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The Theater of the Metaxu: Staging the Between

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Abstract

Human life is defined between diverse extremes: birth and death, nothing and infinity. Theater tries to stage something of this between-being and bring it out of its recess in everyday life. What can be called a metaxological philosophy can illuminate this between-condition. “Metaxu” is the Greek word for “between,” while “logos” can mean an accounting, or reasoning, or wording. A metaxological philosophy of the theatre would look on it as staging the between. Can we say that the theatrical stage, as an intermedium of human communication, is a distinctive wording of the between? Can a metaxological philosophy throw light on what is staged on it, in and through it? In light of this philosophy of the metaxu, reflections are offered on essential themes such as: the space of the stage, the intermediation of inter-action, the shaping of plot, the openness of endings, the tragic and the comic, the sacred and the profane.

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Notes

  1. Hegel (1977, §§699–747).

  2. For two quite different approaches, see Cavell (2003) and Nuttall (2007).

  3. Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is, in part, cultural propaganda for the opera of Wagner which, relevantly, sought to approach the condition of a kind of aesthetic liturgy, and not incidentally Wagner thought of Parsifal not simply as opera but as “a festival play for the consecration of the stage (ein Bühnenweihfestspiel).”

  4. See, for instance, Desmond (1995a, b).

  5. Peter Brook’s The Empty Space (1968) while reflecting its time is still fresh and engaging.

  6. Wittgenstein in conversation with his friend M. O’C. Drury in the Phoenix Park, Dublin: In Drury (1996, 157).

  7. In this regard, it is interesting to note how in the Poetics (XVIII, 1) Aristotle says “In every tragedy there is a complication and a dénouement” (Loeb translation), but the words in Greek are simply a “tying” (désis) and a “loosing” (lúsis)—one might say a knot and an unknotting, a twist and an unraveling, a binding and unbinding.

  8. See Desmond (2002, 133–155).

  9. See Nikulin (2010).

  10. Hegel (1975, vol. II, 1217–1218). Hegel’s discussion of Antigone in his Phenomenology of Spirit, §§446–476 is also important.

  11. See Desmond (1995a, b, chapter 2).

  12. The Chorus at the end of Oedipus Tyrannos (1678–1684): “People of Thebes, my countrymen, look on Oedipus. He solved the famous riddle with his brilliance, he rose to power, a man beyond all power. Who could behold his greatness without envy? Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him. Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day, count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.”

  13. Yeats (1990, 394–395).

  14. On posthumous mindfulness, see for instance Desmond (1990, 278–282); also Desmond (1995b, 36–37).

  15. This suggests a way to rethink Aristotle’s katharsis (Poetics, V, 2–3).

  16. Yeats, The Poems, 349.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Kardinaal Mercierplein 2, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    William Desmond

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  1. William Desmond
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Correspondence to William Desmond.

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Desmond, W. The Theater of the Metaxu: Staging the Between. Topoi 30, 113–124 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-011-9094-7

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