Parable to Paradigm to Ideology: Thinking through (the Jesuit) Theatre

Abstract

Parable/Paradigm/Ideology With this essay, I would like to present and analyze a paradigm of thought that I refer to as thinking through theatre. This paradigm first appeared to me in Maaike Bleeker’s contribution to Laura Cull’s edited collection Deleuze and Performance (2009). There, the paradigm provided Bleeker with the opportunity to develop key themes in Ivana Muller’s 2004 performance How Heavy Are My Thoughts? through the philosophical lens of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (1994). For Bleeker, Muller’s performance constituted an affective articulation of Deleuzio-Guattarian concepts and helped to elucidate the theatrical dimension of the French philosophers’ dispositif. By the end of her article, Bleeker argues, “How Heavy Are My Thoughts? shows thinking in Deleuzian terms as something that happens ‘in between’: between people, and between people and the things they find themselves confronted with,” while demonstrating that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy constitutes a unique performance in and of itself.1 In what follows, I want to add a peculiar form of dramatic literature to the assemblage of performances and ideas created by Bleeker. By inserting the Jesuit Giovanni Domenico Ottonelli’s Della Christiana Moderatione Del Theatro Libro (Florence, 1652) into that assemblage, I aim to construct a new analytic constellation consisting of Bleeker, Deleuze, Guattari, Muller, the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest, and, of course, myself.2 The addition of Ottonelli and his treatise opens the paradigm of thinking through theatre first surveyed by Bleeker onto a historical terrain where the “dramatic” component of the Jesuit’s writing emerged, not through a traditional staged performance, but in the spiritual conversion of all who had strayed from the Church’s embrace. As a Jesuit, Ottonelli concerned himself with helping each and every individual to perceive the path of salvation paved and preserved by the Jesuit Order, to practice a disciplined life of self-renunciation, and, ultimately, to see the world through the ideological aperture of the Catholic Faith enunciated by the Jesuit founder, Ignatius Loyola. One parable, in particular, from Ottonelli’s treatise reveals his creation as a work of dramatic literature: “Si narra la notabile conversione di uno scenico