ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis and Performance seeks to further the investigation of these links and connections and to offer new – often unexpected – ones, examining not only the relationship between the terms in its title but their extension into the social, political and ideological domain. For, as post-structuralist or feminist psychoanalytic theory is keen to tell us, things have moved on since Freud. In raising our consciousness in terms of artistic and critical practice, recent theory has challenged the very nature of performance and created an uneasy bedfellow – performativity. In focusing on the body, it has, in the wake of Brecht and Artaud, created a notion of performance which has problematised the author’s voice, the authority of the text, the charisma of the star actor and ‘of both the illusion of reality and the Brechtian challenge to that illusion’. From the Tantztheater of Pina Bausch to the explicit displays of ‘live art’, the performing body ‘is no longer fitted into characterological representation as “intended” by the author’. ‘Abandoning all notions of the individual’, this kind of performance ‘shows the theatricalised subject working through a variety of fantasies, with the spectator called upon to scatter her/his own identification from among a variety of subject positions’.27
