Revisiting Marat/Sade: Philosophy in the Asylum, Asylum in the Theatre

This article stresses the continuing relevance of Peter Weiss’s 1963 drama Marat/Sade to both production and study, reconsidering the work in the light of recent reassessments of the relationship between drama and the practice of philosophy. In her analysis of the play as a philosophical dialogue, the author deprivileges Peter Brook’s directorial choices, which were based on an Anglo-American reading of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and focuses instead on the dialogic and physical potentials inherent in the text itself as a work of philosophical drama more akin to the works of Nietzsche and the historical de Sade himself. In the play, the effecting of politics on the body is illustrated, then interrupted and discussed, and the resulting performance presents us with the unresolved dialectic of individual agency and democratic sovereignty.