How Theater is Possible: Towards a Metaphysics of Presence

Abstract

Introduction . This article substantiates the relevance of the mutual appeal of philosophy to theater and theater to philosophy. The article's research centers on theatrical presence, which unfolds the metaphysical meaning of theater. Methodology and sources . The research draws on methods from the history of ideas (A. Akhutin, G. Teichmüller) and the relatively new disciplines of “philosophy of theater” (M. Kobrinets, A. Guyer) and “anthropology of theater” (L. Kolyankevich). The range of sources includes both historical evidence from the history of theater and philosophical reflection on it, primarily from existentialism (G. Marcel, M. Heidegger) and deconstruction (J. Derrida, F. Lacoue-Labarthe). Results and discussion . Within the context of the history of ideas, theater appears as a dramatic universe of life, a “concrete metaphysics”, a boundary situation, as a site of primordial production and the cancellation/closure of performance in Artaud's “theater of cruelty”. The latter, as a poetic utopia, challenges the metaphysics of representation and asserts itself as a place of “an unrepresentable living present” or pure presence. A retrospective on the history of Western metaphysics reveals how closely theater is intertwined with philosophical thought. Theater offers its own answers to the “school” metaphysical questions about the unity and identity of essence, the status of universals, and the psychophysical problem: the emptiness of the actor's presence, the playful spirit of life, the discovery of consciousness embodied in the body-mind. This is the metaphysical territory that theater opens beyond the oppositions of modern European philosophy. Conclusion . Thus, theater can be seen as an organon of the metaphysics of presence, the specific possibilities of which are revealed primarily in the spacemaking of the world. This understanding allows us to look at the history of theater as the history of presence, as exemplified by certain narratives. Its fundamental mode, then, is an intermediate, neutral position between religion and politics, the sacred and the profane, which either sanctions representation or abolishes it for the sake of affirming pure presence.