Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance extract
Table of Contents
1. Some Erōs–Thanatos interfaces in Attic Tragedy
David Rudkin
2. Dying for love: the tragicomedy of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra
Robert Wilcher
3. Desire and destruction in the drama of Georg Büchner
Karoline Gritzner
4. Labyrinths of the taboo: theatrical journeys of eroticism and death in Parisian culture
Richard J. Hand
5. The kiss of love and death: Eros and Thanatos in the opera
Dieter Borchmeyer
6. Eros/sex, death/murder: sensuality, homicide and culture in Musil, Brecht and the Neue Sachlichkeit
George Hunka
7. The living corpse: a metaphysic for theatre
Dic Edwards
8. Flirting with disaster
David Ian Rabey
9. Howard Barker’s ‘monstrous assaults’: eroticism, death and the antique text
Graham Saunders
10. ‘Welcome to the house of fun’: Eros, Thanatos and the uncanny in grand illusions
Michael Mangan
11. Visions of Xs: experiencing La Fura dels Baus’s XXX and Ron Athey’s Solar Anus
Roberta Mock
12. La petite mort: erotic encounters in One to One performance
Rachel Zerihan
13. Saint Nick: a parallax view of Nick Cave
David Pattie
14. Afterword: The corpse and its sexuality
Howard Barker
Extract from Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance
Taken from the Introduction by Karoline Gritzner
According to Jonathan Dollimore Western culture has always been fascinated by the connections between erotic desire and death. In his book Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture he identifies desire as a ‘restless movement’ which ‘comes to seem destructively insatiable, a permanent lack whose attempted fulfilment is at once the destiny of the self and what destroys it’.1 There is a tradition of thinking about desire as emerging from an experience of lack and incompleteness, as is epitomised in Plato’s retelling of a myth (by Aristophanes) according to which all humans were originally androgynous beings of circular shape who, as a punishment by the gods, were cut in half. This was the origin of (idealist) love and erotic desire – our longing to find the ‘other half’ who will make us complete. But, as Jan Kott says, ‘the paradox and sadness of eroticism consists in the fact that its absolute fulfilment is not possible’.2 This is what makes Eros ‘bittersweet’ (Anne Carson) – a contradictory movement of desire, pleasurable and painful at the same time. ‘[E]rotic imagination never creates a fully developed situation, or a complete person. The erotic partner of imagination and desire is created or given only in fragments.’3 The fragmented erotic other, because he is incomplete (a secret?), positions himself at the boundary between creation (life) and dissolution (death). Accordingly, the status of eroticism and death as ‘limit experiences’ (Blanchot) suggests that the promise of fulfilment or ecstatic jouissance which is contained in the image of the other, the object of desire, is connected to the pleasure and pain of transgression. This was the view of Bataille who, like Sade, associated sex with death, arguing that the fully expressed sexual and erotic desire causes a dissolution or loss of self, a ‘breaking down of established patterns’ and a disturbance of ‘regulated social order’.4
Bataille argues that eroticism signifies a break from the social order of work, reason and calculation; it is an aspect of human sexuality that is divorced from the reproductive drive and through which the individual experiences the shifting grounds of existence. Eroticism is associated with transgression and approaches the condition of death, for its aim is dissolution of self and continuity of experience. The erotic state can be a heightened form of consciousness in which the furthest possibilities and intensities of selfhood are explored. Eroticism is an unknown territory, a mental and emotional terrain vague, and in this it resembles death also. The spiritual, sacred dimension to the experience of eroticism is captured by Bataille’s use of the term ‘sovereign’ to describe erotic desire’s movement of transgression and effect of transfiguration...
The temporality of eroticism and death is peculiar: rooted in experiences of mutability, transformation and crisis, they are both confrontations with the unknowable and make us sensitive to the value and passing of time. It is perhaps no surprise that the intersections between eroticism and death find some of their most poignant expressions in the ephemeral arts of theatre and performance where our encounters with bodies, words, sounds and images are subject to a dynamic of mutability and a heightened experience of time. The theatricality of eroticism and death points beyond representation; its gesture is anti-mimetic, sublime even, for it binds together contradictory impulses and energies which disrupt the logical order of understanding and representation. Theatre is the space in which real and imagined encounters, relations and contacts are enabled or deferred, made actual or possible (the erotic itself creates a space in which every movement, gesture, word, is heightened, made different). The theatre can be an invitation to imagine ourselves and the world and people around us differently; it can alter the parameters of our psychic worlds and affect us viscerally; it can be a dialogue, an address, a challenge, a risk, a seduction...
The essays collected in this volume explore many (and more) of the above-mentioned manifestations and representations of Eros and death in theatrical, musical and cultural texts and performances, both historical and contemporary. One of the central concerns of this book is to propose or work out what may be intrinsically theatrical or performative about the encounter between eroticism and death. The essays explore the ways in which various forms of theatre and performance embody the dynamics of desire and death by, for example, identifying Eros and Thanatos as transgressive, liberating or healing but also aggressive and destructive forces. Many of the essays locate their discussions of eroticism and death in specific cultural–historical contexts and thus provide a sense of how drama and theatre reflect changing attitudes to sexual desire and death. As well as offering particular historical perspectives, the collection contains essays that engage with contemporary dramatic writing and theatre/ performance practice.
Our encounter with eroticism and death in theatre and performance is real and imaginary at the same time. The transient movement of bodies in the space and time of the here and now can be seductive and yield a visceral affect; but our encounter with the unknown and invisible will ultimately depend on the work of our imagination, which alone has the power to turn the theatre into a space of desire.
1. Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (New York, 2001), p. xvii.
2. Jan Kott, ‘A Short Treatise on Eroticism’, in Jan Kott, The Memory of the Body: Essays on Theater and Death, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Evanston, IL, 1992), p. 74.
3. Ibid., p. 71.
4. George Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco, 1986), p. 18.