ABSTRACT
Howard Barker is “a thinker of the event-drama.” Deriving its conceptual premises from a host of thinkers of “the event” – including Deleuze, Badiou, and Blanchot – this chapter undertakes an exploration of the ethics and aesthetics of the event as they feature in Barker’s Hurts Given and Received (HGR). HGR confronts us with a poet who undertakes an impossible task of creating a revolutionary, one-page poem upon the reading of which the reader would be invariably transformed. Such a sovereign gesture, however, is beset with crucial crises and dilemmas whereby the poet undergoes a process of becoming imperceptible. This chapter demonstrates how, in HGR, both the nature poetry and the dynamics of its inspiration/composition are evental. It, thus, seeks to establish how the evental both is underpinned and propelled, in its economics and psychodynamics, by four pivotal components: becoming-other (through proximity with the Other), fragmentary writing, phantasm, and the virtual. Such an evental dynamics entails a subtractive and sacrificial movement from totality to infinity, from the absolute work to the fragmentary, from sovereign autonomy to heteronomy. This attests to how in Barker’s evental ontology of Barker’s Catastrophic Theatre aesthetics and ethics are inextricably intertwined.
