Invisibility and Indexicality: Reflections on the Aesthetics and Politics of Schiller’s Theater

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This paper argues that Schiller’s theater develops a political semiosis organized around operations of indexicality, understood as the attempt to trace a figure back to its invisible conditions of genesis. This notion of indexicality linking visible form to invisible origin is developed in the Kallias-Briefe in reflections on technical form (technische Form) and acquires a distinctively political character in theatrical representation. A tension emerges in the manner in which Schiller’s theater translates agonistic fields of invisibility (instinct and reason, cosmos and character, purposiveness and chaos, necessity and possibility) into visible signs. On the one hand, Schiller’s theater exposes diffuse forms of power that cannot be traced back to a sovereign instance (as is the case with Elisabeth in Maria Stuart) and seeks to reactivate in spectators an indexical capacity that links political agency to its conditions of genesis in a character. On the other hand, Schillerian theater makes the character of the dramatic figure into a zone of inconsistency through which political possibilities are generated and foreclosed. In Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orelans and Wilhelm Tell, for example, the character of the hero disrupts the concentration of normativity in the body of the king or the collective democratic body respectively, thereby investing the dramatic figure with a power of deviation. This tension in the simultaneous repairing and disrupting of politically inflected forms of indexicality is woven through Schiller’s theater and is generative of the radiant power of its dramatic figures. These figures can never be completely extracted from the exterior force of law or from the power of the norm—whence their restorative force. Nor do such figures harmonize perfectly with the instantiation of law and norm—whence their emancipatory force.