Wonder in the Heart of Empire: Deborah Warner's Medea and The Angel Project

Wonder in the Heart of Empire: Deborah Warner's Medea and The Angel Project MAURYA WICKSTROM Finally I ask you what methods yolt use / to combat sadness I and live. - Dorothce Solie (83) In the child's refusal to accept a world that makes no sense lies all the hope that ever makes us start anew. .:.. Susan Neiman (320) The word Empire is everywhere lately, in both scholarly and journalistic attempts to bring critical thought to bear on the Bush administration's global objectives, especially since 9/1 I. The central claim by Hardt and Negri, who have written a ground-breaking theorization of the subject, is that Empire is not a continuation of older forms of capitalist imperialisms and modernisms. but is a definitively new form of political, social, and productive organization, one for which there is absolutely no outside position, one that is corporeal, cellular, and biological in the reach of its power effects, and therefore called by Hardt and Negri "biopower" (22).'. If the condition of Empire is a new condition, then the implication is that languages of analysis and criticism must be newly specific to it. In these two years since the radically new moment in history when the skin covering the towers burned and melted and their human anatomy seared the sky, I have been as if digging in the ruins, listening for the music of the human, something that was ejected from the vortex of capital into its own free fall, a briefly airborne song. At my worst moments, watching the murderous intentions of the United States government, combined with what I know of its history, I fear that we are at the edge of an abyss into which all feeling, human relation, and ethical obligation will begin to fall at a faster and faster pace, deeper than any attempts at excavation, deeper than any rising of the dead. What shall we do to recover ourselves? For all that they have changed the world, the languages that enabled our understanding of the construction and performativity of identity and differModern Drama, 47:2 (Summer 2004) '77 MAURYA WICKSTROM eoce, representation and discourse, seem to me, now, to be in need of supplementing , if not critique. I, for one, have been drained by the intellectual and emotional claims of collective loss, the grave, depth, remains, violence. Where to find new sources of energy and courage? Is there a way to write that can absorb and then express the affective consequences of this historical moment as an integral part of a philosophical and intellectual accounting? Drawn in this search toward the field of ethics, I've chosen in this paper to test the possibilities for what I will call an ethical materialism, using Deborah Warner's 2002--. de Certeau~ Michel. "Walking in the City," The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 126-33. Diamond, Elin. "Medea." Theatre Journal 55. 1 (2003): 135- 36. Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea ofthe Tragic. London: Blackwell, 2003. Euripides. Medea. Trans. Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish. London: Nick Hern Books, 1994. Godoy, Angelina Snodgrass. "Probing the Membrane between Horror and Hope: Artist Claudia Bernardi." 1999. Center for Latin American Studies, University of California , Berkeley. 29 Mar. 2004 . Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University UP~ 2000. Junod, Tom. "The Falling Man." Esquire. Sept. 2003. 24 Mar. 2004 . Kostianovsky, Tamara. "Doris Salcedo." Latinarte 7 Nov. 1985.29 Mar. 2004 . Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: MacMillan, 1957. Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History ofPhilosophy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University UP, 2002. Nussbaum, Martha C. Sex and Social Jt~tice. Oxford, NY, and New York: Oxford UP, 1999· Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. Trans. A. Poulin Jr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977. Shewey, Don. "Somebody's Watching." Rev. of The Angel Project, by Don Shewey. 1 Aug. 2003. 24 Mar. 2004 hUp:lldonshewey.com/lheatecreviews/ the_angel_project.htrnl Solie, Dorothee. OfWal' and Love. Trans. Rita and Robert Kimber. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 19B3. Taylor, Victor Zamudio. "Mexico City: Art. Aggression and Violence." NY Arts Feb. 2002.29...