Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play. --Julia Kristeva, Black Sun (1) [The play] is not about life as it is lived at all, but about life as it might be lived, about the thought which is not licensed, and about the abolished unconscious. --Howard Barker, Arguments (2) Howard Barker (1946-) creates a tragic world, the avowed arche and telos of which are death. However, far from being tantamount to cessation, nihilistic terminus, or the perfection of life, death comes to designate not just the unknown, but the unknowable. It thus involves a state of nonknowledge that forecloses the normative values of use and exchange, and the orders of meaning and morality. (3) As such, death in Barker's Theatre of Catastrophe features as essentially inscrutable, being at once phenomenon and nonphenomenon, which is to say, neither phenomenologically perceptible nor representable, belonging to the order of enigma, secret, and silence. (4) Barker refers to his Art of Theatre as "crucially an art of death" and, endowing it with an ontologically liminal position, locates his theatre on the bank of the river, which serves as the border between the dead and the living. (5) He declares tragedy "the labour of death" and characterizes tragic art primarily as an art that promotes the "feeling for death." (6) Resonant with Schopenhauer's attestation to the pivotal role of death in human life and thought--whereby death is "the real inspiring genius or the Muse of philosophy," without which "there would hardly have been any philosophizing"--Barker discerns death as the most fundamental subject of art and philosophy, declaring it "the subject of all philosophy and all theatre." (7) Resonant with the later Freud's postulation of death as a fundamental drive and ultimate aim of life ("life is a detour to death") (8) and Heidegger's ontological-existential consideration of death as immanent in human life, (9) Barker observes: "Tragedy's a priori--that we live only to be destroyed by life--renders the notion of wrong decisions meaningless." (10) Indeed, death constitutes a crux around which other aesthetic principles of Barker s tragic drama--prominent among which are ethical speculation, contradiction, pain, anxiety, loss, and excess--constellate. Notably for present purposes, having defined the objects of "loss" as (rational, utilitarian, commonsensical, and empirical modes of) "knowledge" and "morality," he proceeds to associate it with melancholy: "The State of Loss describes a state of lost morality, an ethical vacuum, a denial, a rebuke to order, a melancholy and a pain." (11) Relatedly, as is pervasively evident in his theoretical and dramatic works, pain is pivotal to Barker's tragic work in thematic, dynamic, and aesthetic terms. Pain, as Barker emphasizes, should be perceived as "not disorder but necessity" Barker recognizes pain as "spiritually necessary" to the "tragic sensibility," (12) which--considering its association with loss, contradiction, complexity, ethical ambiguity, and transgression--fosters "a melancholy beauty" which serves as the "whole justification for his theatre." (13) More specifically, Barker establishes a firm, yet fraught, relationship between love, pain, and beauty (though death is also intimately bound up with these three), and molds them into a tension-laden manifold. The ensuing statement confirms the point at issue, with Barker defining his Theatre of Catastrophe as "a theatre...which insists on complexity and pain, and the beauty that can only be created from the spectacle of pain. In Catastrophe... lies the possibility of reconstruction." (14) This aesthetics of loss and excess, this poetics of sacrifice, acquires further dimensions when juxtaposed with the crucial questions of nihilism, the death of God, and ontological inadequacy (that is, the poverty of existence and the paucity of possibility of human existence and experience)--questions with which Barker's characters are obsessed. …

中文翻译：

---

霍华德·巴克（Howard Barker）的灾难剧场中的忧郁本体论、事件伦理学和失落的（m）他者：对 13 个对象的分析

没有忧郁症就没有心理，只有行动或游戏的过渡。--Julia Kristeva, Black Sun (1) [这部剧] 根本不是关于生活的，而是关于可能过的生活，关于未经许可的思想，关于被废除的无意识。——Howard Barker, Arguments (2) Howard Barker (1946-) 创造了一个悲惨的世界，其中公开的结局和结局就是死亡。然而，死亡远不等同于停止、虚无主义的终点或生命的完美，死亡不仅代表未知，而且代表不可知。因此，它涉及一种无知状态，它排除了使用和交换的规范价值，以及意义和道德的秩序。(3) 因此，巴克的灾难剧场中的死亡本质上是高深莫测的，既是现象又是非现象，也就是说，既不是现象学上可感知的，也不是可表征的，属于谜、秘密和沉默的秩序。(4) 巴克将他的戏剧艺术称为“至关重要的死亡艺术”，并赋予其本体论上的界限位置，将他的戏剧置于河岸上，河岸是死者与生者的边界。(5) 他将悲剧称为“死亡的劳动”，并把悲剧艺术定性为一种促进“死亡感”的艺术。(6) 与叔本华对死亡在人类生活和思想中的关键作用的证明产生共鸣——死亡是“真正鼓舞人心的天才或哲学的缪斯”，没有它“几乎不会有任何哲学思考” ——巴克将死亡视为艺术和哲学最基本的主题，宣称它是“所有哲学和所有戏剧的主题”。(7) 与后来弗洛伊德关于死亡是生命的基本动力和最终目标的假设（“生命是走向死亡的迂回”）产生共鸣 (8) 以及海德格尔关于死亡在人类生命中内在存在的本体论存在主义的考虑，(9)巴克观察到：“悲剧是先验的——我们活着只会被生活摧毁——使错误决定的概念变得毫无意义。” (10) 事实上，死亡构成了巴克悲剧戏剧的其他美学原则——其中突出的是伦理思辨、矛盾、痛苦、焦虑、失落和过度——的关键。值得注意的是，就目前而言，将“损失”的对象定义为（理性的，“知识”和“道德”的功利主义、常识和经验模式，他继续将其与忧郁联系起来：“失落状态描述了一种失去道德的状态、道德真空、否认、对秩序的谴责、忧郁和痛苦。” (11) 与此相关的是，正如在他的理论和戏剧作品中普遍存在的那样，痛苦是巴克在主题、动态和美学方面的悲剧作品的关键。正如巴克所强调的，疼痛应该被视为“不是无序而是必然”。巴克认为疼痛对于“悲惨的敏感性”来说是“精神上必不可少的”，(12)——考虑到它与损失、矛盾、复杂性、伦理歧义的关联，和过犯——培养“忧郁的美”，作为“ 完全为他的戏剧辩护。”（13）更具体地说，巴克在爱、痛苦和美之间建立了一种牢固但充满张力的关系（尽管死亡也与这三者密切相关），并将它们塑造成一个充满张力的关系随后的声明证实了这一点，巴克将他的灾难剧院定义为“一个剧院......它坚持复杂性和痛苦，以及只能从痛苦的景象中创造出的美。在灾难中……存在着重建的可能性。”（14）这种损失和过度的美学，这种牺牲的诗学，当与虚无主义、上帝之死和本体论不足（即, 生存的贫乏和人类存在和经验的可能性的匮乏）——巴克笔下的人物所痴迷的问题。…