Analytics of Schizophrenia: A Deleuze-Guattarian Consideration of Buchner's Danton's Death and Weiss's MaratlSade

Abstract

A passing glance over Georg Buchner's Danton's Death and Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade would lure the eye's attention to shapes, images and colorations of a congeneric landscape. The French Revolution serves as the background for both plays, and the dramatization of the deaths of two exemplary figures of the period (Danton and Marat) reinforces, no doubt, the family resemblance between the two texts written so far apart in time (1835 and 1964 respectively). Both plays discuss the optimistic hopes of the early phase of the Revolution, record the ensuing climate of Terror, and note with irony the return to despotic rule. Madness, integral to Weiss's conception (the murder of Marat is a reenactment performed by the inmates of an insane asylum during the Napoleonic era), is also present in the hypertrophied visions of the various characters in Danton's Death. The melancholic tropics and ecstatic domains conjured by the imaginations of Danton and his associates induce a haunted atmosphere which approximates the state of frenzy kindled by the Marquis de Sade and the mental patients of Charenton. Finally, it appears that Buchner and Weiss have authored texts that integrate themes of social revolution and madness with a third component, equally important, that is to say human sexuality. Erotic values inform the texts in question, not as an aspect of human activity equal to any other series of considerations, but as a fundamental on tic counterpoint. In addition, the forms of sexuality delineated in the plays are uncompromisingly extreme, highly profane and militantly transgressive.