Performance, Politics and Activism
Considering both making political performance and making performance politically, this collection explores engagements of political resistance, public practice and performance media, on various scales of production within structures of neoliberal and libe
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11 Frank B. Wilderson III
This essay begins with three quotations: You have no brother in the slave when you say ‘O my brother’. (Arabic Proverb) We cannot properly feel ourselves into his nature, no more than into that of a dog. (Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History) How can one live in death… when the shadow that overhangs existence has not disappeared, but on the contrary weighs ever more heavily? (Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony)2 Empathy is an anchor-tenant in the edifice of aesthetic theory. Rhetoricians argue unreservedly that rhetoric itself cannot proceed without empathy, and that when it does, it fails.3 The OED defines empathy as ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’. Arts and humanities theorists extend the definition, describing what occurs during an empathetic encounter as ‘the bodily effort to enter through “speech, gesture, tonality” into another’s way of being or life-world’.4 Narrowing the field to film and theatre theorists, we find that an empathetic structure of feeling requires that a drama unfold over what Mike Wayne, borrowing Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the ‘chronotope’,5 refers to as biographical time, ‘the time of the psychological and emotional life of characters’, a ‘conceptualization of time [that] directs our attention to the way characters grow and develop as a result of their interaction with adventure time’ (Theorising Video Practice, 164). ‘[A]dventure time refers to the unexpected and unforeseen turning of events; the rupturing of the expected flow of events in the time of chance and fortune’ (162). Without a concept of biographical time, ‘characters’ remain fixed, already-defined ‘physical persons’ (164). 181
10.1057/9781137341051.0020 - ‘Raw Life’ and the Ruse of Empathy, Frank B. Wilderson III
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‘Raw Life’ and the Ruse of Empathy1
Empathy also tenders the promise of a liberatory relation between ‘Human beings’ through catharsis (intense release of emotion) and cathexis (locating of emotion into an object, event or person), by staging an encounter that can renew or re-establish the kinship, or communal, structure of feeling that it presumes to exist ab initio, as if in a state of nature. It hails the spectator to a filial, natural essence by privileging ‘biographical time’, time that ‘locates causal agency (the “because” principle of why things happen) at the level of individual characters’ (164) and their essential being. It can also hail the spectator to a kinship structure of feeling b
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