eJournals Forum Modernes Theater 29/1-2

Forum Modernes Theater
fmth
0930-5874
Narr Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/1201
2018
291-2 Balme

Farewell to the Sublime?

1201
2018
Esa Kirkkopelto
The recent massive terrorist attacks committed by religious fundamentalists all over the world give the performing arts a reason for a newkind of self-criticism. Fromnowon, it seems impossible that any performance could credibly manifest, let alone praise, the idea of selfsacrifice as an individual heroic act at any level of interpretation. The political resistance must disregard the possibility of terrorism at the imaginary level as well. If this quite obvious but intuitive conclusion is taken critically, its consequences for our way of considering Western performance aesthetics and performance practices are considerable. First, it raises doubts about the modernist and post-modern attempts during the second half of the last century to revive the sublime as an aesthetic category. To continue the criticism by James Elkins, who has suggested “the moratorium to the word” (2009), I would like to submit that “cryptoreligious” concept to a deconstruction, which focuses on its “dynamic” aspects. The deconstruction of the sublime in performance is directly linked to the capacity of performance practices to deal with their intrinsic anthropocentric presuppositions. Can we encounter, imagine and think a performing body otherwise than through sublime scenarios?
fmth291-20047
Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism Esa Kirkkopelto (Helsinki) The recent massive terrorist attacks committed by religious fundamentalists all over the world give the performing arts a reason for a new kind of self-criticism. From now on, it seems impossible that any performance could credibly manifest, let alone praise, the idea of selfsacrifice as an individual heroic act at any level of interpretation. The political resistance must disregard the possibility of terrorism at the imaginary level as well. If this quite obvious but intuitive conclusion is taken critically, its consequences for our way of considering Western performance aesthetics and performance practices are considerable. First, it raises doubts about the modernist and post-modern attempts during the second half of the last century to revive the sublime as an aesthetic category. To continue the criticism by James Elkins, who has suggested “ the moratorium to the word ” (2009), I would like to submit that “ cryptoreligious ” concept to a deconstruction, which focuses on its “ dynamic ” aspects. The deconstruction of the sublime in performance is directly linked to the capacity of performance practices to deal with their intrinsic anthropocentric presuppositions. Can we encounter, imagine and think a performing body otherwise than through sublime scenarios? 1. The title of the article carries a distant echo of Barnett Newman ’ s famous slogan from the year 1948, “ The Sublime is now ” . Theoretical discussion on the significance of the sublime as an aesthetic category has taken a new turn in the new millennium. Whereas authors writing during the second half of last century, such as de Man, Lyotard, Richir, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, attempted to revive this classical category and divest it of its metaphysical trappings, nowadays many are inclined to suggest that the sublime should be abandoned altogether. This article aims to fuel the debate with evidence from the domain of the performing arts. The discussion in this case is related to the capacity of performances to deal critically with terrorist violence, a political and humanitarian problem that has become global in scale. Terrorist attacks seem quite faithfully to follow certain dramaturgical patterns familiar to the Western theatrical tradition, a historical familiarity that risks compromising artists ’ critical ability to approach the subject. The reasons for this inability are deeply rooted in Western aesthetics and, as I will argue, come back to a certain interpretation of the sublime experience. I will start by quoting arguments from different contemporary thinkers who have adopted a clearly anti-sublime stance. The following series of quotations from James Elkins ’ essay “ Against the sublime ” sums up his criticism on the topic: There is some evidence that the sublime still owns us. 1 The sublime has come to be the place where thoughts about religious truth, revelation, and other more or less unusable concepts have congregated. 2 [T]he essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling or speech, transcend the human. 3 Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 47 - 55. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen It is important not to assume that the sublime, presence, or transcendence, are philosophic masks that can be removed, revealing a hidden religious discourse. They are that discourse. 4 I would suggest that to move forward, contemporary art criticism might begin by acknowledging that the sublime cannot be fully excavated from its crypto-religious contexts. 5 [I]t is an effect of the sublime itself, clear evidence that the sublime cannot be adequately explored unless the writing finds a way to move back and forth from discourse on to discourse of. 6 As a second example of contemporary criticism, I quote Jacques Rancière, who in The Future of the Image criticizes the legacy of Adorno and Lyotard for its “ inflated ” use of the term “ unpresentable ” : Under what conditions can it be stated that certain events cannot be represented? Under what conditions can an unpresentable phenomenon be given a specific conceptual shape? Obviously, the line of inquiry is not neutral. It is motivated by a certain intolerance for an inflated use of the notion of the unpresentable and a constellation of allied notions: the unpresentable, the unthinkable, the irredeemable. The inflated usage [of the unpresentable] subsumes under a single concept all sorts of phenomena, processes and notions, ranging from Moses ’ s ban on representation, via the Kantian sublime, the Freudian primal scene, Duchamp ’ s Grand Verre, or Malevitch ’ s White Square on White Background, to the Shoah; and it surrounds them all with an aura of holy terror. 7 Both of these arguments point to the fundamentally uncritical nature of their object. Whereas according to Elkins the sublime blurs boundaries and escapes the possibility of criticism, for Rancière it leads to the rejection of critique. However, the sublime could also be criticized nowadays for ecological reasons. The disqualification of the idea of “ nature ” as an all-encompassing whole also places the sublime in a questionable light. Allow me to quote Bruno Latour at this point: Let us ponder a minute what is meant by the notion of ‘ anthropocene ’ , this amazing lexical invention proposed by geologists to put a label on our present period. We realise that the sublime has evaporated as soon as we are no longer taken as those puny humans overpowered by ‘ nature ’ but, on the contrary, as a collective giant that, in terms of terawatts, has scaled up so much that it has become the main geological force shaping the Earth. 8 Or as Timothy Morton writes: Two and a half thousand people showed up at the University of Arizona in Tucson for a series of talks on cosmology. Evidently there is a thirst for thinking about the universe as a whole. Why is the same fascination not there for global warming? It ’ s because of the oppressive claustrophobic horror of actually being inside it. You can spectate ‘ the universe ’ as an ersatz aesthetic object: you have the distance provided by the biosphere itself, which acts as a spherical cinema screen. Habit tells us that what ’ s displayed on that screen (like the projections in a planetarium) is infinite, distant - the whole Kantian sublime. But inside the belly of the whale that is global warming, it ’ s oppressive and hot and there is not ‘ away ’ anymore. 9 From this one might already conclude that the sublime has reached a crisis in the new millennium. However, as my following remarks will show, this is not yet all. It seems to me that the issue and its relevance look quite different from the perspective of the performing arts as opposed to the visual arts, which have dominated the post-modern discussion on the sublime. 48 Esa Kirkkopelto (Helsinki) 2. The massive terrorist attacks perpetrated all over the world in recent years in the name of ISIS, as well as the simultaneous rise of populism in national policies, give us as thinkers and makers of theatre a reason to develop a new kind of self-criticism. From now on, it would seem quite impossible for a theatre performance credibly to manifest, let alone praise, the use of violence as a means of serving political purposes. It would also be problematic to present self-sacrifice as an acceptable or admirable individual solution, as a manifestation of exceptional and exemplary courage, at any level of interpretation. Simultaneously, the political resistance that raises objections to the fascist and racist agendas of populists has to discard the use of violence at every level of argumentation, even the imaginary level. This is not simply because we are now living under emergency laws, or because we think it is correct to respect the memory of the victims of recent terrorist attacks. Public security has become our common cause, and the majority accepts the measures adopted to maintain it regardless of what one thinks about their rightness, or of whether one is scared or not. By behaving as we do we are not simply censoring ourselves, which would imply that, sometime later and in more secure circumstances, we might return to a rhetoric that better corresponds with our convictions. We, too, are liable to think that the Western way of life and state control are to be overcome, but not like this! The fact that many find it possible to reason in this way shows the basic weakness of our liberal positions and values. To what extent do our aesthetic attitudes, as well as the ethics of artmaking, reflect and thereby promote this same weakness? Considering terrorist actions aesthetically or rhythmically, as we do in theatre and in the arts in general, makes it easy to recognize their general dynamics. On the aesthetic level it is a question of the sublime. At the same time, as art theoreticians continue to re-visit this concept and the corresponding experience, in the name of posthumanism, for example, 10 on the affective level it constitutes one of the strongest driving forces of popular entertainment, populist and nationalist rhetoric, and even Islamist terrorism. Is this a coincidence? What do these two sorts of “ sublime ” have in common? May we even be talking of different things? What sort of critique should we exercise here? As Islamist militants in the Middle East demolish ancient monuments that belong to the world ’ s cultural heritage, impose the burqa on female citizens in the areas they govern, and achieve martyrdom by carrying out suicidal terrorist attacks on civilians they regard as miscreants, are they not throwing back in the faces of their Western spectators the same values the Western world once regarded as fundamental to its own aesthetics and politics? As a reminder of these values, allow me to quote a few passages from the “ Analytic of the Sublime ” in Immanuel Kant ’ s Critique of Judgment from 1790: Perhaps the most sublime passage in the Jewish Law is the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth, etc. 11 Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or a thought ever been expressed more sublimely, than in that description above the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): ‘ I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil ’ . 12 It is rather in its chaos that most arouses our ideas of the sublime, or in its wildest and most ruleless disarray and devastation, provided it displays magnitude and might. 13 For what is it that is an object of the highest admiration even to the savage? It is a person 49 Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism who is not terrified, not afraid, and hence does not yield to danger but promptly sets to work with vigor and full deliberation. Even in a fully civilized society there remains this superior esteem for the warrior, except that we demand more of him: that he also demonstrates all the virtues of peace - gentleness, sympathy, and even appropriate care for his own person - precisely because they reveal to us that his mind cannot be subdued by danger. 14 Even the war has something sublime about it if it is carried on in an orderly way and with respect for the sanctity of the citizens ’ rights. At the same time it makes the way of thinking of a people that carries it on in this way all the more sublime in proportion to the number of dangers in the face of which it courageously stood its ground. 15 Here Kant lists phenomena that have traditionally been considered susceptible to the evocation of a “ sublime ” experience. Some of them relate to representability, some to the display of “ power ” (Gewalt). In combination, they easily evoke associations with sacrificial violence that nowadays is related to Islamist terrorism. To blame Kant for laying the foundations for the aesthetics of terrorism would be absurd, of course, but it is also hard to keep him outside the affair insofar as he is one of the major theoreticians on the topic. One might suggest that the problem here is precisely such associations, the imaginary amalgam at which Kant himself aimed his criticism. To fight these associations, however, one should know how to stop them and with what one could replace them. Despite the insistence of Paul de Man, 16 for instance, that these and other Kantian examples should be understood not from a psychological perspective but as illustrating the transcendental divide and tension between the faculties, the confusion here is nevertheless hard to avoid in practice. Why is this so? The instance that undergoes some sort of self-sacrifice in Kantian analysis is the power of the imagination in its desperate attempt to bridge reason and perception. The imagination, according to Kant, “ succumbs ” (unterliegen) to the dominance (Gewalt) of nature 17 and “ sacrifices ” (aufopfern) 18 its might and freedom for the sake of Reason. If one tries to imagine how imagination works at the moment it encounters phenomena such as those listed above, one quite spontaneously ends up with fantasies to do with death and resurrection. The inability of the imagination to imagine its own working gives rise to these fantasies. From a longer historical perspective, this strand of the sublime, which in Kantian analysis is referred to as “ dynamic ” , has dominated the tradition of Western aesthetics, frequently also espousing anti-theatrical attitudes. One of the starting points was Pericles ’ funeral oration, in which he called for the public, and especially women, to stop mourning the victims of war who had given their lives for the cause of the polis. It continued with the Platonic philosophical over-writing of the classical tragedies, replacing the tragic catharsis with the sublime elevation caused by the serene death of the philosopher-hero. The Crucifixion followed, as the sufferings of Christian martyrs were secularized and modernized in the writings of Diderot, Rousseau, Winckelmann, Goethe and Lessing. Finally, Friedrich Schiller gave this dramaturgical tradition its fullest theoretical account, basing his analysis on the conceptuality of Kantian aesthetics. In this respect the Schillerian legacy is questionable in two senses. On the one hand, it informs Idealist philosophy, smuggling in motifs that, much later, allowed George Bataille, for instance, to criticize the sacrificial logic of speculative idealism. 19 On the other hand, Schiller ’ s aesthetics soon became the target of his followers ’ artistic criticism. By way of an example, the focal question for Hölderin was the staging of the self-sacrifice. 20 50 Esa Kirkkopelto (Helsinki) Regardless of whether we stage the death of a martyr in a Baroque mourning play, or witness the victory of modern over ancient morality in a neo-classical tragedy, or portray a quasi-archaic fertility rite to challenge the values of Western metaphysics, the sublime scenario 21 remains the same: something, or someone, has to die, disappear, so that something else, better, more alive, more infinite, immaculate and innocent, can come forth and manifest itself on stage, in front of us. Rebirth, renaissance, creation and epiphany through destruction, calmness in the midst of struggle, serenity and blessing are reached by going through chaos and dispersion in the history of the Spirit, the Nation, Class or eternal Nature, and in the imagination of an individual participant, spectator or reader. In other words, if Kantian analysis is replaced and applied to stage performance, as Schiller was among the first to suggest, the consequence would unavoidably be psychological, agonistic and heroic for the simple reason that human beings are watching other human beings in theatre, and their imagination in this context tends to be thoroughly anthropomorphic and anthropocentric. 22 It seems obvious that, despite the cultural differences, violent Islamism does not escape the logic of sacrificial imagination embedded in the cultural and individual imagination of Westerners. As the facts already imply and as so many experts have argued, 23 Jihadism is deeply intermingled with the crisis of Western citizenship, aggravated by refugee crises, socioeconomic segregation and secularization, and it uses these phenomena as its fuel. However, mere socio-political facts do not explain the ideology, 24 neither does religion nor related traditions. Historically and culturally, the ideals of self-sacrifice and assassination belong to the Shi ’ ite tradition, in other words the branch of Islam to which Sunni militants are violently opposed: suicide is basically prohibited by the Koran. 25 As Navid Kermani points out, Al-Qa ’ ida ’ s ideology takes root among modern urban westernized Muslims, from the “ mixture incorporating anti-capitalism, the cult of martyrdom, Third World rhetoric, totalitarian ideology and science fiction ” . 26 The influence of the Christian tradition, in which martyrdom and self-sacrifice have always had major significance, is not excluded here, either. For the same reason, the main differences between school shootings, Anders Breivig and Islamist terror are not necessarily ideological. As Kermani argues, the “ psychological profile ” of all such attacks is “ a modern, Western one ” : By means of a single act, the crazed killer acquires a surrogate for that which is lacking, almost by definition, in modern society: a comprehensive framework of meaning in which the individual has his allocated place. The act is preceded by a phase of withdrawal, separation, subjectively perceived rejection or conscious isolation - even when the outward forms of bourgeois existence are being maintained. 27 It may be that post-Kantian art critics and philosophers, who in repeated attempts have aimed at distinguishing the true sublime from the false, and the finite and deconstructive sublime from the infinite and metaphysical, have left unguarded a door through which the anthropomorphic and the sacrificial sublime can slip in. How should such an intruder be dealt with? How could imagining be stopped at the right moment? 3. One can easily understand why, in the visual arts, the sublime may have appeared at a certain moment in history to be an emanci- 51 Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism patory concept. Most contemporary theories - Newman ’ s revival of the sublime and Jean- François Lyotard ’ s post-modern update in the 1980 s, as well as present-day critiques - have been motivated by attempts to challenge the dominance of the figure and its representation, and to liberate visibility and aesthesis from earlier aesthetic ideals and ideological constraints. The story is not necessarily that different in the realm of the performing arts, and especially in the theatre, given that different genres of art have followed different paths in their sublime logic. In Kantian terms one could argue that, whereas the art critic in the visual arts has placed more emphasis on the socalled “ mathematical sublime ” , based on the loss of form due to a superior magnitude, the critic in the performing arts has found more inspiration in the “ dynamic sublime ” , based on the loss of form to a superior power. Whereas in the first case, the phenomenon challenges the subject of the representation, in the latter case it puts in play her corporality. Let us consider, for instance, the repeated attempts during the past century to revive the Dionysiac origins of theatre in the names of Artaud and Nietzsche, either by staging sacrificial rituals or by returning in the performances to the function of those rituals. Examples are early Grotowski, The Performance Group, Joseph Beuys, or the activists of Vienna. A lot happens in their performances, but the idea of human sacrifice or self-sacrifice remains among their constant reference points. 28 Today it is also legitimate to ask to what extent these examples of scenic avant-garde only re-ritualize and perpetuate the sacrificial logic that characterizes the work of actors in bourgeois theatres where, night after night, they are supposed to satisfy the claim of their spectators for “ authenticity ” , “ self-expression ” and “ presence ” . 29 This kind of aestheticism dating back to Schiller may have been condemned a long time ago in a certain type of ideological critique, but at the level of artistic practice the sublime scenario is still surprisingly insistent. Here is an example, which, like all those that precede it, is universally familiar. In 2007 Erika Fischer-Lichte wrote about Marina Abramovic´´s body art as follows: When Abramovic´ crushed the glass, cut the five-pointed star into her skin, flogged herself, or lay down on the ice cubes, she did not emit the slightest sign of pain. She restricted herself to performing actions that perceivably changed her body; she transgressed its limits without ever showing any external sign of the inner states triggered by it. 30 However, as in the performance thirty years ago, she did not show a single sign of pain, although one could see that she had cramps and her back turned a deep red. 31 It is, in particular, the performance artists above [i. e. “ Abramovic´, Pane, Burden, Acconci, The Viennese actionists, The Fluxus artists, Joseph Beuys, and others ” ] who have paved the way for a redefinition of aesthetic experience as liminal experience. 32 A performance first and foremost, means passing a threshold - entering a state of liminality. 33 My point is not to criticize the aforementioned artists. That would be moralistic and simplistic. It is more relevant to note how, via the intermediation of Abramovic´ and other artists in the genre of so-called “ ordeal art ” , 34 Fischer-Lichte re-positions the sublime logic from the arts field back to the critical field, and how she uses selected artistic examples to sustain her interpretation of the so-called “ performative turn ” . The “ liminal norm ” of performance studies has faced criticism since the beginning of the millennium, notably from Jon McKenzie, 35 but it may be that the aesthetic conditions of that norm have attracted less attention. Nevertheless, the quoted passages go to 52 Esa Kirkkopelto (Helsinki) the core of the issue: this, as I will argue, is the performing body and our understanding of it, an understanding that is always entangled with the question of the power (and the powerlessness) of the imagination. At the beginning of my essay I noted how the sublime appears to us today as a suspicious concept on account of its possible uncriticality and anthropocentricism. I then drew attention to how it has been considered from different angles in the Western traditions of the visual and the performing arts. It is, in fact, astounding that these artistic strands of the sublime have rarely encountered one another, even though from a historical perspective they tend to feature in the same periods and the same cities. One fundamental reason for this lack of encounter, or this reciprocal repression, may be that the “ mathematical ” and the “ dynamic sublime ” do not really encounter one another in Kant, either. 36 A more obvious and historical reason is that the relation between the avant-garde and the sublime has remained ambiguous in the visual arts. Although, on the one hand, conceptual art and performance art since the 1950 s have opposed the openly sublime values of modernists (such as Pollock, Reinhardt, Newman, and Rothko), their revolt was not immune to the sublimity and the related theatricality on the other side, such as in body art. 37 One critic who has to be mentioned at this point, among the few who in my opinion have touched on the subject, is Michael Fried, who criticized minimalism in his text “ Art and Objecthood ” precisely for its hidden and disavowed corporality. 38 If we consider the avant-garde in the visual arts (such as conceptual and performance art) as a form of progressive liberation from the human point of view and denomination, we already make a sublime move in the dynamic sense of the phenomenon. The abstraction, no matter whether it takes place in the name of purification, reduction, multiplication, defiguration, destruction, formalization, conceptualization, ascesis or mysticism, cannot necessarily do without a certain simultaneous fantasy concerning the disappearance or dissolution of human corporeal agency, of yourself or your fellow, or of yourself as your inferior fellow, and the related theatricality. 4. Lyotard already raised the question that assumes importance at this point in his essay on the sublime and the avant-garde: “ How to distinguish between hidden figure and non-figure? ” 39 At the time, Lyotard believed that such a distinction was possible. Today I would not be so sure about that. As Navid Kermani concludes: The terrorists ’ appropriation of a religious tradition is fundamentally no different from the way in which the Fascists made use of the obvious construct of an Aryan-German primeval history. It has scarcely more to do with the real history of the Sunni Arab world than the Valhalla mythology of the Nazis with real remembered German history. The images may be old, traditional or archaic, but the use of them is decidedly modern. 40 No matter what we think about the historical or philosophical pertinence of this analogy, on the aesthetic level it is hard to avoid. Terrorists mix these things up anyway! No matter how sophisticated our idea of the sublime is, or how “ liminal ” the nature of our boundary experience is, we are never safe from caricature, which concerns nothing more and nothing less than the human character. The essential characteristic of that character is that it is able to multiply itself, to quote itself, to divide itself into two parts, into an inferior sensible part and a superior supra-sensible part, and to “ sacrifice ” one 53 Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism for the other. It may be that there is no longer anything to be represented or imitated at the sublime moment, but what we can still do is to imitate the very act of reaching the limit. In contrast to how it appears, the presentation is not (yet) finished: it continues theatrically. This dramaturgical schema or figure with which we have deeply identified ourselves as subjects has genuinely and intrinsically engaged our imagination, does not cease to haunt it, and does so all the more powerfully the less there is to be seen or perceived. If in your scenic imagination you combine the idea of the white cube or the black box with the idea of bloodshed you can imagine a kind of performance against which we nowadays, as spectators and makers of theatre, might dare to express our reserve. A critical doubt arises regarding the motives at play every time the bodies of the performers are disfigured, mutilated, covered with waste, filth and blood; every time their bodies are reduced spectacularly to “ mere ” bodies, flesh, meat or an informal mass; every time a performance plays with the imaginary threat of violence. Without resorting to Girardian moralism vis-à-vis presumed “ primordial ” or “ fundamental ” violence (because what is that, after all, other than another way of sacralizing violence? ), I would rather argue as follows. The fact that all violent acts are sustained by a certain kind of imagination 41 does not imply that imagination is violent through and through. The link between violence and imagination is always based on the mediation of the human figure, which in turn is an imaginary construct. Therefore, in the age of terrorism, it is our special challenge as artists and critics to liberate our imagination from its anthropocentric and anthropomorphic closure, and to learn to imagine differently even when we are dealing with living human beings and bodies, as we do in the performing arts. Notes 1 James Elkins, “ Against the Sublime ” , in: http: / / www.academia.edu/ 163451/ Against_the_Sublime (2009/ revised in 2013), p. 1. Published in: Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte (eds.), Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, New York 2011, pp. 20 - 42. 2 Ibid., p. 10. 3 Ibid., pp. 11 - 12. 4 Ibid., p. 12. 5 Ibid., p. 14. 6 Ibid., p. 9. 7 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, London and New York 2008, p. 10. 8 Bruno Latour, “ Waiting for Gaia. Composing the common world through arts and politics ” . A lecture at the French Institute, London, November 2011: http: / / www.bruno-latour.fr/ sites/ default/ files/ 124-GAIA- LONDON-SPEAP_0.pdf [accessed 6 February 2018]. 9 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis 2013, p. 132. Morton ’ s remark seems to be based on his psychological interpretation of the Kantian sublime. Cf. Ecology without Nature, Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London 2007, p. 16, 46, 76, 130 - 132. 10 Cf. Claire Colebrook, “ Not Kant, Not Now. Another Sublime ” , in: Aesthetics in the 21 st Century. Speculations V, New York, 2014, pp. 127 - 157; Daniel Mafe, “ Art and the sublime: the paradox of indeterminacy unknowing and (dis)orientation in the presentation of the unpresentable ” , in: eJournalist, 2009, 9(1). 11 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, transl. by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis 1987 [1790], § 28, p. 135. 12 Ibid., § 49, p. 185. 13 Ibid., § 23, pp. 99 - 100. 14 Ibid., § 28, p. 121. 15 Ibid., § 28, p. 122. 16 Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, Minneapolis and London 1996, pp. 122 - 123. 54 Esa Kirkkopelto (Helsinki) 17 Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 28, p. 121. 18 Ibid., p. 129. 19 Georges Bataille, “ Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice ” , in: Œ evres completes, vol. XII. Paris 1988, pp. 326 - 245. 20 Cf. Esa Kirkkopelto, Le théâtre de l´expérience. Contributions à la théorie de la scène. Paris 2008, pp. 235 - 238. 21 Ibid., pp. 141 - 147. 22 Cf. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 141 - 142. 23 Cf. Slavoj Ž i ž ek, “ Are the Worst Really Full of Passionate Intensity? ” , in: New Statesman, 10 January 2015, http: / / www.newstatesman.com/ world-affairs/ 2015/ 01/ slavoj-i-ek-charlie-hebdomassacre-are-worst-really-full-passionateintensity [accessed 7 October 2017]; Gauchet, Marcel, “ Le fondamentalisme islamique est le signe paradoxal de la sortie du religieux ” , in: Le Monde, 21 November 2015, http: / / www.lemonde.fr/ idees/ article/ 2015/ 11/ 21/ marcel-gauchet-le-fondamentalismeislamique-est-le-signe-paradoxal-de-la-sortie-du-religieux_4814947_3232. html#xc87l8ym0cHJEiEi.99 [accessed 7 October 2017]; Jason Burke, “ L'Etat islamique propose une vie plus excitante que de travailler au McDonald's ” , an interview with Jason Burke in: Le Temps, 8 June 2016, https: / / www.letemps.ch/ monde/ 2016/ 06/ 08/ islamique-propose-une-vie-plus-excitantetravailler-mcdonald-s [accessed 7 October 2017]; Kenan Malik, “ Between Rage and Terror ” , in: Kenan Malik ’ s Blog “ Pandaemonium ” , 7 September 2016, https: / / kenanmalik.wordpress.com/ 2016/ 09/ 07/ betweenrage-and-terror/ [accessed 7 October 2017]. 24 Fethi Benslama, Un furieux désir de sacrifice, Paris 2016, pp. 65 - 91. 25 Navid Kermani, “ Roots of terror: suicide, martyrdom, self-redemption and Islam ” , in: Open Democracy, 21 February 2002: https: / / www.opendemocracy.net/ faith-islamicworld/ article_88.jsp [accessed 8 October 2017]. (Re-published in German: Dynamit des Geistes. Martyrium, Islam und Nihilismus, Göttingen 2002.) 26 Kermani, “ Roots of terror ” . 27 Kermani, Dynamit des Geistes. 28 Cf. Erika Fischer-Lichte ’ s account on the function of ritual and (self-)sacrifice in 20 th century theatre in: Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual. Exploring Forms of Political Theatre, London 2005. 29 Cf. Kent Sjöström´s fine analysis on the topic in an unpublished conference paper entitled “ The sacrifice, the copy and the critical gaze - the actor ’ s authenticity and the commodity value of emotions ” in: https: / / www.academia.edu/ 24358691/ The_sacrifice_the_copy_and_the_critical_gaze_- _the_actors_authenticity_and_the_commodity_value_of_emotions [accessed 7 October 2017]. 30 Erika Fischer-Lichte, “ Performance Art - Experiencing Liminality ” , in: Marina Abramovic´, 7 Easy Pieces, Milan 2007, pp. 33 - 45, here p. 34. 31 Fischer-Lichte, “ Performance Art - Experiencing Liminality ” , p. 43. 32 Ibid., p. 39. 33 Ibid. 34 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked. The Politics of Performance, London and New York 1993, p. 152 - 157. 35 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else. From Discipline to Performance. Oxon and New York 2001. 36 Cf. Kirkkopelto, Le théâtre de l´expérience, pp. 395 - 403. 37 Cf. Thomas McEvilley, The Triumph of Anti- Art. Conceptual Art and Performance Art in the Formation of Postmodernism. New York 2005, pp. 38-39, 49, 80, 370 - 371. 38 Michael Fried, “ Art and Objecthood ” (1967), in: Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood. Essays and Reviews. Chicago 1998, pp. 148 - 172. 39 Jean-François Lyotard, L´Inhumain. Causeries sur le temps, Paris 2014 [1988], p. 96. 40 Kermani 2002. 41 Robin Fox, “ The Violent Imagination ” , in: Peter Marsh and Anne Campbell (eds.), Aggression and Violence, Oxford 1982, pp. 6 - 26. 55 Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism