Radical Gesture and the Politics of Postdramatic Tragedy: Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains

Abstract

AbstractDuring his short lifetime, Reza Abdoh (1963–1995) was hailed as a trailblazing theater artist in the avant-garde art scenes of both Los Angeles and New York, where he created a series of massive performance spectacles that sought to intervene critically in the American political status quo. His 1992 piece The Law of Remains stages a furious response to the US American AIDS crisis, depicting it through the allegorical lens of a film being made by Andy Warhol based on the life of queer serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. Performed in the ruins of an abandoned hotel ballroom, the piece drew attention in The New York Times for being “one of the angriest theater pieces ever hurled at a New York audience.” This article analyzes the political dimension of Abdoh’s theater by focusing on specific gestural elements that occur at key moments in The Law of Remains. Doing so, it brings together theories of gesture from Hans-Thies Lehmann, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Walter Benjamin, and configures these viewpoints into a constellation through which the politics of gesture in Abdoh can be illuminated. What emerges in Abdoh is a politics of “hopeless hope,” one uniquely meaningful for our planetary present tense.