Let Identity Happen on the Stage! The ID/Entity of a New Living Work of Art

Abstract

Based on an interdisciplinary approach, which involves philosophy, sociology and performance theory, the article questions the performative body on the terrain where politics coincides with aesthetics and the latter becomes a useful means for the arising of a critical instance, involving, in a broader sense, themes of politics and power in the globalized Western world. The analysis proceeds from Italian Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s 1999 performance Genesi: From the museum of sleep. In its disregarding the speech in favour of the ‘condensed images’ – where critical discourse and reality are merged in a unique movement – Genesi sets up an high formalized in(organic) mechanisms in which the human body appears in its ‘bare life’, sharing with animals and automata an ontological proximity. Taking account of the specific training regime of Societas and turning to theatrical studies for an understanding of the “scenic presence” in Genesi, concepts of identity, reality and corporeality are questioned either from an ontological perspective (Heidegger) and within the theoretical framework of “queer” and “post-human” (Butler, Deleuze and Guattari). Where aesthetics and politics enter a zone of indistinction, a bio-political interpretation arises. Through a journey in the philosophy of Foucault and Agamben, the author gets to see the Societas’ rhetoric of dis-human as a resistant approach through the performative body, via the suspension of its own organicity displayed on the stage. In its continuous mutations and hybridizations through sexes and genders, in its disregarding its own organicity, on which sovereign power exerts its absolute control, the performative body does express the loudest ‘gestus’ of a liberation from the traps of a globalized bio-politics.