ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the values of performance art: what can performance mean to its society? It focuses on performance art because of its relationship to language: performance art complicates the full presence of its subject in identity and language categories - it embodies the effects of language on bodies. The chapter also focuses on the tradition of defining the subject derived from Hegel's analysis of the partial constitution of the subject through antagonistic struggle, through fight. The Aufhebung of the dialectic was 'located' in the name: in the mark of that which is other to the thing, and therefore frames the thing but points back to the other of the framing. The consciousness of the lord is thus an embodied being: a thing in itself. For the lord to need the slave would be to acknowledge the corporeality of the lord, and for the slave to need the lord is to acknowledge the need for recognition.
