Originally published here on 4 February 2010. A revised version of this post appears as a passage in Word Made Flesh.

The active contemplation for which the art of tragedy aims rehearses a contest between the noumenal and phenomenal. All of theatre’s tools are phenomenal — the body, the word, the scene; time, space and causality — but it is only with these that the noumenal can be suggested, hinted at. The metaphysical union of subject and object in the ecstatic moment of recognition is impossible in the phenomenal world. But this tension presents to the spectator an opportunity for the contemplation of other worldly and phenomenal possibilities. It is a contemplation from within this attempted union, not outside of it, and for all its impossibility it nonetheless limns the thing-in-itself of the body and the word.

All the more reason for the spectator to resist losing herself in the story, a blindness: this is the Culture Industry’s desire. Instead the spectator is engaged in a project to find herself, in an attempt to unite with the performer, in its lyrical duration …