Rokem - Philosophers and thespians: thinking performance

During the past few years, a gradually growing number of publications about the relationship between philosophy and the theatre have been published. I will only mention some of the more recent ones that have inspired my own work: Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium , Fordham University Press, New York, 2004; Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy , edited by David Krasner and David Z. Saltz, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Mich., 2006; Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and the Avant-Gardes , Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, 2006; Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, CollectionLaboratoryTheater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century , Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 2005; Alan Read, Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue , Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2008; Paul A. Kottman, A Politics of the Scene , Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2008; Rikard Schnstrm, En frsmak av framtiden: Bertolt Brecht och det konkreta , Brutus stlings bokfrlag Symposion, Stockholm/Stehag, 2003.

See for example: Thomas Gould, The Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy , Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1990; Stanley Rosen, The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought , Routledge, New York and London, 1988; Susan B. Levin, The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.

Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault , University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles / London, 1998, 6.

Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004.

Report of the Task Force on the Arts , Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 2008, 1, http://www.news.harvard.edu/press/pressdoc/supplements/081210_ArtsTaskForceReport.pdf .

Plato, Symposium , in Complete Works , edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson, translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1977. All references are indicated in parentheses after the quotation.

J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words , Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., second edition, 1975. See also Chapter 6, note 15.

Judith Butler, Antigones Claim: Kinship between Life and Death , Columbia University Press, New York, 2000, 65.

Sue-Ellen Case, Classical Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts, Theatre Journal , 37, 3, 1985, 317327. Includes an interesting discussion of the theatrical agon .

Aristotles Poetics , translated by S. H. Butcher, Hill and Wang, New York, 1999, chapter 9, 68.

Ibid., 69.

Gerald F. Else, Aristotles Poetics: The Argument , Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1963, 307; 313. See also G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Aristotle on History and Poetry ( Poetics , 9, 1451a36b11), in Amlie Oksenberg Rorty, Essays on Aristotles Poetics , Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1992, 2332; and Nurit Yaari, Greek Tragedy in Theory and Praxis: Aristotles Theory of Tragedy in the Perspective of Aristophanes Theatre Practice, Maske und Kothurn , 35, 1, 1989, 719.

Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama , University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, 1112.

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, in Selected Writings , translated by Harry Zohn, volume 4, 19381949, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2003, 391.

Diogenes Lartius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers , book 3: Plato, translated by R. D. Hicks, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1966, 279281.

Plato, Symposium , in Complete Works . All references are indicated in parentheses after the quotation.

Brecht on Theatre , edited by John Willet, Methuen, London, 1982, 121.

Ibid.

The ending of the dialogue has received ample critical attention from philologists and philosophers, as well as literary scholars, drawing attention to its enigmatic, unresolved ironies. In this context I want to mention the following in particular: Diskin Clay, The Tragic and Comic Poet of The Symposium , Arion , New Series, 2, 2, 1975, 238261; C. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996; Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, Platos Symposium: The Ethics of Desire , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006. See also Ruby Blondell, The Play of Character in Platos Dialogues , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.

Our knowledge of Agathon is not very extensive, and none of his tragedies has survived. However, he also appears, together with Euripides, as a character in Aristophanes play Thesmophoriazusae , whereas Socrates appears in The Clouds . For an extensive and illuminating analysis of Agathons character in a theatrical context, see Anne Duncan, Performance and Identity in the Classical World , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, chapter 1. See also Froma Zeitlin, Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes Thesmophoriazusae , Critical Inquiry , 8, 2, 1981, 301327 (also published in Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature , University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996, 375416). In this essay the relations between tragedy and comedy, though in a way that is not directly related to the Symposium , are discussed.

Plato, Republic , in Complete Works , revised edition, C. D. C. Reeve, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis / Cambridge, 1977. All references from the Republic are indicated in parentheses after the quotation.

For a comprehensive historical overview of this position, see in particular Jonas Barish, The Anti-theatrical Prejudice , University of California Press, Berkeley, 1981.

Art, poetry, drama, and theatre are frequently used synonymously by Plato. However, there is no doubt that theatre and acting are the two artistic expressions that Plato attacks most vehemently. In any case this is not the context in which to try and find an orderly pattern in Platos use of terminology.

Andrea Wilson Nightingale , Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, 3.

Plato, Laws , in Complete Works , translated by Trevor J. Saunders, 1483, 816e.

See for example James Arieti, Interpreting Plato: The Dialogues as Drama , Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Savage, Md., 1991; and Max Statkiewicz, Platonic Theater: Rigor and Play in the Republic , MLN , 115, 2000, 10191051.

See P. W. Harsch, Plato Symposium 194B and a Raised Position in the Theater, Classical Philology , 44, 2, 1949, 116117; and Richard Hunter, Platos Symposium , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.

The Greek term used here is agnizomai , to contend for a prize.

The Greek term used here is agnothete , to direct the games, to exhibit them.

My reading radically differs from that of K. J. Dover, who claims that Plato means us to regard the theme and framework of Aristophanes story as characteristic not of comedy but of unsophisticated, subliterate folklore (45). K. J. Dover, Aristophanes Speech in Platos Symposium , Journal of Hellenic Studies , 86, 1966, 4150.