Performance and/as Exception (ACLA 2016, March 17 -20, Harvard University)
The state of exception, theorized by Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, describes the state's ability to grant exemptions to the normative order of its own law, and in so doing to perform itself as a unified whole. But as this political encounter with the performative suggests, theatre too has a long history of engagement with states of exception, and with a capacity to disrupt and evade normative orders. For theorists and practitioners as wide-ranging as Bertolt Brecht, Harold Pinter, Valie Export, and Peggy Phelan, this rupture is one of performance's most insistent pleasures – and a source of its most trenchant social critique.