ABSTRACT
This chapter dwells more specifically on aesthetic questions and, above all, the crisis of form and representation posed to drama/theatre by oil and its aporias. We will also explore the implications of the consideration of oil and its event of entering a dramatic text or theatrical performance as a field of forces whereby all the formerly entrenched values, norms, and phenomena (including subject and the text) undergo upheaval and reconfiguration. I will also delineate the distinct features that render drama/theatre a better-equipped medium and genre (given its multi-media, less diegetic, and performative nature) for tackling the social-historical, psychological, and political-economic subtleties of oil, climate crisis, and Anthropocene/Capitalocene from a world-systemic perspective. Finally, it will be explained how, by way of cause or origin, some of the aporetic complications posed or embodied by oil stem from the uncertainties surrounding the questions of space, time, measure, and scale. In this regard, I will delve into the causes underlying such critical issues as the failure of imagination and energy unconscious in social-cultural and dramatic-theatrical encounters with oil. It will be expounded how these aporias of oil come to affect our relation to ourselves and the world at ontological, social-cultural, perceptual, and cognitive-affective levels, including our relation to space, time, our self, and the other(s) (at interpersonal and collective levels).
