Reviewed by:

• Afterlife of the Theatre of the Absurd: The Avant-Garde, Spectator-Ship and Psychoanalysis by Lara Cox
• Arka Chattopadhyay

The avant-garde introduces a break in the history of established aesthetic traditions, but its interruption becomes a norm and gets subsumed within the same traditions with the passage of time. Does [End Page 110] this mean, the radical edge of the avant-garde is momentary? Can we think of its afterlife beyond temporal exhaustion? This is the central question that Lara Cox’s Afterlife of the Theatre of the Absurd addresses with European absurdist theatre as corpus and psychoanalytically inflected arguments on identity categories like gender, race, and ethnicity as methodology. The intention is to think through the lasting and renewable political impact of the absurdist avant-garde, and, to its credit, it doesn’t let go of the specificity of theatre as practice. Cox blends psychoanalytic theory with questions of spectatorship that lie at the core of the conceptualization of theatre as performance.

Cox chooses to begin from a historical vantage with what is usually considered the first absurdist play: Eugene Ionesco’s The Bold Soprano (1950). Her reading revolves around a perverse idea of spectatorship that tilts the work from tragedy to farce, converting anxiety into pleasure through the pervert’s fetishistic logic of ‘disavowal.’ In Cox’s readings, here and elsewhere throughout the monograph, the existentialist universal of the human condition gets challenged by particulars like queer sexuality in this case. She shows how Ionesco parodies masculine and feminine stereotypes and critiques the heterosexual institution of marriage. Taking into account the production history of the play (including queer stagings and amateur high-school performances) enhances the point of evolving parody in performance.

From gender, we come to nation and ethnicity in the chapter on Arthur Adamov’s critically neglected play Off Limits (1969) that engages with the politics of the Vietnam War. Cox argues that the play critiques the American military intervention by introducing a psychotic spectatorship (unlike perverse spectatorship, as studied in Ionesco) of anger and resistance through the logic of ‘foreclosure.’ Though the post 9/11 contextualization of the play as a satire of patriotism remains speculative for lack of current-day productions, Cox manages to offer a convincing reading of how the play can have continuing political significance in the 21^st century.

The third chapter undertakes an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s 1972 play Not I as a disruption of gender exceptionalism with a focus on race, while it continues with the thread on psychosis. In this context, gender exceptionalism refers to a discourse that women in the non-Islamic West are more liberated than the Muslim women in the non-Western countries. The reading anchors itself on the implied racial and religious alterity of the djellaba-clad Auditor vis-à-vis Mouth. Cox argues for a female Auditor to balance the representation and suggests that the play trashes gender exceptionalism as it evacuates the ideology in the Real via the extreme tempo that turns Mouth’s speech into blah-blah for the audience. There is a psychotic repudiation of language that consolidates the ideology of exceptionalism. But, she complains about the absence of the Auditor in recent productions and how the white performer playing Mouth risks cultural appropriation.

The critical thread on subverting gendered racism becomes more radical in the interpretation of Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1958), read against the backdrop of the Algerian war of independence and French de-colonization. The spectatorial mode here is that of “supplementary enjoyment” halfway between pain and pleasure as the audience watches a theatrical portrayal of “black community’s emancipation from white hegemony” (Cox 123) and a deconstruction of white female victimhood. There is both fear and enthrallment in watching the play, as she shows by attending to the 2014 performance in Paris that evoked a strange bafflement. The idea of incomprehension plays into the supplementary enjoyment that doesn’t signify anything. The argumentative slant is towards the a-signifying Real. The high point of the chapter...

审核人：

• 荒诞剧场的来世：先锋派、旁观者和精神分析作者劳拉·考克斯 (Lara Cox)
• Arka Chattopadhyay

前卫艺术打破了既定美学传统的历史，但它的中断成为一种常态，并随着时间的流逝而被纳入相同的传统。[End Page 110]这是否意味着，前卫的激进边缘是一时的？我们能否超越暂时的疲惫来思考它的来世？这是劳拉·考克斯荒诞剧来世的核心问题将欧洲荒诞派戏剧作为语料库，将关于性别、种族和民族等身份类别的心理分析论点作为方法论。目的是思考荒诞派先锋派的持久和可再生的政治影响，值得称道的是，它没有放弃戏剧作为实践的特殊性。考克斯将精神分析理论与处于戏剧表演概念化核心的观众问题相结合。

考克斯选择从历史的角度出发，通常被认为是第一部荒诞派戏剧：尤金·尤内斯库 (Eugene Ionesco) 的《大胆的女高音》( The Bold Soprano , 1950)。她的阅读围绕着一种变态的旁观者观念展开，这种观念将作品从悲剧转变为闹剧，通过变态者“否认”的拜物教逻辑将焦虑转化为快乐。在考克斯的读物中，在这里和整本专着的其他地方，人类状况的存在主义普遍性受到了特殊性的挑战，比如在这种情况下酷儿性行为。她展示了 Ionesco 如何模仿男性和女性的刻板印象，并批评异性恋婚姻制度。考虑到该剧的制作历史（包括酷儿舞台表演和业余高中表演），增强了表演中不断演变的戏仿的意义。

从性别出发，我们在亚瑟·阿达莫夫 (Arthur Adamov) 极度被忽视的戏剧《禁区》 (1969 ) 的一章中谈到了民族和种族，该剧涉及越南战争的政治。考克斯认为，该剧通过“取消抵押品赎回权”的逻辑引入愤怒和反抗的精神病性旁观者（不同于尤内斯库所研究的反常旁观者）来批评美国的军事干预。尽管 9/11 后该剧作为对爱国主义的讽刺的语境化由于缺乏当今的作品而仍然是推测性的，但考克斯设法提供了一个令人信服的解读，说明该剧如何在 21 世纪具有持续的政治^意义。

第三章对塞缪尔·贝克特1972年的戏剧《不是我》进行分析。作为以种族为重点的性别例外论的破坏，同时它继续以精神病为主题。在此背景下，性别例外论指的是非伊斯兰西方国家的女性比非西方国家的穆斯林女性更自由的话语。阅读本身基于身穿 djellaba 的 Auditor 相对于 Mouth 隐含的种族和宗教差异。考克斯主张女性审计员来平衡代表，并建议该剧破坏性别例外主义，因为它通过极端的节奏疏散了现实中的意识形态，将嘴巴的演讲变成了观众的废话。有一种对语言的精神病性否定巩固了例外主义的意识形态。但，

在对让·热内 (Jean Genet) 的《黑人》( The Blacks , 1958)的解读中，颠覆性别种族主义的关键主线变得更加激进，该书是在阿尔及利亚独立战争和法国去殖民化的背景下阅读的。当观众观看“黑人社区从白人霸权中解放出来”（Cox 123）和白人女性受害者身份的解构时，这里的观众模式是介于痛苦和快乐之间的“补充享受”。观看该剧既有恐惧也有迷恋，正如她在 2014 年巴黎演出时所表现的那样，那场演出引起了一种奇怪的困惑。不理解的想法在没有任何意义的补充享受中发挥作用。争论的倾向是指向a-signifying Real。本章的高潮...