Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance (review)

This book, by theater historian and performance theorist Freddie Rokem, makes a significant contribution to both fields in its careful critical excavation of four "encounters" (both fictional and real) between philosophers and theater artists and through the theorization Rokem extends outward from these encounters, largely based on the thinking of Walter Benjamin. The relationship between theater and philosophy has been a long one, and indeed Rokem's first encounter is taken from Plato's Symposium, in which Socrates and playwrights Agathon and Aristophanes meet at a drunken banquet and debate their views on Eros. The second encounter is between the philosopher-self and the thespian-self as embodied by Shakespeare in the character of Hamlet. Third, Rokem shares the brief period of historical correspondence between Friedrich Nietzsche and August Strindberg in 1888-1889, as these giants of philosophy and theater wrestled with "the elusive borderline between sanity and madness" (88). Fourth and finally, the relationship between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin is considered. The second part of this engaging text takes Benjamin's notion of "constellations" (143-47) and links it to the accidents and catastrophes that mark the first half of the European century, culminating in the rise of Nazi Germany and the outbreak of World War II.

In my view, this collection of linked essays gains in strength as it moves forward. The more speculative analyses of theatrical/philosophical encounters of chapters 1 and 2 centered around the Symposium and Hamlet, while clear and cogent, are less engaging and original than the historical encounters documented between Nietzsche and Strindberg, and Benjamin and Brecht in chapters 3 and 4. Rokem takes what he calls an "interpretative approach" (7) in his analysis of the encounter between Socrates and the two playwrights to try to solve the puzzle of why Plato seems to have excluded Aristophanes' reply to Socrates, indeed why Plato "no doubt intentionally, has excluded some crucial information from his own text" (7). The chapter addresses this mysterious gap in Plato's text and also offers an intertextual reading between the Symposium's dialogue and Oedipus Tyrannus, which will be of interest to scholars of ancient Greek theater. Chapter 2's analysis of Hamlet as both philosopher and thespian is a solid one, if less original in its thinking than subsequent chapters prove to be. That said, in the final section of chapter 2 entitled "Philosophy Reads Hamlet: The Worthy Pioneers" (77-86), Rokem presents a novel interpretation of the ghost of Hamlet's father in the play that draws on wide-ranging sources (Austin, Benjamin, Derrida, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein) in which he posits a utopian function for the ghost, considering him to be a "worthy pioneer" (79-82) as Hamlet describes him. The pioneering labor of the ghost in Hamlet is to look back as well as forward, to prefigure the Angelus Novus by Paul Klee (a key notion in Benjamin's philosophy), the "helpless angel of history" (83) that looks back at the past while being blown forward into the future.

Chapter 3 offers a "performance-dialogue" (8) analysis of the brief correspondence between Nietzsche and Strindberg, at times mediated by Danish critic George Brandes, who introduced Nietzsche's thinking to Copenhagen in a series of lectures in the spring of 1888 and who acted as an intermediary between these two flawed giants of philosophy and theater. Rokem does a fine job tracing this correspondence and the imminent mental breakdowns of both men and showing the extent to which they were afflicted by the prevalent psychosocial problems of homophobia and misogyny. However, I found the final section of this chapter, which focuses on Nietzsche alone, to somewhat veer off course from the purported overall aim of the text into an analysis that goes all the way back to Plato. Rokem is fond of an intertextual approach that constantly refers backward and forward in the text. While this approach is mostly effective, in this instance I found I lost hold somewhat of...