Abstract
Judith Butler begins this work with a consideration of gender performativity in order to think about the relationship between linguistic and performance studies, locating the body as the interface for both the speech act and embodied performance. Echoing her well-known arguments that “performance” must replace “essence” as a way to understand the development of gendered identities, Butler examines the role of “gesture” in relation to language and performance by focusing on Walter Benjamin’s reading of epic theater in Brecht. She suggests that Benjamin’s account of Brecht’s epic theater construed “gesture” as an unconventional, unsupported, and de-authorized form of action that cannot quite be accounted for. Performance therefore involves a form of alienation, and gesture—where language and performance intersect—can potentially become an allegory of the decomposition of the speech act.
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Notes
- 1.
See J.L. Austin, “Performative Utterances,” in Collected Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) and How to do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
- 2.
Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” trans. Alan Bass, in Limited, Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1977), 1–23.
- 3.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
- 4.
Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992).
- 5.
Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011).
- 6.
Walter Benjamin, “What is Epic Theater?,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1976), 151.
- 7.
Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Illuminations, 122.
- 8.
Franz Kafka, The Castle (New York: Knopf, 1954), 36.
- 9.
Franz Kafka, “Description of a Struggle,” in The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 28.
- 10.
Benjamin, “What is Epic Theater?,” 147.
- 11.
Ibid., 148.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Ibid., 149.
- 14.
In “What is Epic Theatre,” Benjamin elaborates the relation of epistemology and action through interruption: “This discovery (alienation) of conditions takes place through the interruption of happenings” (150); “Interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all structuring (151).
- 15.
See Elin Diamond, “Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn’s The Rover,” ELH 56(3) (1989); “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism,” TDR 32(1) (1988); and Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
- 16.
Walter Benjamin, “Was ist das epische Theater? (2),” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 535; Benjamin, “What is Epic Theater?” 150.
- 17.
Walter Benjamin, “Brecht’s Threepenny Novel,” in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostok (London: NLB, 1973), 75.
- 18.
Walter Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht: Svendborg Notes,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1978), 213.
- 19.
Ibid., 201.
- 20.
Walter Benjamin, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 203. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 300.
- 21.
Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht,” 208.
- 22.
Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht,” 209–210.
- 23.
Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht,” 210.
- 24.
Parts of this essay were published in “Theatrical Machines,” differences 26(2) (2015).
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Butler, J. (2017). When Gesture Becomes Event. In: Street, A., Alliot, J., Pauker, M. (eds) Inter Views in Performance Philosophy. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95192-5_15
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