How to Act, How to Spectate (Laughing Matter)

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Notes

1 A territory that was, of course, mined exhaustively by several twentieth-century theatrical authors, such as Samuel Beckett

2 Philosopher Giorgio Agamben analyses the state of exception as ‘the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension’, as for instance in the ‘"military order” issued by the president of the United States on November 13, 2001, which authorized the “indefinite detention” and trial by “military commission” … of noncitizens suspected of being involved in terrorist activities’ (Agamben 2005: 3).

3 In Ramsay Burt's reading of La Ribot's ‘laughing’ works, they are ‘"destroyed men” (and women) … people undone by the disaster of modernity’ rather than abandoned. Burt's essay (2008) came to my attention just as the present article was being completed and is highly recommended, developing as it does – and with considerably more economy than the present attempt – a sophisticated argument about this work as a provocatively resistant form of performed ‘passivity’. I am grateful to Charlie Fox for putting me on to Burt's article.

4 I am grateful to Laura Bruton for putting me on to Felman's book.

5 The phrase again is Agamben's and refers to conceptual frameworks according to which what counts, and what doesn't count, as ‘human’ is decided upon. See Agamben 2004.