Philosophical Tales

Pieter De Buysser is a writer, film and theatre maker, and philosopher. He studied literature and philosophy in Belgium and France, and obtained a Master in Philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was taught by Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Jacques Derrida, and Jacob Rogozinski. This philosophical legacy is often reflected in his writing, both on a stylistic level as well as in thematic focus. Themes like the blending of fact and fiction, the sparring of reality and imagination, and cultural scepticism versus scientific optimism infuse his writing. History is like a dream his characters wake up from in an anachronistic landscape. One critic compared De Buysser’s narrative style to that of a pickpocket with words: before you know it, he’s gone in a whole different direction with the story. De Buysser offers a unique voice for the stage. His love for objects reminds us of the UK-based troupe Ridiculusmus, though his use of language tends to be sober, and veers towards the poetic, reminiscent of the best of Matei Vişniec’s concise stage narratives. Besides his theatre work, De Buysser also writes essays and is an award-winning short-fiction filmmaker (De Intrede, You Know You’re Right). His novel De Keisnijders (The Pebble Cutters, 2012) evokes an urban utopia that is physically impenetrable but nimble in the imagination of the novel’s characters. He writes within the tradition of the contes philosophiques, pioneered by Voltaire and Diderot, and he certainly shares the meta-theatrical reflection of the latter.

In 1999, at age 27, he established his own theatre company called Lampe for which he wrote a number of theatre texts that initially toured in Flanders and Holland and by 2005 were regularly programmed at theatres and festivals in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The name “Lampe” conjures the image of a light bulb, but refers to Immanuel Kant’s humpbacked servant Lampe in Köningsberg (Kaliningrad). Banished to the basement of the eighteenth-century philosopher, Lampe writes his texts on discarded sheets of paper, and the backside of drafts of The Critique of Pure Reason, or in the margins of scraps of The Critique of Judgment. In the shadow of the Enlightenment, two-hundred years after the facts, Lampe is a “transformatador,” who plays footsie with his Master’s projects. In De Buysser’s words, poor Lampe is the main character in a shadow play without ever being seen on the stage. Woefully brave, and with a gleeful heart, he plays tricks with the Enlightenment that are still to come.

Under the Lampe cloak, De Buysser has written, produced, directed and/or performed a handful of remarkable works, such as Het Litteken Lip (Lip Scar, 1999), An Anthology of Optimism (2009), and Book Burning (2012). The latter was performed in Dutch and in English for well over one-hundred performances and travelled around Belgium, Holland, and other parts of Europe for more than four years. In this collaboration with visual artist Hans Op De Beeck, De Buysser is on stage with a magic trunk out of which he quite literally unfolds a dystopian reflection on history, almost like a narrative origami event. The play is an archaic piece of theatre, transparent in its props-based wizardry, with a simple but sophisticated fable. The book-burning of the title refers to the traumatic history of the recent past, but also suggests, in our saturated times of information-overload and endless apposition of abundancy that one of the few acts of resistance that remains is, in fact, a more radical sort of burning of pre-destined and uniform options. Knowledge that burns, sometimes means more freedom.¹

By the middle of the Book Burning tour, Lampe, somewhat similar to the ending of The Last Tragedy, has had enough and disappears in the draperies of his historical origins. In 2014, De Buysser produced a new monologue Landscape with Skiproads (published together with Book Burning in English translation). “It all began with a cardboard box,” we hear in the beginning of the play, a box that belonged to Guy Debord, who had received it from Jean-Luc Godard as a gift...