ABSTRACT
This chapter signifies an entirely different meaning of the mythical body, different from what we tend to think according the standard categorizations of Muller's poetics. There is a conventional argument that wants Muller to have begun as poet and ended as a poet, having distinguished himself in between as a dramatist. Muller's greatness as a dramatist is predicated on the fact that he is first and foremost a performer of words, a performer with words, lending his texts an internal performativity which precedes their theatrical realization. Muller had a very clear sense, not only of himself as a poet, but what it means to be a poet theoretically and what sort of openings the poetic text provided to his authorial practice, generally speaking. Heiner Muller may be said to be one of the last such poets, since this pair of categories lost its historical reality in his lifetime. Muller relishes the perverse instance of affirming what is inevitably destructive.
