Jerome Carroll

Postdramatic theatre and the political : international perspectives on contemporary performance

Is postdramatic theare political and if so how? How does it relate to Brechts ideas of political theatre, for example? How can we account for the relationship between aestetics and politics in new forms of theatre, playwriting, and performance? The 11 chapters by 13 contributors in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatres ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance. Offering analyses of a wide range of internationa performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmanns theoretical positions, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from earlier theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Ranciere and others.

William James and 18th-century anthropology: Holism, scepticism and the doctrine of experience

This article discusses the common ground between William James and the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Recent commentators on this overlap have characterised philosophical anthropology as combining science (in particular biology and medicine) and Kantian teleology, for instance in Kant’s seminal definition of anthropology as being concerned with what the human being makes of itself, as distinct from what attributes it is given by nature. This article registers the tension between Kantian thinking, which reckons to ground experience in a priori categories, and William James’s psychology, which begins and ends with experience. It explores overlap between James’s approach and the characteristic holism of 18th-century philosophical anthropology, which centres on the idea of understanding and analysing the human as a whole, and presents the main anthropological elements of James’s position, namely his antipathy to separation, his concerns about the binomial terms of traditional philosophy, his preference for experience over substances, his sense that this holist doctrine of experience shows a way out of sterile impasses, a preference for description over causation, and scepticism. It then goes on to register the common ground with key ideas in the work of anthropologists from around 1800, along with some references to anthropologists who come in James’s wake, in particular Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, in order to reconceptualise the connection between James’s ideas and the tradition of anthropological thinking in German letters since the late 18th-century, beyond its characterisation as a combination of scientific positivism and teleology.

Philosophical Aesthetics and Philosophical Anthropology at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: Holism, Expressivism, and Antipathy to Separation

This article discusses the relationship between philosophical anthropology and philosophical aesthetics at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the connection of both with literature and the novel form in particular as it develops in the late eighteenth century. The analysis presented goes beyond the usual treatments of aesthetics and anthropology that focus on the sensory or corporeal. Here the connection is seen to turn on an aspect of anthropology’s holism, namely what is identified as its antipathy to separation, and to the ideas about methodology that accompany this antipathy to separation: that an anthropological approach is descriptive, syncretic, fragmentary, and aphoristic. These qualities are seen as particularly suitable for the human, making the novel form as it appears in the late eighteenth century a particularly appropriate medium for a ‘Diskurs vom Menschen’. Antipathy to separation also casts useful light on the connection between anthropology and aesthetics, in which regard I draw links between expressivism as a philosophical approach and anthropology’s antipathy to separation.

‘Indirect’ or ‘Engaged’: A Comparison of Hans Blumenberg's and Charles Taylor's Debt and Contribution to Philosophical Anthropology

Summary This article presents and compares aspects of Charles Taylors and Hans Blumenbergs seemingly opposing views about agency and epistemology, setting them in the context of the tradition in German ideas called ‘philosophical anthropology’, with which both align their thinking. It presents key strands of this tradition, from their inception in the late eighteenth century in the writings of Herder, Schiller and others associated with anthropology to their articulation by thinkers such as Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen and Karl Löwith in the early twentieth century. The main issues here are: mans status as part of nature or as ‘radically divorced’ from nature; the possibility of objective knowledge of man versus the epistemological status of human ‘meaning’; the view of knowledge as abstraction versus ‘concrete’ or ‘lived’ experience. Within these parameters the article contrasts Taylors emphasis on ‘engaged’ agency, embedded in discourses, bodies and predispositions, with Blumenbergs sense of our ‘indirect’ relation to reality: ‘delayed, selective, and above all “metaphorical”’. It concludes that each position may be traced back to a key strand in philosophical anthropology: the one emphasising mans unique freedom, the other that sees mans grasp of reality as uniquely interwoven with a background of meanings.