‘Rule Number 1 – It is Possible that Your Only Nation is Imagination’

Abstract

May a country be a work of art? In Belgian Rules/Belgium Rules Jan Fabre sets out to invent Belgium beyond current separatist nationalism, claiming a metonymic relationship between Belgium and theatre, since Belgium was born on the stage of Brussels’s Opera house in 1830. He theatricalizes the institution of the nation by taking up the movement of Belgian carnival parades, in order to historicize it again thanks to his theatricality of repetition, whose agent is the theatrical image in-the-making. The piece is approached as a site of collision between theatrical and historical temporalities. The way Fabre releases the historical/political potential of theatre is explored through Merleau-Ponty’s existential philosophy, Badiou’s invented real and Foucault’s relations of power in institutions. It is concluded that Fabre’s theatre becomes an image itself. Thanks to the metonymic relationship, Belgium is also invented as an image, as an image-nation. Fabre changes the politics of time by disrupting the linear causality of history through his theatricality of repetition. The image-nation becomes a theatrical/political manifest of what is possible in an era challenged by nationalisms.