Abstract:

In this paper, the so-called Crisis of Representation is discussed as a hallmark of Western Theatre and Modernity. The key hypothesis of overcoming such a crisis is investigated through the emergence of a performative turn, in which performance is understood in a broader sense derived from Performance Studies. To address this, the paper builds on authors such as Artaud, Derrida, Heidegger, Gumbrecht and Féral for a general theoretical background, and on the work of authors such as Cull, Street and others for a more specific approach concerning the field of Performance Philosophy. This paper argues that a philosophical turn in Performance Studies has happened through a radicalization of ‘Presence’.

Keywords:
Representation Crisis; Theatrum Mundi; Performance; Performative Turn; Performance Philosophy

Résumé:

Dans cet article, la soi-disant crise de représentation est discutée comme une caractéristique du théâtre occidental et de la modernité. L’hypothèse clé de surmonter la crise par l’émergence d’un virage performatif a été étudiée, dans lequel la performance est comprise au sens large par les études de performance. À cette fin, nous nous référons à des auteurs tels que Artaud, Derrida, Heidegger, Gumbrecht et Féral comme cadre théorique général, et à des auteurs tels que Cull, Street et d’autres pour une approche plus spécifique dans le contexte de la philo-performance. Cet article soutenait qu’un tournant philosophique dans les études de performance s’est produit par une radicalisation de la ‘présence’.

Mots-clés:
Crise de la Représentation; Theatrum Mundi; Performance; Virage Performatif; Philo-Performance

Resumo:

Discute-se aqui a chamada Crise da representação como marca do teatro ocidental e da modernidade. Sua possibilidade de superação, como hipótese central, perpassaria a emergência de um novo paradigma caracterizado por uma virada performativa - no qual performance é entendida em sentido amplo, derivado do Performance Studies. Como referencial teórico utiliza-se, em caráter geral, a ampla bibliografia de autores como Artaud, Derrida, Gumbrecht e Féral e, em caráter específico, no âmbito da Performance Philosophy, de autores como Cull, Grant e outros, evidenciando que explicitar esse novo campo é discutir, também, suas tarefas futuras em direção àquilo que chamamos de uma possível hermenêutica da presença.

Palavras-chave:
Crise da Representação; Theatrum Mundi; Performance; Virada Performativa; Filosofia-Performance

By way of Introduction…

Let’s start from the end: Performance Philosophy. This term, of English origin, would be complex to translate into any Neo-Latin language, such as Portuguese or Spanish¹ 1 In the Portuguese version of this text I make a digression about the impossibility of a direct translation of the term Performance Philosophy and attempt an explanation on why this Special Issue was named Filosofia-Performance, purposely written in Portuguese with a hyphen: in order to keep the myriad of possible relationships between both terms open. For a better understanding of the problem, please see note 3. Also, I strongly recommend the introduction to the field written by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Performance Philosophy: an introduction, which opens this issue. . While at first it might seem to indicate (to us) something like a ‘Philosophy of Performance’ (‘Filosofia da Performance’), the truth is that its meaning has been more broadly constructed and strengthened over the last decade as a field that, if it does not answer - nor seek to answer - the question ‘What is performance?’ in its entirety, does nevertheless restate the question so radically that multiple unthought possibilities have gained strength. Possibilities that allow us to think, for instance, of Philosophy itself as a kind of Performance (of thought?) or of Performance as a way of philosophizing (Cull; Lagaay, 2014CULL, Laura; LAGAAY, Alice (Org.). Encounters in Performance Philosophy. Performance Philosophy Books series. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.; Street; Alliot; Pauker, 2017STREET, Anna; ALLIOT, Julien; PAUKER, Magnolia (Org.). Inter Views in Performance Philosophy: Crossings and Conversations. Performance Philosophy Books series. London: Palgrave Macmillan , 2017. - among others), if only we allow ourselves to go beyond modern logic and traditional categories of so-called rational thinking.

Philosophy and Performance - or performing and philosophizing - can today be seen as inextricably intertwined. In both disciplines, for instance, the question of the relationship between the real and presence remains open. New perspectives are starting to take shape, in which thought is necessarily “embodied”, i.e. thinking is profoundly rooted in both the body and the world, inseparable from them. Thus, new questions like ‘How does Performance think?’² 2 Actually, ‘How performance thinks’ was the name of one of the first symposiums organized by Laura Cull on the subject. It was an international, two-day conference, co-organized by the PSi Performance and Philosophy working group and Kingston University, in April 2012. More information available at: <http://psi-ppwg.wikidot.com/london-2012>. , and so forth, have emerged and defy us to think beyond the dichotomies and structures built in Modernity.

Over the last 10 years, some scholars, originally from Performance Studies, as well as many other expatriates from philosophy, have expanded the concept of Performance (which, as a field, has long shifted away from Theatre Studies, for instance) in a way that means it is no longer possible to think of philosophy simply as a method that would be analytically employed to study performance.

The independence of Performance as a field of study, considered from the perspective that will be developed here, fits into what I consider to be a major paradigm shift, in which the very question What is Philosophy? also needs to be restated.

Such questions imply the birth of a new field - it is not a new kind of a “philosophy of performance”, but rather something radically different, not just an internal turn in Performance Studies, but a new field of scholarship, artistic practice and investigation: Performance Philosophy: Philosophy as Performance; Performance as Philosophy - maybe a “Performosophy”³ 3 Before we move on, a note on translation is still needed. The use of the term philo-performance, for example, is already present in some texts in French (Marrou et al., 2015), which is, indeed, another Neo-Latin language. However, I have some reservations about its use, since it emphasizes the philia – or the pursuit of a knowledge that one does not possess – rather than the sophia itself. A more suitable neologism in Portuguese could, on the other hand, be Performosofia (or Performosophy), since in canonical Latin performo refers to something that takes shape / forms through. Philosophy points out to a search for ‘truth’ (the sophia) but could it find other forms of expression and unveiling that do not depend solely on the “nous” – as the Greeks called the “pure thought”? Although Stuart Grant does not refer to the term Performosophy, I would like to recommend for further reflection on the different types of knowledge (besides such a search for a “pure abstract thinking”), his chapter (Grant, 2019) on Performance and the different types/possibilities of knowledge in the ancient Greek world. There he discusses, for example, the Aristotelian Phronesis as a possibility of answering ‘how performance thinks?’. Moreover, I would like to thank Will Daddario and our exchange of emails for the initial suggestion that made me think about the possibility of this neologism in Portuguese. ?

Philosophizing and performing would indeed prove to be so interconnected that I cannot but think of the hypothesis of the emergence of a new perspective, one that could be related to what Josette Féral called Performativity as opposed to Theatricality. In her seminal article, Féral (2002FÉRAL, Josette; BERMINGHAM, Ronald. Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language. SubStance, special issue Theatricality, Wisconsin, v. 31, n. 2/3, p. 94-108, 2002.) related philosophy and theatre, or more specifically, phenomenology and theatricality, discussing them through two possibilities: first, from a kind of intentional attitude (the spectator’s gaze) that frames everyday life and displaces it, creating a cleft - as a type of relation of alterity with the real, that divides space into the outside and the inside of theatrical representation. Through this cleft in everyday life, theatrical representation becomes the space of otherness, a double of reality, that necessarily presents itself as fiction and crisis (of the real). It is this kind of active gaze that establishes theatricality itself, once it constructs a radical fissure that takes place in the metaphorical illusion of the proscenium. Yet, in other writings (2015), Féral also discusses a second possibility, named Performativity, which comes together precisely within the emerging paradigm (in the 20th Century) of Performance Art, in which the performer’s body and the immediacy of art as a work opens a different possibility of relationship within the world, one that, instead of fictionalizing reality, duplicates it, seeks “to bring it into presence” - or “[open] it up in its truth”.

Such immediate possibility of presentification, to be discussed within the theoretical framework of Performance Philosophy, is at the core of this text. After the initial considerations above, we have the necessary scope - through, precisely, such a polarization of the theatrical and performative - to discuss the well-known crisis of modernity (a conception already pointed out and diagnosed by authors such as Husserl, Heidegger and Nietzsche, among many others). This crisis can, now, be repositioned within the perspective that I propose here: as the crisis of a fiction / representation of the world and the possibility of overcoming such a crisis through a broad hermeneutic-phenomenological paradigm that tries to think art beyond Aesthetics, a view that got stronger throughout the 20th Century and that can be found in the work of various artists and performers.

The crisis of modernity as the crisis of representation is the crisis of a certain fiction of the world that underlies the crisis itself - a cleft established by an expanded concept of theatricality. As I will explore, it relates to the well-known Baroque metaphor of a Theatrum Mundi (the great Theatre of the world), which fables reality by comparing it to a stage. Used by Shakespeare and Calderon de la Barca, amongst others, this idea reflects the modern suspicion of the real, reinforcing the metaphysical impossibility of knowing ‘the truth’ that would be behind the scenes or behind reality.

However, this metaphor (of a Theatrum mundi, world as Representation) needs to be revised in light of the performative turn towards ‘presence’ and the possibility of the body as the place for the epiphany of truth - in fact, this is the main hypothesis of this text, now expressed more clearly -, a hypothesis to be developed within the critical fortune already accumulated by studies in Performance Philosophy⁴ 4 The critical fortune already accumulated by studies in Performance Philosophy, it is currently concentrated in three main sources: the website of the Research Network for the field of Performance Philosophy, available at <http://performancephilosophy.ning.com/>; Palgrave Macmillan's 20-book series on the subject available at <https://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14558>; and especially the Performance Philosophy Journal <https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal>, an international online journal published since 2015. .

Finished with this long introit, we can proceed further.

About Old Metaphors and the Crisis of Modernity

In a sense, we could say that only now we have reached the beginning of this text. In Modern times, the metaphor of a Theatrum Mundi (the Great Theatre of the World), which fables reality by comparing it to a stage, is well known. It is used by Shakespeare, in the play As You Like It, 1603

The metaphor is reinforced with the Spanish author, Calderón de la Barca, who writes about thirty years later, in 1634, a play literally called The Great theatre of the World (1990CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA, Pedro. The Great Theatre of the World. Adapted by Adrian Mitchell. London: Dramatic Publishing House, 1990.), in which the Creator, creation and creatures meet before the opening of the curtains, in an exercise of Metatheatre. God then distributes roles to characters as the King, the Beauty, the Rich Man, the Peasant and the Beggar to play their parts in his play of life. It ends when the characters depart to enter the stage - the world. As Luis Felipe Lima and Ricardo Valle (2008LIMA, Luis Felipe; VALLE, Ricardo. Introdução à vida é sonho. In: CALDERON DE LA BARCA, Pedro. A vida é sonho . São Paulo: Hedra, 2008. P. 9-29., p.15) warn us, in their introduction to Calderón de la Barca: “Both the dream and the theatre, used as exemplum, should alert men about the mistakes of the living world”.

The dream as a metaphor will become increasingly present in modernity. From Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1605, to Life is a Dream, 1635, another play written by Calderón de la Barca, known by its famous verses:

In this sense, then, dreams, in the 17th Century repertoire, are comparable to theatre: both feature a parade of fictional images, phantasmagorias, illusions - and even though they may be somehow related to reality, they are not real. Of course, to think of the sensible world as fictitious and misleading, and thus comparable to a dream (and theatre) is not something new: that image has a long genealogy that goes all the way back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. But, in a more relevant manner, this image relates mainly to a long Western tradition - Neoplatonist and Christian - that will interpret Plato in the light of their own beliefs, relating “the things of the world” to illusions or deceits of the senses, imperfect reflections of Truth (given that Truth belongs to another order of reality, to ‘another world’, divine - to that one which lies before and after the opening of the curtains). From this perspective, what the senses can grasp is not the real world, but its double.

Less than a decade after Life is a Dream, such baroque restlessness (the friction between the fictional and the real) would be revisited, now in a definitive philosophical form, by René Descartes in his Meditations (1641)⁵ 5 Adrien Baillet, his first biographer, refers the origin of the argument to a series of dreams the author had in 1619 and which he recorded in his diaries. :

However, Descartes’ dreaming argument will become a rhetorical stratagem that only seems to lead to a radical scepticism. From the point of view of the history of metaphysics, Descartes is the one who, through the hyperbolic doubt, leads it (metaphysics) into a new level of radicality, thanks to the virulence of his argument, by emphasizing that our experiences are merely impressions of the senses. There is no substantial difference between feeling, imagining feeling or dreaming. Descartes (1996, p. 16) places everything under the cloak of doubt:

Descartes’ solution is his self-awareness as a being who thinks, the famous cogito that Saint Augustine had proposed long before, in The City of God, but now in a more radical sense. Hyperbolic doubt as a method: although I cannot doubt that there is “a thing that thinks” or “something that doubts” - the famous cogito ergo sum - even if I am deceived, then at least I am. I am, indeed, but in a way that even my own bodily and material existence can still be doubted. How would it be possible to get out of such solipsism? How would it be possible to establish with certainty that the outside world also exists, that one has a body and that it is not just a representation of the self? This seems like an impossible task. Descartes, like Augustine, can only accomplish this through the idea of God.

When Descartes (1996DESCARTES, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.) considers the cogito as the only certainty of his self-awareness, he turns all things, and even his own body, into ideas or representations of the world, captured by the senses and whose validity cannot be assured without reference to the existence of God - who becomes the “great metaphysical guarantor”.

Surprisingly, theatre in modern times will also be affected by this new perspective brought by Cartesian thinking, so that it turns into something structured and hierarchized in a very specific way. As Gumbrecht explains:

At the other end of modern metaphysics’ historical arc, we could situate Antonin Artaud, the avant-garde man of theatre who became famous for re-thinking the relation between theatre and what he would call its double, who brings into question, precisely, such a metaphysical perspective as a hallmark of Western theatre. Derrida (1995DERRIDA, Jacques. O Teatro da crueldade e o fechamento da representação. In: DERRIDA, Jacques. A Escritura e a Diferença. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1995. P. 149-178.), in his text The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation, deepens such a problematic when he paints Artaud as the “great diagnostician” of decadence in Western theatre. It would be fair to say that Artaud, in his book The Theatre and its Double (1936), reverses the metaphor of the Theatrum Mundi, since he does not see theatre as a metaphor of reality, but rather the opposite: modern theatre-making was affected and responds to, and therefore duplicates, the modern worldview. Theatre can be seen as the microcosm of the metaphysical hierarchy of the world (the macrocosm). The modern stage is theological, hierarchical and text-oriented (which is to say, logocentric) and as such - as in a hall of mirrors - it has become a double of the real itself.

The double of the double, even farther from the real and the truth. Pure phantasmagoria from an unfinished judgment of God - the “Platonic dream comes true”. And so, we get to the heart of this article: modern theatre, just like all the other constructions of modernity, is in a crisis because it is, essentially, metaphysical: another “ghostly” double of the real. But we live in times of nihilism: as in Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett (1953), theatre is waiting for someone who is not there - and never will be. Or as Shakespeare, always contemporary, had advocated in scene V, act V, of Macbeth

The question we must ask here is why does life end up meaning nothing in modernity? Why would the history of metaphysics necessarily lead to nihilism, when life has no value in itself?

The 20th Century witnessed the rise of scientific thought as instrumental reason, the massive growth of cities, the advent of the masses and two world wars. Metaphysics, in the Heideggerian perspective, is the great framework of Western philosophy, which although in ruins and in crisis, remains somehow determined by Western worldview. This period of crisis can be best understood through Nietzsche’s genealogical diagnosis, from both his fundamental critique of rationalism and his assumption of nihilism. Nihilism is, according to his analysis, an epochal feature of modern times characterized by an enormous loss of meaning and purpose - the heavy loss of all greater meaning. The ‘death of God’ advocated in Nietzschean thought would be, for Heidegger (1978), a collective experience of the 20th Century.

The crisis of metaphysics as nihilism is a crisis perceived and thematized incessantly throughout the twentieth century, by authors such as Husserl and his heirs, by the already mentioned Heidegger and Derrida, and also by many others, such as Foucault, Badiou and Gumbrecht - and although these authors may have provided different diagnoses (and prognoses) of the contemporary age, they have in common the attempt to understand and think beyond crisis. This is also stated, in the terms previously discussed here, as the Crisis of Representation: a crisis in which the nexus between “the words” (the representation) and “the things” (the represented) seems to have been lost: “This is not a pipe”, Foucault would say echoing Magritte (1976)⁶ 6 The Crisis of Representation is the crisis of modern epistemology as well, manifesting itself in various fields: from metaphysics to aesthetics – as well as politics. We live in the age of Nihilism, i.e.: an indigent and spectacular time when simulacrum seems to have replaced real even through “fake news”, which I cannot help but mention it, although it will not be discussed it in this paper. Nonetheless, it is curious to note that modernity, in the age of technique, has tensioned fiction and reality in such an extreme way that, at the maximum height of its crisis – which, rather than being called postmodern, should be regarded as 'hypermodern': the exaggeration and maximization of (the now empty) categories that we have yet not fully surpassed –, fiction reached its maximum power, given that representation no longer “needs” to correspond to anything real. The great metaphysical guarantor was not the only thing that disappeared. The baby seems to have been thrown away with the bath water, one could say. So, if this age of technique is the age of indigence, is it also the age in which we would have lost the final link between representation and the thing being represented? How to get out of such Aporia? .

However, when speaking of the crisis of representation and its possible overcoming, Gumbrecht (2003GUMBRECHT, Hans-Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford university press, 2003., p. 46-47) emphasizes that

Therefore, the problem of truth for Heidegger (1997HEIDEGGER, Martin. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. In: HEIDEGGER, Martin. Wegmarken, GA 9. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997.) and his heirs will no longer be the need to transpose the metaphysical gap between subject and object, but rather the emptying of this gap, given that human self-referentiality also points to “life itself, in the extent to which life in unrepresentable” (Derrida, 1978DERRIDA, Jacques. Writing and difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978., p. 234) - i.e. the unrepresentable as a necessary and constitutive dimension: a revisited Greek alètheia⁷ 7 Stuart Grant takes Heidegger’s appropriation of Greek alètheia as “a revealing example”: “Heidegger’s characteristic phenomenological gesture” can be reduced “to a performative attitude. […] It is clear that even in these earliest writings and teachings, Heidegger, in his redefinition of the Greeks, was attempting to solve the problem of the ontological difference through a turn to the as yet unrealised concept of the performative” (Grant, 2019, p. 77). , as I shall discuss next.

The body as Event: the unrepresentable as a constitutive dimension

Gumbrecht also states that

Indeed, Antonin Artaud was one of the most iconic figures in the early 20th Century artistic scenario, signatory of the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924) and its greatest enthusiast in theatre - despite being expelled from Breton’s official movement. His ideas would be both highly fruitful for, and radically transform western theatre-making in the second half of the twentieth century. (Artaud; Sontag, 1998ARTAUD, Antonin; SONTAG, Susan (Org). Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. Berkley: University of California Press, 1988. ) Artaud wanted to deconstruct the traditional categories and hierarchies of theatre, which he considered emptied of meaning. He wanted to break, for example, with the separation between audience / stage, to remove the audience from its comfortable place of passive spectatorship in favour of a new theatre, which he called the Theatre of Cruelty. In the Theatre of Cruelty, more than text or words, it is the scream, the unarticulated voice, the breath and the gesture or, in other words, the body as the primordial origin of the theatrical act which sets up the scenic space: the body as the poetic event which inhabits it, an epiphany of the body. Artaud prioritizes, in simple terms, the gesture and the voice in their physical intensity, enabling the human body to produce what he calls “hieroglyphics” - material embodied figures whose meaning can never be exhausted and cannot even be trivialized through a unique interpretation.

But why would life, in its full extent, be unrepresentable, as Derrida (1978DERRIDA, Jacques. Writing and difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978.) had written about Artaud? This also raises a second question: is it possible to think of an art that might not be representation and, by extension, neither an imitation nor a shadow of something else? An art that does not represent⁸ 8 It is important to note that there is a Neo-Latin ambivalence (therefore, existing in Portuguese and which we cannot avoid) related to the use of the term representation, which finds its origin in the repraesentatio from medieval philosophy. This question has more peculiar nuances in German, since there is a differentiation between Vorstellung and Darstellung, concepts that can both be translated by representation in Portuguese depending on the context. Darstellung is generally related to theatrical making (and the concepts of aesthetics in general) as presentation, whereas Vorstellung, in turn, is more restricted to representation as mental or propositional representation, an idea as “representational truth”. Representation here is used, as in Portuguese, either as the theatrical representation or as the propositional representation – the one which stands in the basis of logical truth –, both altogether. but turns into presence? May this turn towards presence be a line of flight from nihilism and from the crisis of representation in this contemporary age of technique? This is the direction in which this new field of Performance Philosophy seems to venture. It brings new ways to think the body and its possibilities not only in tradition, as image and representation, but, above all, beyond all metaphysical or dichotomous determinations and towards the possibility of a body that is the very poetic event that pervades it: the epiphany of truth (as alètheia) through the body.

Thus, among the many characteristics of performance (art), the central role given to the performer’s body can be emphasized and considered as the founding and indispensable element of every performative act, capable of opening a space and establishing a relationship “between the artist and the spectators, the spectators and the artwork, the artwork and the artist” (Féral, 2015FÉRAL, Josette. Além dos limites: teoria e prática do teatro. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2015., p. 155). A performance comes to be due to the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators, the spatial and temporal relations that it establishes, the hermeneutic topos it shares, and the immediacy of presence. And as Tilottama Rajan puts it (1995RAJAN, Tilottama. L’anguage, Music and the Body: Nietzsche and deconstruction. In: RAJAN, Tilottama; CLARK, David. Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. P. 147-169. , p. 150), “the immediacy of presence is perhaps the immediacy of this rapture, an immediacy whose basis is phenomenological rather than metaphysical”⁹ 9 A remark here is necessary: immediacy of presence refers to the possibility of understanding in the Heideggerian sense of Befindlichkeit (sometimes translated as state-of-mind, or disposedness or even affectivity) and of Verstehen (understanding): an immersive experience of the world, pre-theoretical (and as so, pre-predicative) – the understanding, “in a grasp”, of the horizon of a shared referential world, a network for intelligibility that he calls a totality of involvements, as an affective atmosphere (Stimmung) that resonates among those who share them. We feel the world before we interpret it, and we live in the twilight of its ambience. In this sense, to think of the immediacy of presence as a rapture distances itself from the modern, dichotomous metaphysical worldview: we are in the world, we feel the world, and we are as we feel, without separation or possibility other than being this openness that perpass us. Heideggerian philosophy works here as a starting point for us to think of a possibility of truth that is not simply representation, but truth as pure appearance or poetic unveiling of being: alètheia. To think from what presents itself is to think necessarily from this non-metaphysical horizon, what also allows us to reclaim the meaning of words corroded alongside western tradition, such as rapture, body, presence – words which now point out no longer into some empty transcendence but into pure immanence (Heidegger, 1977; 1984; 1995). .

It raises the question of how not to connect the immediacy of presence, as epiphany of the body, with the very idea of a performative event? As Féral says,

Performance is the coming to be of truth as embodiment, in its very abyssal and contradictory aspects, as a hieroglyph that cannot be reduced to a single representation. To think of a hermeneutics of presence appears, therefore, as a future possibility: the body, matrix of meanings, becomes art - a place of passage, of tensions, of possible epiphanies of sense and meaning; capable of pointing to the unrepresentable and, instead of erasing it or denying it, embracing it in a fight (Urstreit) that is also a rapture. A poetic production indeed, but akin to Heideggerian poiesis: the production of meanings, as something open to understanding and interpretation, in a hermeneutic sense (Heidegger, 1977HEIDEGGER, Martin. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. In: HEIDEGGER, Martin. Holzwege, GA 05. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1977.).

Some (inconclusive) considerations

Taking a step back in this discussion, we should note that Performance is taken here as an extremely enlarged concept, strongly marked by the broad-spectrum definition given by Richard Schechner (2002SCHECHNER, Richard. Performance Studies, an introduction. London: Routledge , 2002.). That is:

As Street, Alliot and Pauker (2017STREET, Anna; ALLIOT, Julien; PAUKER, Magnolia (Org.). Inter Views in Performance Philosophy: Crossings and Conversations. Performance Philosophy Books series. London: Palgrave Macmillan , 2017., p.11) have recently remarked, the very “emergence of Performance Philosophy is itself enabled by the development of performance paradigms and their applications”.

In this brief text, I sought to present the crisis of modernity as the crisis of a fiction / representation of the world and its attempt to overcome it within a broad hermeneutic-phenomenological paradigm that retakes art beyond aesthetics. This paradigm has been strengthened throughout the 20th Century and it is present in the work of various artists and performers - with this essay having chosen to highlight the seminal character of Artaud.

When thinking about the emergence of a new paradigm, old modern dichotomies - between thought and body, language and action, word and gesture, art and reality - lose all purpose. Thus, the epistemological field of the Performing Arts, and the Arts and Humanities in general, might - or indeed need to be radically questioned, in order for such (pre-) conceptions of metaphysical origin to be completely overcome and set aside. John Sallis, in an article entitled Mimesis and the End of Art (1995SALLIS, John. Mimesis and the End of Art. In: RAJAN, Tilottama; CLARK, David. Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory . Albany : State University of New York Press, 1995. P. 147-169. , p. 77), is categorical in concluding that without constantly re-invoking the need and the “demand for presence,” one cannot overcome the old “Socratic warnings about the deceptive and corruptive power of the phantoms produced by art”.

Therefore, a future task should be to delimit the theoretical framework concerning this change of perspective on the body (and art) in the philosophical tradition, while also locating it within the great change that occurred in art theory in the 20th Century: the end of the (modern) conception of art based on the material character of the artwork and on a historical, linear evolution of artistic styles. This perspective has been exhausted while at the same time pointing towards new ways of making and experiencing art, as this paper has sought to discuss. Arthur Danto for instance, in his well-known work After the end of art (2006DANTO, Arthur C. Após o Fim da Arte: A Arte Contemporânea e os Limites da História. São Paulo: Odysseus, 2006.), states that the question ‘what is art? / is this art?’ has lost its meaning today, and that we should actually ask: ‘when is art?’, or in other words: ‘under what conditions does art come to be’? This discussion echoes and amplifies, albeit without being mention by Danto, The Origin of the Work of Art (1977), a Heideggerian text of 1936, which had long before displaced the question concerning the thingly character of the artwork in favour of the characterisation of art as an event (Ereignis) - i.e., as the possibility of reconfiguration and enlargement of the opening of Being that does not allow it to be sedimented in a single meaning, but remains as an open, a hermeneutic possibility tensioned between what can be represented and the unrepresentable - an abyssal and indomitable trait fleeing from any attempt at (final) representation. If the body is a hieroglyph (as Artaud said), then art is a symbol (as Heidegger reminds us). And the immediacy of its presence, like a rapture, can never be exhausted in any given representational meaning. It is in this freer sense that I use the expression, hermeneutic of presence¹⁰ 10 And with that we also move away from Gumbrecht (2004) and re-approach Heidegger’s late writings (1977; 1994). .

However, we must move slowly if we want to make sense of a statement such as a ‘major paradigm shift’, regarding a turn towards performance and the body as presence - as previously stated. We need to pause a little longer to understand what this really refers to. In other words, I defend here that what appeared to be just a philosophical turn within Performance studies (which would thus have grown into a new field, thanks to the emergence of a myriad of new publications on the subject), also happened, above all, through a radical shift toward the performer’s bodily presence; to the extent that to think of Performance as a paradigm also replaces the mise-en-scène of representation as a metaphor. Theatre ceases to be the mirror of reality and the world also ceases to be a metaphysical reflection of another order of reality. This is the central point discussed in this article and as such, it points to a paradigmatic shift that seems to us, in fact, radical.

And on the other hand, if there seems to be a philosophical turn in performance studies, then a performative turn also happens in philosophy and in the humanities in general, since the genesis of Husserlian phenomenology and the last phase of Heidegger’s thought (1994HEIDEGGER, Martin. Beiträge zur Philosophie: vom Ereignis, GA 65. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994. ), which points to the Event (Ereignis) as the source of any possibility of understanding and interpretation of the world, or rather of philosophy itself (Grant, 2019GRANT, Stuart. The Unnamed Origin of the Performative in Heidegger’s Interpretation of Aristotelian Phronēsis. In: GRANT, Stuart; McNEILLY-RENAUDIE, Jodie; WAGNER, Matthew (Org.). Performance Phenomenology: To the Thing Itself. Performance Philosophy Books series. London: Palgrave Macmillan , 2019. P. 63-83.). Pushing further, we thus have the terms Performance and Philosophy establishing a zone of friction in which each term needs to be paradigmatically repositioned, even if not definitively. I cannot avoid mentioning that there are some risks involved, as Laura Cull (2012CULL, Laura. Performance as Philosophy: Responding to the Problem of ‘Application’. Journal of Theatre Research International, Cambridge, International Federation for Theatre Research, v. 37, n. 1, p. 20-27, 2012., p. 25) points out:

Undoubtedly, addressing the possible intersections between Philosophy and Performance is to move beyond the narrow definitions of each of these terms, into a whole new interdisciplinary field which has been gaining strength through the writings of forerunners such as Friedrich Nietzsche (who thought of the body as the place of the philosophical event) or Antonin Artaud (who, by suggesting that there were thoughts that cannot be expressed through words, presented us with the ‘still radical’ idea that there is a kind of ‘physical’ language capable of being expressed not only through words, but through gesture and body intensity. And, more recently, the writings of authors such as Deleuze (and his views on the Theatre of Philosophy), as well as Alain Badiou, who argues for the independence of art as thought and language, or even as a non-philosophy, as François Laruelle proposes, might help us to think beyond the limits established by tradition for each of these terms (Cull Ó Maoilearca, 2017CULL Ó MAOILEARCA, Laura. Equalizing Theatre and Philosophy: Laruelle, Badiou, and Gestures of Authority in the Philosophy of Theatre. Journal of performance Philosophy, v. 3, n. 3, p. 730-750, 2017.). The road ahead, however, remains long.

Finally, I have the perception that the field of performance - and of a Performance Philosophy - from the point of view of a hermeneutics of presence, is enriched by a plurality of influences, stimuli and challenges, which are far from being exhausted. Artaud’s position, even in the early decades of the 20th Century, sought to construct a scene whose poetics did not depend on words, and Nietzsche’s signalling that modern categories, such as reason and the emphasis on discourse, as well as the subject, went into crisis, shows a tendency - a turn in the tide - that will prove dominant throughout most of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, a turn towards embodiment, towards the body as presence. This perception will still be echoed by many other artists and thinkers. This is just the tip of the iceberg. If the performative turn towards presence as rapture or an epiphany of the body (and, consequently, also as the emergence of a new hermeneutic paradigm capable of moving beyond all the old, corroded metaphysical dichotomies and its hall of mirrors) is, indeed, capable of overcoming Nihilism - as a crisis of representation or as crisis of the modern episteme - only time will tell.

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