Encounters in Performance Philosophy Edited by Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay Performance Philosophy Performance Philosophy is an emerging interdisciplinary field of thought, creative practice and scholarship. The Performance Philosophy book series comprises monographs and essay collections addressing the relationship between performance and philosophy within a broad range of philosophical traditions and performance practices, including drama, theatre, performance arts, dance, art and music. The series also includes studies of the performative aspects of life and, indeed, philosophy itself. As such, the series addresses the philosophy of performance as well as performance-as-philosophy and philosophy-as-performance. Editorial Advisory Board: Emmanuel Alloa (University of St. Gallen, Switzerland), Lydia Goehr (Columbia University, USA), James R. Hamilton (Kansas State University, USA), Bojana Kunst (Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany), Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany), Martin Puchner (Harvard University, USA), Alan Read (King’s College London, UK) Titles include: Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay (editors) ENCOUNTERS IN PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY (2014) Broderick Chow and Alex Mangold (editors) ŽIŽEK AND PERFORMANCE (2014) Will Daddario and Karoline Gritzner (editors) ADORNO AND PERFORMANCE (2014) Forthcoming titles: Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly and Maeva Veerapen (editors) PERFORMANCE AND TEMPORALISATION (2014) 10.1057/9781137462725 - Encounters in Performance Philosophy, Edited by Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to npg - PalgraveConnect - 2015-08-15 Series Editors: Laura Cull (University of Surrey, UK), Alice Lagaay (Universität Bremen, Germany) Freddie Rokem (Tel Aviv University, Israel) Bojana Cvejić CHOREOGRAPHING PROBLEMS (2015) Published in association with the research network Performance Philosophy www.performancephilosophy.ning.com Performance Philosophy Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–137–40739–9 978–1–137–40740–5 (paperback) (outside North America only) (hardback) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England 10.1057/9781137462725 - Encounters in Performance Philosophy, Edited by Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to npg - PalgraveConnect - 2015-08-15 Mischa Twitchin THE THEATRE OF DEATH: THE UNCANNY IN MIMESIS (2015) Contents List of Figures vii Series Preface viii Part I Beginnings Introduction Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay 3 Part II What Is Performance Philosophy? 1 Performance Philosophy – Staging a New Field Laura Cull 15 2 Performing the Impossible in Philosophy Alice Lagaay in conversation with Alice Koubová 39 Part III On the Stage 3 4 The Problem of the Ground: Martin Heidegger and Site-Specific Performance Martin Puchner The Face and the Profile Denis Guénoun 65 87 Part IV On the Actor 5 ‘Bodies of Knowledge’: Conceptualizing the Art of Acting Freddie Rokem 6 The Most Mimetic Animal: An Attempt to Deconstruct the Actor’s Body Esa Kirkkopelto 105 121 Part V On the Body in/of Performance Philosophy 7 8 The Theatre of the Virtual: How to Stage Potentialities with Merleau-Ponty Emmanuel Alloa 147 Staging Philosophy: Toward a Performance of Immanent Expression Arno Böhler 171 v 10.1057/9781137462725 - Encounters in Performance Philosophy, Edited by Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to npg - PalgraveConnect - 2015-08-15 xi Notes on Contributors vi 9 Contents The Gymnastics of Thought: Elsa Gindler’s Networks of Knowledge Katja Rothe 197 10 Connecting Performance and Performativity: Does It Work? Sybille Krämer 223 11 Downscaling Lamentation: On Trope and Fratricide Nimrod Reitman 238 Part VII On Tragedy 12 Thinking about Philosophy and Drama Today: Three Proposals Paul A. Kottman 13 After Tragedy Jean-Luc Nancy 261 278 Part VIII Endings 14 The Last Human Venue: Closing Time Alan Read 293 Index 309 10.1057/9781137462725 - Encounters in Performance Philosophy, Edited by Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to npg - PalgraveConnect - 2015-08-15 Part VI On Performativity and Language Proof 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 7 The Theatre of the Virtual: How to Stage Potentialities with Merleau-Ponty Emmanuel Alloa Merleau-Ponty: the primacy of performance? Richard Schechner, the founder of the 1960s New York avant-garde Performance Group, considered that the performer need only bear one thing in mind if he wanted to overcome the theatrical (i.e. instrumental, representational) mode in which performance had been entangled for so long. This sole thing was: ‘Your body is not your “instrument,” your body is you.’1 Schechner’s proclamation is striking, as it makes clear that thinking about performativity unavoidably means thinking about embodiment. Unlike an instrument, the performer’s body cannot be separated from him or laid aside after the performance. The performer is that living body through which he performs and, as such, the performer cannot face his own body; he cannot act upon it as he would upon an object. Any act will inevitably have to go through the body. Schechner’s argument seems to imply that any performance is thus determined by the bodily disposition of its performer. The performer exemplifies what the performance is about by means of his or her present body rather than by portraying a character and thus simply denoting it, as was characteristic of representational theatre. What is performed does not preexist the act and consequently cannot be re-presented, but is brought about in an expressive, corporeal gesture. Such a conception of embodied performance has often been allied to a phenomenological account of the expressive body, namely to the one sketched by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception,2 thereby turning him into a theoretical key for the performing arts today.3 Already in the 1960s, practitioners such as Lygia Clark or Hélio Oiticica overtly understood their body art with reference to 147 Proof 148 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Emmanuel Alloa Merleau-Ponty.4 His work had just been made available in translation at this time and performance artists like Vito Acconci or Laurie Anderson also studied him intensively,5 while in a broader sense, an entire generation of body artists such as Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneeman or Ana Mendieta has been associated with a Merleau-Pontyan gesture.6 Choreographers and dance theorists have equally insisted on the importance of The Phenomenology of Perception for an understanding of their object.7 However, this infatuation with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is surprising in that he hardly wrote about performing arts at all. Notably the emerging contemporary dance scene does not get a single mention, which confirms Maxine Sheets-Johnstone observation: ‘Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic judgment of dance is surprisingly ill-informed and appears utterly lacking an experiential base.’8 This fact is even more significant as other arts are a constant interlocutor,9 first and foremost painting in the elaboration of his late ontology of the visible. Likewise his phenomenology could not exist without its constant reference to literature, from Proust to Claude Simon. Even cinema became the topic of a specific lecture.10 Theatre is only dealt with rather marginally, as I shall discuss later on. And yet, it seems that the arts of the stage exemplify like no other what embodied expression could stand for. However, a number of questions arise when transforming a thinking that follows the ‘primacy of perception’ into a thinking of the ‘primacy of performance’. I would like to briefly summarize two objections raised by Judith Butler and Richard Shusterman. While later using some elements of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in the elaboration of her own theory of performativity, in an early essay Judith Butler criticized the Phenomenology of Perception for still building on residues of naturalism.11 Despite his rejection of naturalist psychology, Merleau-Ponty, she argues, displays a certain ‘anthropological naïveté’, which ultimately leads him to posit something like a ‘natural state’. The attempt however to describe the universal structures of bodily experience reveals the impossibility of that project, as repeatedly, it turns out that what is supposedly natural is actually the result of a cultural codification. Butler favours a discourse of construction as the only possible way of avoiding a pre-existing or naturally given instance of the self rather than talking, as phenomenology does, about the constitution of a gesture, a meaning or an identity through an embodied act. What is achieved through an active performative construction is indeterminate and yet, on the backdrop of a fundamental indeterminacy, there is agency that crystallizes this indeterminacy and renders Proof Theatre of the Virtual 149 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 ‘such possibilities determinate’.12 As a result, Butler’s ‘body’ is not so much a performing body as a continuously (socially and discursively) performed body, unlike that of Merleau-Ponty. Or, stated otherwise, while, in Butler’s view, Merleau-Ponty leaves the embodied subjectivity too undetermined by not taking the external social and discursive framings into account, he overdetermines it in another, physiological sense. By insisting on the insurmountable body schema and the physiological structures of behaviour, he leaves too little a space, says Butler, for travesty, self-fashioning and transformation.13 In a similar manner, Richard Shusterman has engaged with MerleauPonty’s phenomenology of embodiment. He criticizes what he considers a model not sufficiently open to transformations, although for other reasons than Judith Butler.14 While widely accepting Merleau-Ponty’s account of somatic experience, Shusterman considers it to be narrowly restricted to a description of the body such as it actually is, without exploring its potential improvements. In the perspective of Shusterman’s ‘somaesthetics’, a performing body is a body aware of the potential of its own enhancements, whereas the problem with Merleau-Ponty is his ‘commitment to a fixed, universal phenomenological ontology based on primordial perception.’15 Husserl’s epistemocentric ego would then only apparently be left behind with the kinaesthetic embodied self of Merleau-Ponty, since no pragmatic transformation is envisioned; no doing better but only a knowing better about the body and its functions. One could adapt Marx’s dictum to Shusterman’s meliorist body pragmatics here: Philosophy has only interpreted the body in various ways – the point is to actually change it. Although from very different standpoints, both Butler and Shusterman thus criticize Merleau-Ponty for assuming fixed, actual determinations of the body, leaving no space for potential transformations. For Butler, it is the belief that there are general structures of bodily existence that lead to Merleau-Ponty’s fixist position. For Shusterman, Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of conscious awareness of the body as a means of improving its actions and for realizing its latent abilities precludes him from accessing a practical somaesthetics, i.e. practical methods for actors, musicians, sportsmen or just any individual to improve their somatic awareness and thus their somatic functioning.16 However, the claim that a reflective consciousness of bodily functions improves their efficiency is debatable: outside of learning situations, it seems most somatic practices work all the better if they are habitualized and go unnoticed. Shaun Gallagher cites the case of a patient who has lost proprioception from the neck down and needs to consciously monitor (through visual Proof 150 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Emmanuel Alloa control) every single gesture. As a result, movements such as walking appear robotic and require more time as the ‘silent’ spontaneous synthesis of movement Merleau-Ponty talks about is not feasible.17 My focus here will not be to discuss Merleau-Ponty’s and Shusterman’s divergent notions of operativity, which I have done elsewhere,18 as much as to question the notion of transformation that tends to be narrowed down to an actual physical practice in Shusterman’s somaesthetics. The opposition Shusterman makes between the purely implicit self-organization of latent somatic processes and the actual and explicit improvement of the gesture through practising seem to run roughshod over an essential dimension of somaticity, that of the ‘virtual body’. Located between the description of how things are at present and the prescription of how things should become, virtual space is a space for exploration which does not necessarily require actualization. As I propose to show, there is a reflection in Merleau-Ponty on this third, virtual body, which has so far received scant attention. Like Gilles Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty intensively read Bergson and his problematization of the question of ontological ‘possibility’ which I will go on to introduce in the subsequent section. Although not as thoroughly elaborated as Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty has enthralling arguments to contribute to a non-deterministic notion of possibility or, rather, of virtuality. I shall make clear that this notion has distinct effects upon how to consider the embodied performance of the actor. The chapter will end with a brief ‘speculative postil’ about the potential political implications of such a conception of the stage. The possible and the virtual What is ‘virtuality’? What is the virtual? This term, used so widely today, finds its roots in Medieval Scholasticism, where it is still essentially coextensive with the notion of possibility. That which possesses virtus, possibilitas, or potentialitas is, literally, that which can be. Only what is capable of coming into existence will eventually come into existence. This amounts to claiming an ontological precedence of essence over existence: whether something effectively is (what in Latin is called an sit) has no influence on the essence of it (on its quid sit). In its purely potential state, the essence is already entirely present in the thing and its realization no more than consolidates what was already contained within it, to such an extent that the existence should be held to be ‘accidental’ in relation to the essence of the thing.19 In other words, the concept of being can do without the existential determination. In the words of A.G. Baumgarten, existence is merely the ‘complement of the essence’ Proof Theatre of the Virtual 151 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 (existentia est […] complementum essentiae).20 This intuition is radicalized even further by Kant, when he demonstrates that existence cannot be considered a predicate: it adds nothing to the haecceitas, to the ‘thisness’ of the thing. From the standpoint of their essence, 100 real Florins are hardly more than 100 possible Florins,21 as common sense will learn to its detriment. By positing existence as radically exterior to essence, the task remains of justifying why it is that some beings become real and others do not. Such logics of causality require one to posit that what eventually happened must have at least been possible before, although it might not have been anticipated. Following Bergson, we may speak of a ‘retrograde movement of truth’ that projects into the past that which, at the very same moment, reveals itself to have been the condition of its own realization: ‘as reality is created as something unforeseeable and new, its image is reflected into the indefinite past.’22 In such time sub specie aeternitatis, the real is always already ‘ideally pre-existing’ – a form of existence that amounts to a purely thinkable or logically representable existence which does not yet possess any effectivity. The possible is thus reduced to a non-impossibility. But how can one account for the sudden occurrence of realization which irrupts into the heart of a purely logical order? Following Bergson, Merleau-Ponty criticized the subordination of the possible to a mere ‘logical possibility’.23 The bifurcation of essence and occurrence, which is the natural result of the hypostasizing of Nothingness, opens the door to a possibilism, in which numerous possible worlds co-exist: whatever is incompossible in one and the same world gets distributed among numerous possible worlds, the series of which is, in principle, infinite. In this way, extended to cosmology, even Leibnizian thought remains under the rule of the principle of logical noncontradiction. Against such a possibilist position is opposed, at first sight, thought that conceives of no concept of the possible outside the strict framework of its realization, after the example of the Megaric philosophers for whom there is no potency that is not coextensive with an act.24 Thinking ‘the possible on the basis of the real’, as Merleau-Ponty advocates along with Bergson, would mean breaking with the philosophical attitude that seeks, from some independent standpoint, in some ‘other world’, the reasons for this one. And yet, while this ‘actualism’ may place thought back into the reality of experience, it nevertheless remains derivative of what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘necessitarian ideology’: the possible must necessarily realize itself, insofar as a possibility that never realizes itself loses its status as possible and is quite simply transformed into an impossibility. In such a vision, the possible and the Proof 152 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Emmanuel Alloa real come to converge in the image of an over-determined world without lacunae. While possibilism is uninterested in concrete realization, actualism excludes any becoming. Both possibilism and actualism fall victim to an ‘ideology of the intrinsic’ incapable of conceiving contingent becoming except as ‘irrational, as opacity, as residue.’25 To summarize, both the possibilist and the actualist world are worlds that, in abolishing contingency, also evict all otherness, if we define the contingent as that which could also have been otherwise. Addressing either a possible world or a world of pure act: insofar as they both already entail (ideally or empirically) constituted objects, it is no longer ‘in progress’. To no longer think on the basis of identity, but rather on the basis of becomings differentiating themselves, means on the contrary – as Bergson advocates – simultaneously to rethink latency and movement, reserve and tension. The challenge here now is to re-articulate the possible and the real according to a different dynamic of forces; not so much a matter of abandoning thinking about potentiality as of having done with a purely logical determination of these. Having learnt the Bergsonian lesson, Merleau-Ponty refuses any notion of possibility that would take ‘the real’ as its antonym and looks rather to develop ‘a new notion of the possible’,26 one which, ‘against actualism and possibilism’, would already entirely be the ‘ingredient of being’,27 thus relating it to Aristotelian dynamis or to virtus understood as force. In placing oneself from the outset in the territory of the real, hollowed and pleated into actualities and virtualities, numerous problems following from the opposition between the possible and the real are revealed to be, in the Bergsonian sense, false problems: as opposed to the position of the demiurgic God, the position of praxis prevents, by the very nature of its incompressible perspectivity and partiality, a representation of all possibilities. Merleau-Ponty illustrates his point with the example of a short film showing in slow motion how Matisse proceeds with the realization of a painting. The painter was himself overwhelmed by this capacity to apprehend how the work was constituted, stroke by stroke, from an empty canvas. Still, as striking as it may be, such a documentation still falls prey to a retrospectivist illusion, positing an initial nothingness and the pictorial gesture as supervening upon it afterwards, reduced to a mere selection of possibles: In his mind’s eye, Matisse did not have all the possible gestures, he did not have to eliminate all but one of them, in order to make his choice rational. The camera and the slow motion make all the possibilities explicit. Matisse, settled in man’s time and vision, looked at Proof Theatre of the Virtual 153 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 the actual and virtual ensemble of his canvas and moved his hand toward the area which called for his brush so that the painting could be what it became in the end. He solved with a simple gesture the problem which, on analysis and reflection, seemed to contain an infinite number of givens.28 Being wrapped into bodily becoming means overcoming from the start the idea according to which potency is integrally reabsorbed into the movement of actualization, but also understanding on the contrary the incompleteness that Aristotle assigned in principle to all being-inmovement. It may thus be stated with confidence that Merleau-Ponty’s thought is placed entirely under the auspices of a kinesis of this sort, that transcends local movement – which is itself still beholden to the idea of completion: ‘movement is not above all a change of place, but the internal formulation of a doing, the internal breaching of a body towards that which it departs from and towards that which it approaches.’29 Such nonpositionality, or even better, such eccentricity of sensible being, is already associated with a reflection on the virtuality of bodies as early as The Structure of Behaviour (1942/93), and especially in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945/62).30 The virtuality of the body To have a body – The Structure of Behaviour already insists on this point – is to be traversed with virtualities. The fact that objects are visible in actuality – and therefore that I am able to see them – presupposes that I contemplate them from a certain point of view which is not itself outside the visible realm. I can only grasp them virtually, just as I can never have anything more than a virtual or mediated representation of my back.31 If another viewer can have an actual grasp of my own blind spot, my own actual vision will be simply virtual for that viewer. Merleau-Ponty seems to adopt Bergon’s distinction when, faced with the Sartrean opposition between the real and the imaginary, he instantiates the virtual as a strategic concept, making it possible to overcome what turns out to be a bad reformulation of the conceptual couple of the possible and the real.32 In order to establish that the imaginary is not outside the real, but already inhabits its inactual folds, MerleauPonty refers specifically to Wertheimer’s experiment. In the experimental situation, the psychologist places the subject in a room whose contents the person can only see by means of a mirror inclined at a 45° angle.33 Wertheimer notices that after a few seconds of disorientation, Proof 154 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Emmanuel Alloa proprioception as the foundation of space is abandoned in favour of an orientation founded in the virtual specular image. After a few moments, it is as if the referential system had displaced itself, allowing perception to regain its verticality. What is happening here under laboratory conditions is nothing more than the inversion of retinal images carried out by the newborn in its spontaneous ontogenesis. The lived body is thus redoubled by a virtual body which – and this is the main point – does not just add itself as a supplement to the lived body, but places itself even before the lived body, like a primordial body defined by its tending towards a ‘task’.34 The embodied condition implies that man is no longer in-the-world in the Heideggerian sense of In-der-Welt, but rather that the être-au-monde, as the French translation goes, has to be read in terms of ‘being-towardthe-world’ in the sense that any posture is polarized and oriented towards the world, and as a result the subject is always exceeding its own proper place. In a certain way, it is not so much the physical body that projects a virtual body out before itself as an anticipation of its future actions; it is rather the ‘virtual body’ that ‘displaces the real body to such an extent that the subject no longer has the feeling of being in the world where he actually is.’35 Thus is it necessary to define the body as a somatic virtus, as an operating force always exceeding its concrete actualizations. Numerous analogous cases are also analysed in the Cours de psychologie et de pédagogie at the Sorbonne, notably concerning phantom limbs, children’s drawings, and even cybernetics. Merleau-Ponty even goes so far as to extract an anthropological thesis on the notion of the virtual: the ability to point with one’s finger to a projection in space presupposes ‘already inhabiting the virtual.’36 This is an ability that is inaccessible to most animals and to people suffering from apraxia. Virtual space is a ‘centrifugal or cultural space’.37 Here, the idea of the virtual leads to the beginnings of a theory of intersubjectivity: the gesture of pointing out simultaneously marks both the place from which the pointing is done (its hic et nunc) and an elsewhere as its correlate. According to the notes from the lectures on Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, the gesture constructs a ‘“virtual network,” a system of correspondences between the properties of my actual field and what would be the properties for me as another, elsewhere, or for another. To point out [montrer] is already to presuppose this virtual or cultural space.’38 Each one of these cases – and the latter thesis in particular – deserve more in-depth analysis than can be carried out here. The notion of the virtual cannot however become autonomous so long as it remains Proof Theatre of the Virtual 155 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 imprisoned in the straitjacket of a philosophy of subjectivity which still favours the Phenomenology of Perception. Within Merleau-Ponty’s early texts, the virtual body remains beholden to a projective teleology: the body, even when delivered from the res extensa, remains the instrument of a ‘possession of the world’, and the ‘possession of the world by the body’39 remains unilateral. While the Leib can no longer be defined by simple possession [propriété], its effectivity remains oriented by an I can and the notion of the virtual that of a ‘system of possible actions’.40 The Husserlian displacement of the Cartesian I think moves towards an embodied I can (Ich kann), but it never questions the priority of an ego that possesses all its resources within itself. The question thus remains open as to the degree to which Merleau-Pontian philosophy truly reaches a notion of the virtual that is still implicitly actualist or possibilist. How to reconcile the tension towards the act without its actualization becoming a task to be fulfilled, already established ahead of time? Merleau-Ponty entrusted Gilles Deleuze with the essay on Bergson in his collection Les philosophes célèbres. Deleuze is unquestionably the philosopher who of anyone in the twentieth century best identified the aporiae of the virtual. It is also Deleuze who chose to refer to theatrical art in his attempt to approach the virtual which, as with Merleau-Ponty, would fade into the background before cinema and painting. Here I will briefly reconstitute what is at stake in this Deleuzian ‘dramatization’ in order then to ask in what sense a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology, from the point of view of a theatrical paradigm, makes it possible to uncover not only some interesting new ways of reading stage aesthetics, but also in what sense the act of the actor allows a new reformulation of the notion of embodiment. Gilles Deleuze: embodiment and counter-effectuation In How Do We Recognize Structuralism? Deleuze defines the actual as the result of an embodiment (‘What is actual is that in which structure is embodied or rather what the structure constitutes when it is embodied’41). Deleuze’s philosophical effort can be described as deflating both embodiment, described as basically unifying and identifying, and the possibilism which is its transcendent form, opposing them on the contrary to the forces of the virtual. The virtual, Deleuze says following Bergson, ‘is not opposed to the real, but to the actual’,42 and he relies also on Proust to add that virtual states are ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’.43 The virtual is always ready to be actualized; as a force that always already ‘orientates, conditions, engenders’,44 it Proof 156 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Emmanuel Alloa possesses a propensity to be productive of new solutions which were not given however in the conditions of the problem. This generative process can be termed ‘drama’, the inspiration for which is found in the organology of Raymond Ruyer. According to Ruyer, drama articulates the relation between a ‘role’ that depends on the theme that it plays and a ‘theme’ that exists only in the variations that instantiate it.45 Deleuze emphasizes the theatricality of these concepts when he describes life as virtuality that presents itself as if it were actual. ‘The world is an egg, but the egg itself is a theatre: a staged theatre in which the roles dominate the actors.’46 It is in analogous passages that we come to understand the real difficulty of the Deleuzian project of conferring some consistency on the virtual, an effort that left him dissatisfied though the end of his life.47 At any moment, the example that had seemed the most capable of leading to it – the theatre – seems at any moment to risk veering towards one of the two poles that are to be kept apart. For, while the role may have priority over the actor, and precedes its actualization in the body of the actor, this is because the role was written, and thus possible beforehand. The ‘method of dramatization’ is revealed properly to be (if this rather Derridean term is allowed here) the pharmakon of the virtual: if the virtual only acts like it is actual, without really being so, the virtual is safe, but one falls back into the most complete possibilism, and loses the efficiency of the virtus. How then are we to think about the mutual belonging of the virtual and the actual, of the actualization which belongs to the virtual,48 or of a virtuality that is the strict co-relation of the actual?49 If we accept that the virtual (as opposed to the metaphysical possible) tends to produce actualizations, we then have to counter this natural inclination towards effectuation – what Lucretius called the clinamen – with what Deleuze calls a ‘counter-effectuation’: ‘to be the mime of what effectively happens, to double the effectuation with a counter-effectuation, the identification of a distance, like a true actor or like a dancer.’50 Pushing back against this force that pushes towards identification, means amplifying another force, this drân at the basis of Greek drama, which will come to supplant the order of identification, which is itself at the basis of a reductive conception of actualization, replacing it with a principle of intensification.51 However, although the theatre seems to have served as a catalyst for thinking about the virtual, the theatre as an art eventually ceded its place to cinema. In his rare writings on theatre, Deleuze seems to have given up on seeing in the theatrical stage a possible scheme for the coherence of the virtual.52 And even though Merleau-Ponty is hardly Proof Theatre of the Virtual 157 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 more prolific on the subject, one can find a more precise description of what it means for an actor to embody a role, allowing finally for a rethinking of the notion of embodiment not only in light of a possible that is already over-determined in its essence, but on the basis of a fundamental separation from the given. Merleau-Ponty: reversivisibility In his lectures on the Psychologie et pédagogie de l’enfant, Merleau-Ponty turns to the notion of ‘drama’. What is called drama is the fact that the sense of the actor’s acting is never positively given, but is only given by contrast, and is only ever to be found ‘in the virtual centre of his gestures’.53 Although appearing to be marginal in the works of MerleauPonty, the theatre alone seems capable of stitching together the early writings with the late ontology of the visible. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty invokes the relation of the actor’s expressive body to that of the role expressed, relying on an episode from Proust, (without, however, giving the details).54 How disappointed is the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, when he sees ‘la Berma’, whom he had long anticipated in his dreams, on stage for the first time, in the role of Phèdre in Racine’s eponymous play. The experience goes awry, as the narrator has previously internalized the text in order to be all the more able to capture the singularity of la Berma’s acting, independently of the pre-text provided by Racine: ‘I listened to her as though I were reading Phèdre, or as though Phaedra herself had at that moment spoken the words that I was hearing, without its appearing that Berma’s talent had added anything to them.’55 One might speak, along with Merleau-Ponty, of a dissecting gaze, that would attempt to separate out from the pre-established sense its physical vessel whose task would then consist in nothing more than translating the former. When, much later, he returns to the theatre to see another production of Racine’s Phèdre, the narrator once again rests his gaze upon that which constitutes the stage as such and proceeds with a veritable meditation on what we might describe as the transcendental of the theatre. During his second visit, doubtlessly anticipating a second disappointment, this time the narrator turns his attention away from la Berma’s acting as well as from the play as such, and directs his gaze towards what is going on in the half-light of the theatre house. Here, the analytic of the actor’s acting that took place on first visit gives way to a contemplation of the situation of the spectators as condition of possibility of any theatrical Proof 158 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Emmanuel Alloa representation. However – and this is the decisive aspect – the audience, distributed among the parterre, the galleries, the boxes, is precisely incapable of being reduced to what Diderot liked to call the ‘fourth wall’, i.e. a purely logical and, therefore, invisible condition of the representation. Instead, Proust describes how the house is, in all its richness, as the condition of the stage, itself also a stage for an audience that is always already conditioned by the representation that it nevertheless itself institutes. The theatre house is not the reverse or invisible side of the stage, but rather a threshold where the potency of the acting is already foreshadowed, a pre-stage on which, despite the darkness, the spectators are inevitably already actors. Such is the Princess of Guermantes in her box, who ‘ceasing to be a nereid, appeared turbaned in white and blue like some marvellous tragic actress dressed for the part of Zaïre, or perhaps of Orosmane.’56 We might conclude from these few remarks that the theatre is always ahead of itself, having latently begun even before it explicitly becomes a theatrical representation. Its condition of possibility is its having always already begun, even though nothing is yet to be seen. ‘If I imagine a theatre with no audience in which the curtain rises upon illuminated scenery, I have the impression that the spectacle is in itself visible or ready to be seen, and that the light which probes the back and foreground, accentuating the shadows and permeating the scenes through and through, in a way anticipates our vision.’57 Merleau-Ponty dedicated important pages of the Phenomenology of Perception to the question of the transcendental without coming to a satisfactory conclusion. Here is to be found the theatrical pre-figuration of its solution, given in his last writings: the transcendental and that which it makes possible can only be rigorously described in terms of reversibility and reciprocal inversion. The visible and the invisible mark less the dividing line between the two metaphysical realms than an implicative rolling of the visible over into itself that we might call reversi/visibility. ‘My body as a visible thing’ Merleau-Ponty explains, ‘is contained within the full spectacle. But my seeing body subtends this visible body; and all the visibles with it. There is a reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other.’58 The sensible chiasm indicates an inextricable relatedness which cannot ultimately be stabilized and impedes finding an ultimate standpoint – be it physical or metaphysical – from which to organize the spectacle of the world. Coming back to Proust, an analogous discovery seems to be at work when the narrator of In Search of Lost Time turns his gaze once again towards the stage in order to reevaluate the expressiveness of la Berma’s Proof Theatre of the Virtual 159 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 acting. The expressive operation, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘brings the meaning into being and makes it effective, and does not merely translate it.’59 The theatrical role does not preexist what Merleau-Ponty calls, in Cézanne’s word, its ‘realization’; similarly music, where the musical phrase can in no way be dissociated from the physics of the sounds that carry it and in which it resides entirely. Not a single material aspect of the actor’s body, not a single change in her gait, not a grain in her voice: in a word, no physis can in principle be marginalized from what is taking place. Having abandoned his analytic gaze, Proust’s narrator suddenly hears ‘Berma’s voice, in which there subsisted not one scrap of inert matter refractory to the mind.’60 In his 1949–1951 Cours de psychologie et pédagogie, Merleau-Ponty develops an often overlooked meditation on theatrical expression. Just as he shall later on speak of the ‘enigma of visibility’ (énigme de la visibilité) regarding the appearance, on the painter’s canvas, of something that was not yet there and is yet nowhere else, Merleau-Ponty here evokes the ‘magic’ of the theatre.61 Distancing himself from Diderot’s paradox of the actor, which remains too dualistic, he notes the fact that never ‘is the role … given in advance’62 and that ‘any production of the sense of a play is always a recreation.’63 In this way Merleau-Ponty distances himself from the theatre of representation. For there is indeed an overlapping between the two orders of Phèdre and la Berma: it is almost impossible to see Phèdre without la Berma, as much as it is to see la Berma without Phèdre. We find ourselves further removed from Deleuze’s structuralist thesis of the priority of the role over the actor,64 but also from the Sartrean division between the real and the imaginary. No doubt, ‘the actor entrusts himself to his body’ (l’acteur se fie à son corps), as Merleau-Ponty says, echoing Paul Valéry who underscores that the painter engages his entire body in the pictorial act.65 But the body of the actor coincides with a real body to no less an extent than does the body of the painter, a real body that must, for the length of the performance, negate its actual historicity in order to become an imaginary body. The actor’s body is much rather a virtuality which, being always already real, possesses the ability to detach itself from the actual. Expression through acting means for Merleau-Ponty ‘to make the body play a certain role insofar as it is capable of allowing itself to be taken up by other roles it habitually plays.’66 One might be reminded of the beginnings of Greek theatre and of Thespis, considered to be the first tragic author/actor. According to tradition, Thespis experimented, in the second half of the sixth century Proof 160 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Emmanuel Alloa B.C., with different sorts of masks in order to maintain both the plasticity and the indeterminacy of the face.67 The mask – this persona that Boethius interpreted according to a popular etymology as a per-sonare, a resonating-through – consisted for Thespis in a fine layer of white lead applied to the face, transforming the actor into a receptacle of possible figures. The actuating body comes then to resemble a medium, in the sense that Aristotle attributed to this word, i.e. the ability to take on a form without losing the ability to take on other forms. That which becomes manifest in this virtual appearing is the simultaneity of compossibles in act, presenting themselves in their inextricable overlapping. By taking on an ontological sense, Wertheimer’s ‘overlapping’ points towards a new concept of potential being. Fundamentally, this is a being of dimensional depth: the actual and the inactual no longer allow themselves to be distinguished in principle but are permanently overlapping, rolling over and reversing themselves in a space that is defined by its inexhaustible depth. Potential being resonates with a notion of pregnance (prégnance) that is reciprocal enshrouding, co-implication and unfolding.68 As a result, the notions of incarnated existence and ‘flesh’ (la chair) are categorically transformed: far from being a mere irruption ex nihilo whose ‘mystery’ must then be explained, embodiment is not a unique and resounding event of incarnation, but rather remains among what Nietzsche’s Zarathustra called all those ‘silent events’. Taken in a theatrical perspective, the notion of ‘incarnation’ is freed of its soteriological rags and rather stands for an ongoing ‘embodiment’.69 The experience of the stage shows that, insofar as the human being appears for others, he is always elsewhere than in his own place. At the same time as he sees, he is always also virtually visible for others to whom he gives himself as a spectacle. To think the reversibility of the visible and the invisible is then to think the reversibility of vision in act and visibility in potency: the order of visibility is an order of specularity or, rather, of spectacularity. ‘This immense virtual audience that was waiting’ (speculative postil) Choosing the virtual and its stage as a starting point not only sheds a new light on often overlooked aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, it also opens up new theoretical horizons which still require thought. To begin with, the notion of the virtual body clearly complicates the clear-cut opposition Sartre would have liked to introduce into Proof Theatre of the Virtual 161 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 philosophy by categorically separating the real and the imaginary. To say that the imagination is ‘a world where nothing happens’ and which remains exempt from any ingredient of reality70 amounts to making a sanctuary of it and, by extension, denying it any efficacy. Anything goes in the imagination then, as long as whatever happens there has no effect on the outside. Jacques Rancière, who hinted at the consequences of making such a sanctuary of the imagination, remarks that in this way we could enjoy ourselves with novelistic or theatrical fiction ‘without trouble since they do not leave the frame of the fictional situation.’71 To concede on the contrary the virtual character of any stage, is to admit that its delimitation is not of a logical order, but rather a horizontal one, always implying its own lateral overflow, always biting at its own edges. Leaving behind the dialectic of presence and absence that still structures the distinction between the real and the imaginary for Sartre, Merleau-Ponty’s formulations attempt rather to circumscribe not so much an immanent being as an imminent being,72 always ready but never fully deployed, in brief: an ‘overlapping-being’. Associating the virtual and the overlapping opens up a reformulation of the political stage to which Merleau-Ponty was sensitive – as his circumstantial texts attest. While being above all a homage to Greek thought, the introductory text ‘The Founders’, contained in the collection Les philosophes célèbres, criticizes Greek political thought for having conceived the world in terms that were still too static. Politics was indeed instituted in the Greek city as a theatrical stage, but was nevertheless still dominated by the idea of presence: the political actor addresses other actors, present in actuality because the other half of society (women, slave, metics, etc.) are at work in their absence. The limits of the city coincide with the limits of the voice and, as a result, with the limits of the actors.73 What must be thought, following the path opened up by the political thought of St Paul of Tarsus, is this ‘immense virtual public (still) waiting at the gates of the culture of the State.’74 The task to be thought then presents itself in the following terms: how to enlarge the common stage, without establishing an insurmountable divide between actors and spectators, or between those who do the representing and those who are represented? The Merleau-Pontian meditation on this public waiting at the gates is historically concretized in what Rancière calls the ‘edges of the political’. These margins, these spaces in front of the stage previously kept out of the space of the action, can claim visibility and make its voice heard. The conjuncture between a theatrical architecture and a Proof 162 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Emmanuel Alloa political architecture becomes sensible in the genesis of the ‘spectator’s gallery’.75 Even though certain groups like women and metics did not have the right to speak in the Athenian assembly of the pnyx, this place was conceived as basically open and permeable around the edges, allowing the excluded to participate as spectators.76 Abolished in the earliest modern parliamentary architecture, the spectators’ galleries reappear in the revolutionary assemblies. When the Third Estate met on 19 June 1789 in the Jeu de paume hall of the Versailles palace, the spectators’ gallery was maintained, as if the inclusion of the excluded demanded the counter-constitution of a new excluded ‘third’, both witness to its own constitution and at the same time reservoir of future actors.77 But whether these limits be thought from the start as virtually crossable thresholds (by means of demonstrations or interjections) or whether they be on the contrary an instrument of the immunization of the inside, politics is by essence a domain that is permanently ahead of itself, in constant excess. As such, it always remains – as Castoriadis repeats after Merleau-Ponty – a work in progress, a task to be done.78 José Luis Borges once beautifully said that the essence of art was ‘the imminence of a revelation that never comes about.’ Something similar could be said for the political: politics has to do with a coming constellation, and when at some point in history, certain forces claim that such constellation is fully realized, totalitarianism is only a step away. Believing in the real presence (of a people, of an idea, of an utopia) amounts to reducing imminence to full givenness, and in passing, to deny immanence its lines of flight. Although the virtual scenes or stages that then arise are indeed virtual, this does not mean that they are illusory,79 they are not so much unreal as they tend, as it were, to ‘superimpose’ themselves on what is given.80 Far from simply transcribing the given, term for term, the virtual stage allows us to see that which within the given was previously unseen by ‘positing as possible that which was supposedly impossible.’81 The stage de-identifies subjects with their actual attributes, and reconfigures the face of the visible by disfiguring the resemblance of the identical to itself. In this way, theatre and politics sketch a certain convergence and reveal a stage that is one of irreducible imminence, a stage on which the modalities of what is ‘to come’ appear in such a way that they cannot be deduced from any pre-text and whose open future does not preclude prolongations. Such openness is perceptible, in an inchoate form, in Merleau-Ponty – a thinker whose entire reflection is placed under the sign of a ‘reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact.’82 Proof Theatre of the Virtual 163 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Notes This chapter is translated from the French by John Rogove. A first draft of this chapter was first presented at the Institut Supérieur des Sciences Humaines in Tunis (Tunisia) and at the Philosophy Department of Tel Aviv University (Israel). I would like to thank the attending audiences for their valuable comments. 1. Richard Schechner (1973): Environmental Theater, New York: Hawthorne Books, p. 145. 2. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962a): Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith, London and New York: Routledge. 3. States, Bert O. (1992): ‘The Phenomenological Attitude’, in Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach (eds): Critical Theory and Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 369–379; Garner, Stanton B. (1994): Bodied Spaces. Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press; Zarrilli, Philip (2004): ‘Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor’s Embodied Modes of Experience’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 56, pp. 653–666; Hart, F. Elizabeth (2006): ‘Performance, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Turn’, in: Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart(eds): Performance and Cognition, London: Routledge, pp. 29–51; Roselt, Jens (2008): Phänomenologie des Theaters, Munich: Fink. 4. Kristensen, Stefan (2012): ‘Le primat du performatif’, in Emmanuel Alloa and Adnen Jdey (eds): Du sensible à l’œuvre. Esthétiques de Merleau-Ponty, Brussels: La Lettre Volée. 5. Linker, Kate (1994): Vito Acconci, New York: Rizzoli, pp. 30, 46–47. 6. See the well-informed book by Jones, Amelia (1998): Body Art. Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 317. 7. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton (1987) Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press; Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (1979), Phenomenology of Dance, 2nd ed., London: Dance Books. 8. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (2009): The Corporeal Turn. An Interdisciplinary Reader, Exeter: Imprint Academic, p. 307. 9. On Merleau-Ponty’s dialogue with the different arts, see Alloa, Emmanuel and Jdey, Adnen (2012): ‘Du sensible à l’œuvre. Sur le rapport entre Merleau-Ponty et les arts’, in Du sensible à l’œuvre, Brussels: La Lettre Volée, pp. 9–39. 10. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (ed.) (1968): ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus, Evanston (IL): Northwestern University Press, pp. 48–59. 11. Butler, Judith (1989): ‘Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description. A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’, in Jeffner Allen and Marion Iris Young (eds): The Thinking Muse, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 85–100. 12. Butler, Judith (1988): ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution. An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, pp. 519–531, here p. 521. 13. Butler, ‘Sexual Ideology, p. 99. See also Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge, 1993. Proof 164 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Emmanuel Alloa 14. Shusterman, Richard (2005): ‘The Silent, Limping Body of Philosophy’, in Taylor Carman and Mark B.N.Hansen (eds): The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 151–180. 15. Ibid., p. 168. 16. Ibid., p. 175. 17. Gallagher, Shaun (2011): ‘Somaesthetics and the Care of the Body’, Metaphilosophy, Vol. 42, pp. 305–313. 18. Alloa, Emmanuel (2009): ‘Le corps est-il silencieux?’, in Barbara Formis (ed.): Penser en Corps. Soma-esthétique, art et philosophie, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 113–132. 19. Aquinas, Thomas (1256–1259): Quaestiones quodlibetales II, q. II, a. 3 (Quaestiones quodlibetales, ed. R. Spiazzi, Taurina vol. IX, Turin: Marietti, 1956). 20. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (1739): Metaphysica, § 55 (Metaphysics. A Critical Translation with Kant’s Elucidations, trans. Courtney Fugate and John Hymers, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 21. Kant, Immanuel (1781/87): Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B627 (Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 22. Bergson, Henri (2002): ‘The Possible and the Real’, in Keith Ansell-Pearson and John Mullarkey (eds): Key Writings, trans. by Melissa McMahon, New York and London: Continuum, pp. 223–232, here p. 229. 23. Unpublished manuscript from 17 September 1958, entitled ‘Labyrinthe de l’ontologie’, Fonds Merleau-Ponty, Bibliothèque nationale de France Paris, Vol. VI. Part of this manuscript is published as Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2007): ‘Labyrinth of Ontology’, in Leonard Lawlor and Ted Toadvine (eds): The Merleau-Ponty Reader, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 415–416. 24. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Theta III (Metaphysics Book Θ, trans. Stephen Makin, Oxford: Clarendon, 2006). 25. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Labyrinth of Ontology’, p. 416. 26. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968): Résumés de cours, Collège de France 1952–1960, Paris: Gallimard, p. 137. 27. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Labyrinth of Ontology’, p. 416. 28. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1973): The Prose of the World, trans. by John O’Neill, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, p. 44. 29. Merleau-Ponty (1996): Notes de cours au Collège de France 1958–1959 et 1960–1961, ed. S. Ménasé, preface by C. Lefort, Paris: Gallimard, p. 172. 30. For a fuller development of what follows, see Vitali-Rosati, Marcello (2009): Corps et virtuel. Itinéraires à partir de Merleau-Ponty, Paris: L’Harmattan. 31. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1963): La Structure du comportement, Paris: PUF, p. 234; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1963): The Structure of Behaviour, trans. by Alden Fisher, Boston: Beacon Press. 32. Steeves, James (2001): ‘The Virtual Body. Merleau-Ponty’s Early Philosophy of Imagination’, Philosophy Today, Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 370–380. See also: Ramírez Cobián, Mario Teodoro (2012): ‘Intencionalidad y virtualidad’, in Mario Teodoro Ramírez Cobián (ed.): Merleau-Ponty viviente, Barcelona: Anthropos, pp. 419–441. 33. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 291. Proof Theatre of the Virtual 165 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 34 Recent experimental research only confirms these observations, when they dissociate from the notion of the body as that which the subject owns alone as its propriety a notion of the body as agency. For the results of this empirical research and their contextualization in a Merleau-Pontian perspective, see especially the work of Shaun Gallagher and in particular, Gallagher, Shaun (2008): ‘Action and Agency’, in Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi (eds): The Phenomenological Mind. An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 153–170. 35 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 291 (translation modified by the author). 36. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962b [2000]): ‘Un inédit de Merleau-Ponty’, in J. Prunair (ed.): Parcours deux. 1951–1961, Lagrasse, Verdier, p. 43. 37. Ibid. 38. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2011): Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression. Notes 1953, ed. Emmanuel de Saint Aubert and Stefan Kristensen, Geneva: MêtisPresses, p. 52. 39. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 291. 40. Ibid., p. 290. 41. Deleuze, Gilles (2002): ‘A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?’, in David Lapoujade (ed.): L’Île déserte et autres textes. Textes et entretiens, Paris: Minuit, pp. 238–269, here p. 250; Deleuze, Gilles (2004): ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’, in David Lapoujade (ed.): Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, trans. by Michael Taormina, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 178. 42. Deleuze, Gilles (1994): Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 208. 43. Proust, Marcel (1981): Time Regained, in: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 6, trans. by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, London: Folio Society, p. 450. 44. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 212. 45. Ruyer, Raymond (1946): Éléments de psycho-biologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Chapter 4. 46. Ibid. p. 216. 47. Cf. David Lapoujade’s note, which recalls that ‘L’immanence: une vie’, published in the journal Philosophie just before his death on 4 November 1995 and ‘The Actual and the Virtual’ edited as an annex to Dialogues II (with Claire Parnet), were intended to be a part of a larger whole entitled ‘Ensembles et multiplicités’ (Deleuze, Gilles (1995): ‘L’immanence: une vie’, Philosophie, Vol. 47; Deleuze, Gilles (2006): ‘The Actual and the Virtual’, in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet (eds): Dialogues II, 2nd ed., trans. by Eliot Ross Albert, London: Continuum). As Lapoujade continues: ‘Deleuze wanted to elaborate the concept of the virtual, which he thought he had not gone far enough in explaining’, Deleuze, Gilles (2007): Two Regimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. by David Lapoujade, New York: Semiotext(e), p. 388. 48. Deleuze, ‘The Actual and the Virtual’, p. 113. 49. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 141. 50. Deleuze, Gilles (1990): The Logic of Sense, trans. by Mark Lester, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 185, (translation modified by the author). Proof 166 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Emmanuel Alloa 51. Cf. Deleuze, Gilles (1967): ‘La méthode de dramatisation’, Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, Vol. 61, No. 3, pp. 89–118 (reprinted as Deleuze, Gilles (2002): ‘The Method of Dramatization’, in: Deleuze (2004), pp. 94–116, cf. especially pp. 95–96). 52. See especially Deleuze, Gilles (1993): ‘One Manifesto Less’, in Constantin V. Boundas (ed.): The Deleuze Reader, trans. by Alan Orenstein, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 204–222. 53. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2001): Psychologie et pédagogie de l’enfant, cours de Sorbonne 1949–1952, Paris: Verdier, p. 562. 54. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 202. 55. Proust, Marcel (1981a): Within a Budding Grove, in: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 2, trans. by C.K Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin, London: Folio Society, p. 18. 56. Proust, Marcel (1981b): The Guermantes Way, in: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 3, trans. by C.K Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin, London: Folio Society, p. 34. 57. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 278. 58. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968): The Visible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Evanston (IL): Northwestern University Press, p. 138. 59. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 213. 60. Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 38. 61. Merleau-Ponty, Psychologie et pédagogie de l’enfant, p. 557. 62. Ibid., p. 560. 63. Ibid., p. 559. 64. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 216. 65. Merleau-Ponty, Psychologie et pédagogie de l’enfant, p. 561. 66. Ibid., p. 559. 67. A reference of sources concerning Thespis can be found in PickardCambridge, Arthur W. (1968): The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 190. And more generally on the beginnings of Greek theatre: Wise, Jennifer (2000): Dionysus Writes. The Invention of Theatre in Ancient Greece, Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press. 68. Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours au Collège de France, p. 167. 69. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 194. 70. Sartre, Jean-Paul (2004): The Imaginary. A Phenomenological Psychology of Imagination, trans. by. J. Webber, London and New York: Routledge, p. 11. 71. Rancière, Jacques (2004): The Flesh of Words. The Politics of Writing, trans. by Charlotte Mandell, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 89. 72. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 245. 73. Aristotle, Politics VII, 4; 1326b5-7 (Politics, trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press/Classical Loeb, 1959). 74. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (ed.) (1956): ‘Les fondateurs’, in Les philosophes célèbres, Paris: Mazenod, p. 44. 75. Ludger Schwarte traced out its history in Schwarte, Ludger (2005): ‘Parliamentary Public’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds): Making Things Public – Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, pp. 786–794. 76. Longo, Oddone (1989): ‘La scena della città. Strutture architettoniche et spazi politici nel teatro greco’, in Lia De Finis(ed.): Scena e spettacolo nell’Antichità, Florence: Olschki, pp. 23–42. Proof Theatre of the Virtual 167 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 77. Schwarte, ‘Parliamentary Public’, p. 791. 78. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1989 [1997]): ‘Done and to Be Done’, in David Curtis (ed.): The Castoriadis Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 367–417. 79. Rancière, Jacques (2007): On the Shores of Politics, trans. by Liz Heron, London: Verso, p. 50. 80. Rancière, Jacques (1999): Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, trans. by Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, pp. 56–57. 81. Cohen, Deborah (2004): ‘Du possible au virtuel. La scène politique’, Labyrinthe, Vol. 17, http://labyrinthe.revues.org/index170.html (accessed 7 October 2009). 82. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 147. Works Cited Alloa, Emmanuel (2009): ‘Le corps est-il silencieux?’, in Barbara Formis (ed.): Penser en Corps. Soma-esthétique, art et philosophie, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 113–132. Alloa, Emmanuel and Jdey, Adnen (2012): ‘Du sensible à l’œuvre. Sur le rapport entre Merleau-Ponty et les arts’, in Du sensible à l’œuvre. 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