Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Tuesday, 23 March 2010 A Critique of Tragedy 13
The idea that an acknowledged metaphysics underlying a drama
necessarily leads to a thesis play, an intellectualized representation of
experience, is easily dismissed: the Greek tragedians worked during the
era of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and though they share a
deep- Between the political materialism of Marx (and its optimism for progressive improvement of the race) and the psychological darkness of Freud (and its pessimism for the ability of the human individual to finally adjust to the tragedy of experience), and therefore between their forebears Hegel and Schopenhauer: this is a dynamic in which the dramatic work operates not as the statement of a problem but as the exploration of bodied consciousness, both a historic construct and a metaphysical condition. It should come as no surprise that aesthetics is central to the project of Critical Theory, as it was to Schopenhauer's metaphysics: each informs the other, and any reconciliation between the two appears impossible. But again, this is not a problem, but a condition, perhaps the condition of the race, and it is informed too by the bloody history of the twentieth century, perhaps the bloodiest of histories. As the Greeks knew, it was the dramatic stage upon which the philosophical dynamic plays itself out, the speaking human body the fleshed dynamic: but offering in the end not a dead conclusion, but an organic experience; the start of a new road into the unknown, into the dark, and possibility. It is difficult not to acknowledge the difficulty of the task, and the responsibility of the dramatist and performer towards not only history (the history of the form as well as the history of the race) but also the autonomous self within it ... it is dangerous, thankless work ... but why else write or stage a play at all ... Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here. Posted in /Tragedy |