Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Tony Fisher is Reader in Theatre and Philosophy at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London<p>'Fisher is meticulous in discussing and describing the categories that<br />constitute political art in the twentieth century: state, government, revolution,<br />and power.'<br />The European Journal of Theatre and Performance<br /><br />'Starting with a seemingly simple question ‘Can art be political?’, this book opens a Pandora’s box that reveals the paradoxical nature of the relationship between art and life, the impossibility of taxonomy of political theatre, on the one hand, and its potential as a hermeneutical tool, on the other, and when it comes to postdramatic theatre and theory – nothing is anymore as it seemed before … The depth of analysis is impressive, whenever we feel we have reached a conceptual stable ground, Fisher probes further and invites us to question deeper!'<br />Silvija Jestrovic, University of Warwick<br /><br />'Fisher is a joy to read! He writes with clarity and urgency but without oversimplification and gratuitous polemic. He draws on the whole toolkit of interdisciplinary thought and covers a vast terrain in contemporary theatre, but he never relies on jargon and avoids any form of superficiality … with cautious optimism, [he] takes the lead of key artists and heads out towards new horizons of possibility, en route, he has revitalized our understanding of both politics and aesthetics.'<br />Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne</p>
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Introduction The horizon of the aesthetic
Part I The aesthetic exception
1 The paradox of the aesthetic exception
2 Crossing the threshold
3 The institution of art: critical and theoretical reflections
Part II Political art after the communicative turn
4 The classical debate revisited: Sartre, Brecht, Adorno
5 Art of the communicative turn: Habermas and the political
6 What is the proper way to display a US flag? – the work of
“dissensual speech” in art
Part III Taxonomy of the political theatre
7 Foundational problems and problems of foundation
8 Displacement effects: Althusser’s “Brecht” and the theatre
of the conjuncture
9 Activist theatre of the conjuncture: the case of Janam and the
street theatre in India
10 The “closure” of the political theatre and the critique
of post-dramatic reason
11 The political theatre redefined
12 The theatre of the planetary conjuncture: Milo Rau’s
Congo Tribunal
13 On taxonomic strategies
Index
The question of whether art produces politically transformative effects has been intensely debated within the critical discourses of art, literature, and performance practices. The aesthetic exception reopens the fundamental questions that underpin these debates and the entrenchments they produce within critical circles.
Offering a wide-ranging perspective that encompasses the historical avant-garde, political activist street theatre in India, contemporary critical art practices, and post-dramatic performance, this book tracks three structural impasses that continue to benight debates on art’s relation to the political: the problem of aesthetic autonomy which separates art from the social world; how art can communicate political effects while remaining ‘art’; and the problem of how art relates to the terrain of real political struggle. It develops a new approach while emphatically embracing the idea that art can make meaningful interventions in the social world that enrich our political life without collapsing into well-known contradictions.
Drawing on the classical debates of Adorno, Lukács, and Sartre; the more recent interventions of Habermas and Rancière; and the political theory of Gramsci, Althusser, and Hall, The aesthetic exception proposes a ‘conjunctural’ way of understanding the aesthetic possibilities that underpin political art practices. It invites readers to consider the stakes for political art in an age plagued by widening inequalities, and the saturation of the world by expropriative logics under globalisation. The book calls for rethinking political art at the level of the planetary conjuncture.