The theatre was necessarily desexualized (Beckett) before it could be resexualized again (Barker). … The thing-in-itself is as unknowable in the theatre as it is unknowable in the phenomenal world. At best its contours can be described; the thing-in-itself cannot. As the test site for the limits of empirical knowledge, the theatre’s stress and tension lie in the use of the limits of empirical knowledge, of theatre itself, to describe these contours. The project must be to attempt to cross this uncrossable boundary for the slim additional knowledge it permits. Because the theatre is a metaphor for the limits of this empirical knowledge through the body, a metaphor for the phenomenal world itself, extremity is necessary: it is the edge that may pierce the veil of Maya.
Arthur Schopenhauer, as well as being one of the last of the German Romantics, was also the first philosophical modernist, a status confirmed by the necessity of his work to later artists and thinkers like Wagner, Freud, and Beckett. His metaphysics explicitly provided the underpinning for the erotic tragedies devised in music drama by Wagner and in psychology and philosophy by Freud. What must also be noted is the extent to which compassion (not duty, as proposed by Kant) forms the basis of Schopenhauer’s ethics. The drama as unique arena for this exploration permits the thought that, as male writers express themselves as bodied females in the metaphorical context of drama and theatre, they are engaging in a compassionate endeavor: to find themselves in the experiential, erotic biologically-determined Other, as a lover may recognize himself in the contemplation of the beloved, and to attempt to experience the body of the Other as their own, in both pain and ecstasy. Primarily, the avenue to this experience is the dramatic word, written to be spoken, further elaborated by the other arts, primarily lighting and costume design, of the theatre.
This, I should say, is far different than poor Jimmy Stewart’s project in Vertigo. Stewart’s desirous detective remains far outside Kim Novak’s body: the artist remains distant from his creation. The writer and director of erotic tragedy seeks union with the Other in the project of expressing this pain and ecstasy: joined, to express a perspective through new eyes.
The overarching theme of Superfluities Redux this year will be to explore the metaphysics and technique of a neo-modernism and how it relates to a new mode of erotic tragedy that I first introduced in Word Made Flesh. Please feel free to use the comments section to add your own contributions to what I hope will be a stimulating series. And please note that comments sections on individual posts are open for only seven days as a spam-prevention measure.