Todesspritze, Massenimpfung und Welterneuerung: Fantastische Störästhetik und therapeutische Utopie in Constanze Dennigs Dramen und Romanen (am Beispiel von Exstasy Rave, Klonküsse und Die rote Engelin)

Abstract

This paper explores central generic and anthropological aspects of Constanze Dennig’s prose and drama in terms of their »disruptive aesthetic«, which is non-mimetic and disrupts all things familiar: logic, perception, morals and narrative patterns. To this end, I shall focus on three exemplary works: her play Exstasy Rave (2003) and her two novels Die rote Engelin, Eros, Omam und ich (2002) and Klonküsse (2005). Exstasy Rave, which was a huge success on and beyond Austrian stages, deals with the challenges of an aging society and its implications for the individual. Die rote Engelin, Eros, Omam und ich (The Red Angel, Eros, Omam and Me) is about a woman who is abandoned by her husband and embarks on a fantastic feminist journey of emancipation, which culminates in world power, betrayal and death by murder. Klonküsse (Clone Kisses) is about a female scientist and her cloned daughter who pursue a revolutionary project of freeing humanity from emotions through mass vaccination. As Dennig’s heroines both succeed and fail in their rebellion against social constraints and power structures that delimit their individual freedoms, the disruptive aesthetic of her texts serves a fundamental critique of whatever forces discriminate against, inhibit or stunt individual lives. The power of her absurdist-macabre texts lies not in offering trumped-up solutions, but in revealing what she calls the »unlived moments of life«. Being both a writer and a practising psychiatrist, she considers these – ultimately therapeutic – fancies far more interesting than people's actual life-stories.