.” (524) “The history of the theory can not be considered independently of theatre history (...): Plato/Greek Tragedy; Deleuze/Artaud, Nietzsche/Wagner; Derrida/Mallarmé; Benjamin/Trauerspiel”(529) But “the theory creates its own concepts of theatricality, which tend to be at odds with the real theatre.” (530).

This conference, along with a review of this multiple dependences between philosophy and drama, also wants to account for the increasing use of what, in a 1983 article, Clifford Geertz (66) called the “dramatic analogy “: from the second half of the century XX, theory increasingly uses the ideas of performance, embodiment, mask, physicality, scene, and stage. But it is not enough that theory gives attention to theatricality, it is also necessary that the theory itself is aware of it. Hence the other two aspects of the project: to develop the contribution of dramatic concepts to philosophical thought, and vice versa, to develop the contribution of philosophy to the scenic languages. Some books recently published have placed in the current agenda the “intersections between theater, performance and philosophy”.

Finally, to help define the terminology: “drama” is a semantic field used by all and we know of its polysemy. Here, we characterize what is “dramatic” as what takes place on a stage or on movie screen and also what happens in everyday life. It is true that there may be, in some languages or in some literary studies, the tendency to associate “drama” only to written text, or dramatic literature, but nothing forces us to do so and that is not at all our intention. In many excellent cases, the dramatic is even associated with what transcends text. For instance, Benjamin wrote: “the dramatic (...) can never express itself in words, but only in representation; this is the ‘dramatic’ in its most rigorous sense” (apud Lehmann 68). Precisely, this project seeks to distance itself from past discussions on “Philosophy and Literature”, for it does not understand drama as (mere) literature, but rather in its performative dimension. It is precisely by the multiplicity of its languages that drama can enrich the philosophy of language: this project will accept contributions that refer to any of the languages used in the scene, from text to movement or space, as well as case studies in which the dramatic is found in theater, dance, film, opera, or in euphoric or dysphoric situations of everyday life.

References

• Geertz, Clifford (2004) “Blurred genres: the refiguration of social thought”, in Henry Bial (ed.), The Performance Studies Reader, New York, Routledge
• Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2002) Le théâtre postdramatique, Paris, L’Arche
• Puchner, Martin (2002) “The theatre in modernist thought”, New Literary History, vol. 33.

Conference languages will be English or French. Conference fee: 200 euros.

Contact: [email protected]