Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance (review)

This is an exemplary book of both comparison and drama. It describes four historical encounters between thespian-like philosophers and philosophically inclined thespians. The encounters are constituted variously by texts, conversations, letters, meetings, and shared projects. In a study that extends from antiquity to the painful eve of the Second World War, the Israeli author offers an antecedent, written after the fact, of an earlier book he devoted to theater after the war.

The book begins with the Socrates of the Symposium and the poetic drama of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus. Rokem describes the kind of dramatic and theatrical devices Plato gave Socrates to use, paradoxically and agonistically, to articulate specific philosophical ideas and the terms by which philosophy would establish itself as a new discipline in contradistinction to theater, poetry, and the arts. The book then moves on to study the conflicted character of Hamlet as both would-be thespian and would-be philosopher. Here the author describes how philosophy is performed by the play and how performance is taken up as the subject of the play's philosophy. After this, the book turns to the brief correspondence between Nietzsche and Strindberg, in which matters of madness and misogyny arise as a matter of both content and authorial form. Finally, the book turns to Benjamin's and Brecht's shared reflections on Kafka's story "The Next Village" and concludes with reflections on Benjamin's performative storytelling. These reflections are the most incisive of the book. With Benjamin, Rokem explores what it means in an "age of plagiarism" (Benjamin's phrase) to engage a text, to bring it to meaning and new meaning, or to give it life by quoting, cutting and pasting, and even writing it out again. The book is as much about performed thought, to adapt Rokem's own subtitle, as it is about specific encounters between thinkers who perform and performers who think.

Although it looks as though the book can be described in terms of four disparate encounters, this impression is belied by the many threads of continuity—pertaining to madness, travel, utopian desire, naming, disguise, and exposure—that weave them into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The last chapter makes most explicit the performativity of thinking and writing that is apparent in the encounters Rokem records and in his own authorial mode of address. To be and always to be is to think, to act, and to perform. Philosophers and thespians share in thinking and doing, in word and action. Rokem's method of writing and thinking—a method of eyewitnessing and commentary—intends to match and indeed does match his subject matter. The match makes this a most worthwhile book to read and to review.

Of great interest is the stress Rokem gives to theme of agon: the strife, antagonism, and competitiveness that is both evident in and the basis of all the encounters he treats. Yet Rokem's aim is not to take a side, one against the other, but to investigate rather the discursive space, as he puts it, "between." He does not therefore investigate struggles in which one side presents itself in genuine denial of the other. He is more interested in how each side inflects and influences the other in productive ways.

One might think that Rokem's choice of encounters stacks the deck, that he should have looked also at encounters in which one side offers a genuine denial of what the other has to offer. In a sense he does, especially if we take the Plato of the Republic or the Laws at his word and persist in thinking that he only had something against the arts and nothing for the arts. He did have something against the arts. Yet he did not argue against them in ways that precluded either his including the arts in his ideal city, albeit under strict conditions of regulation, or, as Rokem stresses much more, his adopting the strategies and devices...