Abstract
My paper draws on Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari and the work of the French multimedia performance artist Orlan in order to bring together the various theoretical strands that examine the body as a phenomenological and speculative entity that has the discursivity and potentiality to function as a performing body within a spatio-temporal framework (a body that is always already scripted within performance and society at large), as well as those theories that move from a Western metaphysics of presence to a de-subjectified semiotics, such as was evidenced in the 1980s and 1990s, and to show what is at stake in that politico-theoretical shift, as well as the implications of this for the performing and viewed/viewing body. Can a theatrical and performing body be confined to a purely visual semiotic framework? What is lost when semiotics – with its poststructuralist (or, in my view, almost antitheatrical) bent, views theatre (and of course the body) as imbricated in semiology or a system of cultural signs rather than perception? This work sets out to pressure these questions. At the same time, it seeks to examine how the performing body can break free from spatio-temporal boundaries and fixed identities and exceeds and even resists any definitive attempts at hermeneutic representation, in effect defying semiotic and semantic systems of representation.
About the author
Panayiota Chrysochou (b. 1982) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cyprus 〈pollyn@live.co.uk〉. Her research interests include performance theory, Shakespearean drama and the Renaissance, trauma studies and psychoanalysis, and Victorian and Gothic literature. Her publications include “The si(eye)ght of trauma: Oedipal wounds, tragic visions and averted gazes from the time of Sophocles to the twenty-first century” (2012); and “In-between states: Twilight horror in Jean Rhys' After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie & Djuna Barnes' Nightwood” (2013).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
