Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Germanic Languages and Literatures
First Advisor
North, Paul
Abstract
This project reads through two German plays from around 1800 that were considered “unperformable” at their time: Hölderlin’s Der Tod des Empedokles and Kleist’s Penthesilea. My work thinks of theatrical “unperformability” as a rebellion against the epistemological and metaphysical frames that were dominating the theater of their time, as well as the public space that this theater was affirming and forming. The plays, I suggest, expose and in fact perform “on stage” the conditions of appearance of the Dramatic stage, which they do not obey – conditions that in Dramatic theater were supposed to be hidden. Those conditions characterize also the metaphysical frame that is called the “metaphysics of representation”, an understanding of human experience and relations with objects and others that is common in Western Metaphysics. The plays’ performance of the conditions of appearance put light on the violent reduction that they impose on any foreign body that reaches the border of the stage and wishes to be seen: their theatrical manifestation exposes how the epistemological limitations and interpretative demands are translated to real violence against bodies and groups, such as in the case of Empedokles’ exile from the city, and Penthesilea’s war and final act of eating her beloved. In the chapter about Der Tod des Empedokles, I suggest that the protagonist’s repeating spectacles of disappearance resist and negotiate the rigid conditions of appearance presented by the priest and the gathering of the citizens, that attempt to dictate Empedokles appearances on stage as well as in the political space. Working with Hölderlin’s poetological texts and their philosophical context, I point out the potential of the form of Empedokles’ dramatic personhood for the interruptions of those conditions. I then survey how formal elements borrowed from Ancient Greek theater, as well as its social, political and theological contexts, are used in Hölderlin’s play to interrupt the norms and forms of dramatic theater and the political gatherings that it enables. In my interpretation, “Empedokles” is working closely with the conditions of performance, and portrays also a search for a stage with more hospitable conditions, that may be manifested in the figure of the volcano. With Penthesilea, I examine how the play makes visible the political implications of epistemological condition – especially in the context of gender performance. I first survey the history of rejections of the play from the theater, and the epistemological conditions that it breached to become unfitting for these stages. Then, I follow instances in which figures in the play perform repeating failed attempts to understand Penthesilea’s appearance and her desire in terms of the spectators’ familiar metaphysics – mirroring the logic of their battlefield, and a similar battle-like metaphysical formation of desire. I emphasize how those hermeneutical attempts expose the epistemological violence that was enacted upon the bodies of the Amazons and the heroin’s unconventional desire, and suggest that her desire was forced into the interpretative frame of the battlefield, resulting in her violent love act. Penthesilea’s act translates the violence of the epistemological frame to real, physical violence; to which the epistemological frame is nevertheless, in my reading, responsible. Yet the hold of that epistemology is constantly haunted by gentle notes and half-transparent ghosts of its insufficiency: suspicious friends, mournful lovers, and a wondering desire that refuses to settle in a form.Together with the exposure of the violence, my reading emphasizes singular moments in which the plays imagine a different stage-epistemology that blinks through the loving gazes of Prothoe, Pausanias and Panthea, and the queer amazons’ bodies. I suggest that those plays were on the one hand written, as Goethe wrote to Kleist, “for a theater that doesn’t exist” – challenging the theater of the future to become a different space, while at the same time thinking the failure of performance seriously, as it exposes something essential about performativity. This resistance is not stepping out of the theater, but is rather intimately entangled within the mechanism of performance, and can imagine new theatrical possibilities for theater, metaphysics and the political space through their relations with each other. This productive “unperformability” seeks to challenge and re-imagine the possibilities of appearance and performance in the theater and the public space. Through the question of the metaphysics of the stage, “unperformability” works out how epistemological realms of appearance dictate the treatment of foreign and transgressive bodies by social spaces and their systems of meaning, and how it can be interrupted.
Recommended Citation
Sovinsky, Netta, "On unperformable plays and the metaphysics of the stage: Hölderlin and Kleist" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1355.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1355
