Foucault's Theatres ed. by Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Foucault's Theatres ed. by Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman David Kornhaber FOUCAULT'S THEATRES. Edited by Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020; pp. 250. "I would like to know how illness has been staged, how madness has been staged, how crime has been staged" (222), says Michel Foucault of his own body of work in the rare and revealing 1978 interview "The Philosophical Scene," newly translated and printed as an appendix to Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman's important edited collection Foucault's Theatres. That Foucault has for so long evaded a book-length treatment in the realm of theatre and performance studies even as his methods have infused the same has always been something of a mystery. Finally, in Fisher and Gotman's new compendium, he takes center stage. In the same interview, Foucault describes his own books as "dramaturgies" (223); here at last they are submitted to dramatic analysis. Of course, Foucault has hardly been absent from theatre and performance studies in any total sense. "A quick survey," Fisher and Gotman write, "suggests that it is obligatory to mention Foucault, but rarely to inhabit his thought: to cite and to enlist but not to engage" (7). That is in part a reflection of the purposefully fractured and fractious nature of Foucault's discourses, what Gotman describes as "the anarchaeology of movement-towards 'truth' … a form of thinking that embraces concurrence without shying away, without pretense to universal or objectivizing certainty or totality" (64–65; emphasis in original). The scene of Foucault's thought is always changing, the narrative always turning. Yet for Fisher and Gotman, the complexity of Foucault's intellectual dramaturgy offers exciting opportunities. As they state in their joint introduction, their collection seeks "to remedy what we believe to be the neglect within theatre and performance studies of systemic engagement with Foucault's intellectual contribution to theatre and performance thinking" (9). It is a mission that extends in at least two directions: to better situate Foucault within the study of theatre and performance and to better situate theatre and performance within the study of Foucault. More so than most, Foucault's elusive philosophy is well-suited to the multivocality of the edited collection over the monovocal proclamations of the monograph. With twelve chapters as well as an introduction, afterword, and interview, Foucault's Theatres offers many entry points to the multiple theatres of the volume's title. The first four entries cover "Truth, Methods, Genealogies" and investigate the theatrical and performative elements of Foucault's different discursive modes. "Foucault often writes at the edge of some stage," writes Mark Jordan in [End Page 446] the evocative opening of his essay on "Foucault's philosophical theatres" (25). The description applies equally well to the visceral sites that frequently feature in Foucault's writing—the executioner's platform, the monarch's dais—as to the degree to which his philosophy always exists in proximity to the performative. Thus Jordan offers an explication of what Foucault himself describes as "philosophy not as thought, but as theatre" (27). Aline Wiame continues this line of inquiry in her synchronous subsequent essay "The Dramas of Knowledge: Foucault's Genealogical Theatre of Truth." Noting Foucault's description of his youthful encounter with Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as a "rupture" in his experience as a philosophy student, she expounds on the degree to which "Foucault's style of writing is theatrical, or more precisely, dramatic" and convincingly argues that "Foucault develops a particular kind of writing which is not about theatre but which thinks through theatre," using the tropes and topos of the theatre as a means of newly understanding topics from history to philosophy (38–39; emphasis in original). Turning to another mode of discourse, Magnolia Pauker offers an original examination of Foucault as interview subject. Acknowledging the paradox of the intensely private author's preponderance of printed interviews (over a hundred across eighty publications in just twenty-three years), she demonstrates that "the performative scene of the interview offers a particular opportunity for counterhegemonic analysis" (50). Gotman herself turns to the lecture hall, examining Foucault's 1979–80 lectures on...