Abstract

Philosophy and the theater name two different, separate cultural domains. They are and should be cultivated in different places by different people, relatively indifferent to the others' domain. This common view of the actual and ideal relationship between the theater and philosophy is questioned in this dissertation. In fact, philosophy and the theater have always intimately interacted even if they often feigned indifference . Paradoxically, they had to interact in order to preserve their independence from ideology with its forced departmentalization and hierarchization of the various domains of culture. More than any other kind of knowledge, more than any other form of art, philosophy and the theater are in danger of ideological repression. In times of political turmoil, the department of philosophy and the theater hall are often the first to close. It is not an accident that the first known and certainly the most dramatic expression of the difference, quarrel or dispute between philosophy and the theater in Western tradition appears in a political treatise, Plato's Republic . The political character of the diaphora has not been maintained, however, in the history of Western culture. Aristotle, Plato's disciple and critic, apparently separated aesthetics from politics and actually integrated the theater into philosophical thought. And it was the Poetics, not the Republic , that established the pattern of the relationship between philosophy and the theater and art in general, often misrepresented as "Platonism." This dissertation considers some cases of resistance to the Aristotelian rule in philosophy and the theater, all of which refer, paradoxically, to Plato as the initiator of the "overturning of Platonism." In fact, it is the Aristotelian tradition which is aimed at, both in the philosophical and theatrical deconstruction of ideology. The philosophers and theorists of the theater discussed in this dissertation, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Artaud and Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, Irigaray and Butler, Brecht and Althusser, all refer to the moment of tension between philosophy and the theater, captured in Plato's diaphora, as the fateful moment in the history of Western culture but also as the point of departure for a different philosophy and theater