Frans-Willem Korsten

Introduction: From Autonomism to Post-Autonomia, from Class Composition to a New Political Anthropology?

This introduction critically addresses the historical development of operaismo/autonomism into “postautonomist” thinking. First, it argues that the very history of postautonomism allows for criticizing the notion of the “history” (or lack thereof) of theorists associated with postautonomist Marxism, such as Antonio Negri. It argues that the “all-or-nothing” characteristic of autonomism lives on in postautonomist theorys denial of mediation (Negri, Berardi), which in fact falls short because of it. Current developments within postautonomist theory, however, offer an alternative to this bipolar logic by redefining notions of subjectivity (Virno, Pasquinelli). The emphasis in this strand of postautonomism given to bio- and anthropo-politics—a new political anthropology –implies a new form of (academic) knowledge production, performed by what Jack Bratich calls the “machinic intellectual.” In this sense, postautononism in fact urges the rethinking of the very idea of the “autonomy” of “self-valorization.”

A Dutch Republican Baroque: Theatricality, Dramatization, Moment and Event

In the Dutch Republic, in its Baroque forms of art, two aesthetic formal modes, theatre and drama, were dynamically related to two political concepts, event and moment. The Dutch version of the Baroque is characterised by a fascination with this world regarded as one possibility out of a plurality of potential worlds. It is this fascination that explains the coincidence in the Dutch Republic, strange at first sight, of Baroque exuberance, irregularity, paradox, and vertigo with scientific rigor, regularity, mathematical logic, and rational distance. In giving a new historical perspective on the Baroque as a specifically Dutch republican one, this study also offers a new and systematic approach towards the interactions among the notions of theatricality, dramatisation, moment, and event: concepts that are currently at the centre of philosophical and political debates but the modern articulation of which can best be considered in the explorations of history and world in the Dutch Republic.

What Roman Paradigm for the Dutch Republic? Baroque Tragedies and Ambiguities Concerning Dominium and Torture

Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy is a volume of essays investigating European tragedy in the seventeenth century, comparing Shakespeare, Vondel, Gryphius, Racine and other vernacular tragedians, as well as neo-Latin dramas by Jesuits and others, and with respect to politics, religion and law.

Introduction: Legal Bodies: Corpus/Persona/Communitas

This issue of Law and Literature, entitled “Legal Bodies: Corpus/Persona/ Communitas,” investigates the various ways that literary and artistic texts have interrogated the modes in which different fields of law have historically conceptualized the notion of “personhood.” The guiding assumption behind this issue is that personhood is not a (biologically) given, stable property of human beings that precedes their interaction with the law, but rather that the notion of personhood is assigned to selected “bodies” by discursive regimes, such as law, medicine, politics, religion, and education. The issue focuses on historical and current (re-)conceptualizations of the notion of personhood within the domain of law, as well as on the various ways that literature, art, and culture are the domains in which the implications and scope of personhood’s legal, political, or medical conceptualizations can be articulated and thought through, and in which alternative understandings of personhood can be proposed. Derived from phersu, the ancient Etruscan term for mask, Roman law adopted the term “persona” to distinguish holders of full civil rights from those who lacked such civil personhood: women, children, slaves, and foreigners. The term’s origin in the theatre indicates that, for the Romans, personhood was not an inalienable property of human beings but was understood as something that was affixed to a natural body, attributing to it a public role and a legal position protected by a set of regulations. As Roberto Esposito recalls, the distinction between persons and non-persons grounds Roman law (and the European legal tradition that emerged out of Roman law), but is also a product of the legal institution. Law, to use Giorgio Agamben’s metaphor, functions as an “anthropological machine,” an apparatus that in assigning personhood to various bodies creates differences between “legal bodies” and “mere biological bodies.”

Towards a New Judicial Scene for Humans and Animals: Two Modes of Hypocrisy

Abstract This article distinguishes between two modes of hypocrisy that relate to two different judicial scenes and cases between ontologically disparate beings, such as human beings and animals. The authors propose to think through what kind of a veritable procedural third could be the judge in cases such as these. Two medieval texts form the point of departure: the 13th-century Dutch epic fable Of Reynaert the Fox and the 10th-century treatise The Case of the Animals versus Man written by the so-called Pure Brethren of Basra. As for the first, it deals with the fundamentally theatrical solution to the problem how a judge can operate in cases between man and animal, which is that the judge acts, hypocritically, as masked animal or masked man. As for the second, it proposes that a veritable third, an ontologically different being, acts as a judge, which in this case is a “jinni”; in the Islamic world a ghostlike-being that is ontologically equally real as man and animal. Hypocrisy here falls back on one of its other etymological meanings: to come in between from below in order to separate, bind, and assess. In the contemporary situation, the figure of the jinni could be thought as an intelligent biotechnological being that could operate as judge. Such a judge would be ontologically different from man and animal but would be judging the cases between them bound by the common denominator of their machinic materiality. Thinking through the consequences of the two solutions of hypocritical judging, the authors suggest that the Legendrian logic of theatricality, with the grounding “zero” as its binding symbol, should be replaced by a dramatic logic of Deleuzian combat under the sign of the unlimited.

Apostrophe, witnessing and its essentially theatrical modes of address: Maria Dermôut on Pattimura and Kara Walker on the New Orleans flooding

Apostrophe is best known as a punctuation mark (’) or as a key poetic figure (with a speaker addressing an imaginary or absent person or entity). In origin, however, it is a pivotal rhetorical figure that indicates a ‘breaking away’ or turning away of the speaker from one addressee to another, in a different mode. In this respect, apostrophe is essentially theatrical. To be sure, the turn away implies two different modes of address that may follow upon one another, as is hinted at by the two meanings of the verb ‘to witness’: being a witness and bearing witness. One cannot do both at the same time. My argument will be, however, that in order to make witnessing work ethically and responsibly, the two modes of address must take place simultaneously, in the coincidence of two modalities of presence: one actual and one virtual. Accordingly, I will distinguish between an address of attention and an address of expression. Whereas the witness is actually paying attention to that which she witnesses, she is virtually (and in the sense Deleuze intended, no less really) turning away in terms of expression. The two come together in what Kelly Oliver called the ‘inner witness’. The simultaneous operation of two modes of address suggests that Caroline Nevejan’s so-called YUTPA model would have to include two modalities of ‘you’. Such a dual modality has become all the more important, in the context of the society of the spectacle. One text will help me first to explore two modes of address through apostrophe. I will focus on a story by Dutch author Maria Dermôut, written in the fifties of the twentieth century, reflecting on an uprising and the subsequent execution of its leader in the Dutch Indies in 1817. Secondly, I will move to American artist Kara Walker’s response, in the shape of an installation and a visual essay, to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005. The latter will serve to illustrate a historic shift in the theatrical nature and status of ‘presence’ in the two modes of address. Instead of thinking of the convergence of media, of which Jenkins speaks, we might think of media swallowing up one another. For instance, the theatrical structure of apostrophe is swallowed up, and in a sense perverted, by the model of the spectacle in modern media. This endangers the very possibility of witnessing in any ethical sense of the word.

Cultural Analysis – Joseph Plays

For several of his plays, Vondel found a source of inspiration, or a first impulse to write, in seeing a print, sketch, or painting. Both Joseph plays, Joseph in Dothan and Joseph in Egypt , conform to the classicist requirement that the entire action take place within one day. This leads to a form of narrative condensation in the plays that resembles the forms of condensation in pictures and, as we will see, in dreams. Joseph in Dothan takes as its major event the capture and selling of Joseph by his (half-) brothers. In relation to both plays, Vondel liked to work with emblematic or iconographic possibilities, as well as with the distinction between inner and outer theatre. Keywords:Joost van den Vondel; Joseph in Dothan ; Joseph in Egypt ; Joseph plays; theatre