Backpages 24.4

Abstract

Backpages is an opportunity for the academy to engage with theatre and performance practice with immediacy and insight and for theatre workers and performance artists to engage critically and reflectively on their work and the work of their peers. Featuring short, topical articles and debates, polemics where necessary, it’s a place of intellectual intervention and creative reflection. It’s also where we hope to articulate, perhaps for the first time, the work of new and rising theatre artists in an academic forum. This issue of Backpages begins with a special section on Jacques Derrida and considerations of his theories in relationship to live performance co-edited by Rachel Clements and Marilena Zaroulia.

Notes

1. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 25.

2. Ibid., p. 49.

3. Ibid., p. 31. Emphasis added.

4. Ibid., p. 32.

5. Dan Rebellato, ‛At this very moment in this theatre here I am’, Dan Rebellato, 11 January 2014 <http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/at-this-very-moment-in-this-theatre-here-i-am/> [accessed 4 September 2014].

6. Alongside this material, we might point readers to Liz Tomlin’s book, Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), which gives a much more sustained engagement with Derrida’s citational aesthetics than there is space for here.

1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Aphorism Countertime’, trans. By Nicholas Royle, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II, ed. By Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 127-42 (p. 129). Jacques Derrida, ‘L’aphorisme à contretemps’, in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre II (Paris: Galilée, 2003), pp. 131-44 (p. 133).

2. Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 45.

3. Space but also time, the date, the rendezvous: the date is a signature, a mark of presence, of life, that at this very moment, here, there is something – let’s call it a person or persona, or a subject, or even a character – capable of signing. But let’s not too quickly see this as ‘human’.

1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Continental Philosophy, ed. by Mark Dooley and Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 65-83 (p. 66).

2. John Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 137.

3. Nicholas Ridout, ‘Prologue’ in A Life of Ethics and Performance, ed. by John Matthews and David Torevell (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp. 7-17 (p. 14).

1. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. by David Wills (Fordham University Press: New York, 2008). Originally published as an essay in 2002: Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’, trans. by David Wills, Critical Inquiry, 28.2 (Winter 2002), 369-418.

2. Derrida’s writing on animals has, for example, been criticized by David Wood, ‘Comment ne pas manger – Deconstruction and Humanism’, in H. Peter Steves, Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology and Animal Life (Albany: SUNY Press), pp. 12-35.

3. Fevered Sleep, ‘It’s the Skin You’re Living In’, Fevered Sleep, 2013 <http://www.feveredsleep.co.uk/films/its-the-skin-youre-living-in/>.

4. In French, the first person singular form, ‘Je suis’ translates as both ‘I am’ and ‘I follow’. Only the semantic context provides the meaning. For a detailed exposition of the complex polysemy of the verb suivre in Derrida’s argument see The Animal That Therefore I Am, pp. 3-4.

5. Ibid., pp. 30-31.

6. Ibid., p. 29. Emphasis in original.

7. Hauntology is found in Specters of Marx, and speaks of the radical anachrony of the spectre - the way in which its appearance troubles clear divisions between past, future and present.

1. Jerzy Grotowski, Jacques Lecoq, Jacques Copeau, Augusto Boal, Eugenio Barba, Michael Chekhov, Dario Fo, and Tadashi Suzuki, among others refer to the animal (and unsurprisingly, the child) whenever they wish to express what an actor can/should achieve: organicity, integrity, spontaneity, flexibility, strength of will, discipline, passion, compassion, precision, courage, commitment, agility, awareness, self-awareness, hyper-awareness, playfulness, fullness, alive-ness. The animal is thus presented as the utopian actor who embodies all these virtues naturally, gracefully, without trying.

2. Jerzy Grotowski, ‘Tu es le fils de quelqu’un’, in The Grotowski Sourcebook, ed. by Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 294-305 (p. 298).

3. Ibid., p. 297.

4. Ibid.

5. ‘…the body vanishes, burns, and the spectator sees only a series of visible impulses.’ Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 16.

6. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. by David Wills (Fordham University Press: New York, 2008), pp. 1-51.

7. Ibid., p. 14.

8. Face to is Grotowski’s favourite direct translation of the French face à, meaning, in front of. Using the word ‘face’ in the translation is grammatically awkward, yet opens up a sense of spatial relationship especially in the context of this image of the animal in front of/face to the human being.

9. Grotowski, ‘Tu es le fils’, p. 300.

10. ‘Performer, with a capital letter, is a man of action’ writes Grotowski in ‘Performer’, in Grotowski Sourcebook, pp. 376-81, (p. 376), and this is what is referred to here.

11. Grotowski, ‘Tu es le fils’, p. 300.

1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. by Chantal Mouffe (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 79-90 (p. 83).

2. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 74.

3. Ibid., p. 85.

4. Michael Thomas addresses the association of Derrida’s early work with the conservative ‘Yale school of deconstruction’, and makes an argument about the trans-cultural translation/transformation of Derrida’s early work in order to put to rest the persistent charge of his conservative orientation before 1993 when Specters of Marx began to make it clear that he had definite political commitments. Michael Thomas, The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), chapters 2 and 3 especially.

5. Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (London: Routledge & Chapman Hall, 1991).

6. Jacques Derrida, cited in Cornell, Beyond Accommodation, p. 111.

7. Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction, p. 27.

8. Johnson, A World of Difference, p. 194.

9. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation, p. 107.

10. Jacques Derrida, cited in Christie V. McDonald, ‘Interview: Choreographies: Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald’, Diacritics 12.2 (1982), 66-76 (p. 67).

11. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, dir. Natalie Abrahami, Young Vic Theatre, London, January –March 2014.

12. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 8.

13. ‘Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution’ was an AHRC sponsored research project conducted in 2013-14 by the British Theatre Consortium (I was Principal Investigator). The final report can be accessed at <http://britishtheatreconference.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Critical-Mass-10.7.pdf>.

14. Beckett, Happy Days, p. 46.

15. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation, p. 202.

16. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: the “Mystical Foundations of Authority”’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3-67 (pp. 27-28).

1. Bill Paterson, cited in ‘David MacLennan’, Herald Scotland, 14 June 2014 <http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/obituaries/david-maclennan.24484979> [accessed 22 August 2014].