Tracing the Other in the Theatre of the Precarious (Lola Arias, Elfriede Jelinek, Meg Stuart, Wajdi Mouawad, Christoph Marthaler)

Abstract

In Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler poses the question if adequate representation of human vulnerability is possible against the background of media representations of violence and suffering during the Iraq war. She takes Emmanuel Lévinas’s concept of the “precarious other” as her starting point. In addition to Lévinas’s sense of the face, Butler also considers the sense of hearing or the acoustic mediation of vulnerability, and she asks for media that could mediate the vulnerability that is (according Lévinas, and to herself) at the core of humanity: “One would need to hear the face as it speaks in something other than language to know the precariousness of life that is at stake. But what media will let us know and feel that frailty, know and feel at the limits of representation as it is currently cultivated and maintained?” (151). I propose that the portrayal of the suffering and precariousness of the other are created and mediated in some contemporary Performing Arts. Further, I propose the precariousness of the other appears in a profound manner when they are represented, not in a primarily visual manner, but by appealing to and involving the spectators’ other senses, such as the sense of smell, hearing, body perception. From the enormous body of contemporary theatre works that employ the spectator’s senses, I choose pieces by Elfriede Jelinek Meg Stuart, Wajdi Mouawad, and Christoph Marthaler. Their performances are multi-sensory encounters with the precariousness of the other, and, as “postdramatic” performances, they are all situated at the edge of drama, in music theatre. In the following, I first introduce Lévinas’s ethics, a key point of departure for both Butler’s and my own work. Secondly, I elaborate on how I translate it in performances of the precarious. Thirdly, I discuss three examples from the international context of theater performances that engage human vulnerability especially strongly.