Abstract
The art of Mark Ravenhill revolves around gender constructs and relations between people in the consumer society. With his conscience clearly on the left end of the political (as much as philosophical) spectrum, the playwright would not shun the reputation of a critic of the so-called postmodern ideology. The paper aims to analyse Ravenhill’s The Cut as an attempt on the part of the playwright to engage with cultural theory and psychoanalysis. With its exploration of the phantasmic background of a society at a time of change, the play is interpreted with reference to Slavoj Žižek’s numerous deliberations on the reinvention of utopia revolution and the big Other in decline. The analysis sets out to prove that The Cut and its representation of the post-revolutionary reality moves Ravehnill into a new territory of engagement with theory and politics, a territory much exceeding that of in-yer-face sensibility. The paper concludes that the play is a warning against post-politics as much as a calling for reconsider political agency. The characters in the play fail to constitute subjective positions capable of anything beyond a politics based either on the fear of negativity, the fear of the cut, or on faith in the university as an apolitical institution driving social change. That said such an attempt to confront philosophical ideas with drama results in new illuminating interpretations which both scrutinize philosophical ideas and shed new light on contemporary drama.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. The chapter on politics in Malpas’ The postmodern (2005, pp. 105–132) and Laclau’s article “The death and resurrection of the theory of ideology” (1997).
- 2.
Cf. The manifesto of the left, Contingency, hegemony, solidarity (2000) written jointly by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek.
- 3.
Žižek borrows the term Truth-Event from Alain Badiou. The term is directly linked to Badiou’s views on the role of philosophy, which is made clear in his Manifesto for philosophy: “The specific role of philosophy is to propose a united conceptual space in which naming takes place of events that serve as the point of departure for truth procedures. Philosophy seeks to gather together all the additional-names. It deals within thought with the compossable nature of the procedures that condition it. It does not establish any truth but it sets a locus of truths. It configurates the generic procedures, through a welcoming, a sheltering, built up with reference to their disparate simultaneity. Philosophy sets out to think its time by putting the state of procedures conditioning it into a common place. Its operations, whatever they may be, always aim to think ‘together’ to configurate within a unique exercise of thought the epochal disposition of the matheme, poem, political invention and love […]. In this sense, philosophy’s sole question is indeed that of the truth” (1997, p. 37). It seems no wonder why Žižek to a large extent allies with Badiou with regard to locating the political at the very centre of any philosophical project. Both philosophers try to rehabilitate philosophical grounds for effective political agency. Yet the Truth they theorise is only discernable from the standpoint of the Event. Or as Žižek puts it: “The Event emerges ex nihilo: if it cannot be accounted for in terms of the situation, this does not mean that it is simply an intervention from Outside or Beyond—it attaches itself precisely to the Void of every situation, to its inherent inconsistency and/or its excess. The Event is the Truth of the situation that makes visible/legible what the ‘official’ situation had to ‘repress’, but it is also always localized—that is to say, the Truth is always the Truth of a specific situation. The French Revolution, for example, is the Event which makes visible/legible the excess and inconsistencies, the ‘lie’, of the ancient régime, and it is the Truth of the ancient régime situation, localized, attached to it” (Žižek 2000, p. 130).
- 4.
“JOHN: Ah-hah. Total darkness. And you have no body. Your body has dissolved. […] The cage has vanished. And you are free. Feel the darkness. […] Where the monsters live. Where the witches live. Where the paedophiles are. […]. Take a torch into the woods. Lies. All of it lies. The void. It’ll eat you up. The chasm that swallows the sailors […] Take a map, make a rope bridge. Steer clear of the void. Lies lies, all of it lies. They’ve told you lies and you’ve kept you eyes open. When all freedom asked of you was to close your eyes. And now you’ve closed them. And you’ve made a start. […] There’s no history. All that struggling to move forward, To expand, to progress. That’s gone away. And there’s no society. […] Don’t try and feel your body. Don't reach for the reports. Don't try and call your wife. Because it's all nothing. There's only truth. There's only you. Darkness is light. Void is everything. You are truth” (Ravenhill 2008, pp. 195–197).
- 5.
It is worth noting that the way desire functions in the play lends itself to a reading that based on the post-Marxist ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, who in Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia (1984) proposed “a politics of participation and direct involvement by those who desired change, not representation and the abstraction of power in the interests of an ossified or ‘molar’ subject (‘the working class’)” (Tormey and Townshend 2006, p. 45). Interestingly, it is suggested in the play that any social change is triggered by and for those who have voice. The two female characters deprived of language in the play, Gita and Mina, are thus deprived of the most elementary tool of articulating desire.
- 6.
For Dan Rebellato the state-of-the-nation play “mirrored the nation-state in its mapping of the political onto the personal, and the general onto the particular.” He rightly points out that the genre is a thing of the past, because “the values of nation and state no longer coincide at the territorial level” (Rebellato 2008, p. 252).
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Kielawski, R. (2013). Cutting into a New World: Reading The Cut Through Slavoj Žižek. In: Fabiszak, J., Urbaniak-Rybicka, E., Wolski, B. (eds) Crossroads in Literature and Culture. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21994-8_3
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