Abstract
This article discusses how in Howard Barker’s recent work the idea of the subject’s crisis hinges on the introduction of an impersonal or transpersonal life force that persists beyond human agency. The article considers Barker’s metaphorical treatment of the images of land and stone and their interrelationship with the human body, where the notion of subjective crisis results from an awareness of objective forces that transcend the self. In “Immense Kiss” (2018) and “Critique of Pure Feeling” (2018), the idea of crisis, whilst still dominant, seems to lose its intermittent character of singular rupture and reveals itself as a permanent force of dissolution and reification. In these plays, the evocation of nonhuman nature in the love relationships between young men and elderly women affirms the existence of something that goes beyond the individual, which Barker approaches with a late-style poetic sensibility.
About the author
is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Graz and principal investigator of the research project Theatre as Philosophical Enquiry: Aesthetics of the Sublime (funded by the Austrian Science Fund, 2019–2021). From 2002 until 2018 she worked as a lecturer in Theatre Studies at Aberystwyth University in Wales. Selected publications include the monographs Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (2019) and Adorno and Modern Theatre: The Drama of the Damaged Self in Bond, Rudkin, Barker and Kane (2015), and the edited collections Adorno and Performance (co-edited with Will Daddario, 2014), Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance (2010), and Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker (co-edited with David Ian Rabey, 2006). She is one of the core convenors of the Performance Philosophy network.
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