Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism

The recent massive terrorist attacks committed by religious fundamentalists all over the world give the performing arts a reason for a new kind of self-criticism. From now on, it seems impossible that any performance could credibly manifest, let alone praise, the idea of self-sacrifice as an individual heroic act at any level of interpretation. The political resistance must disregard the possibility of terrorism at the imaginary level as well. If this quite obvious but intuitive conclusion is taken critically, its consequences for our way of considering Western performance aesthetics and performance practices are considerable. First, it raises doubts about the modernist and post-modern attempts during the second half of the last century to revive the sublime as an aesthetic category. To continue the criticism by James Elkins, who has suggested "the moratorium to the word" (2009), I would like to submit that "cryptoreligious" concept to a deconstruction, which focuses on its "dynamic" aspects. The deconstruction of the sublime in performance is directly linked to the capacityof performance practices to deal with their intrinsic anthropocentric presuppositions. Can we encounter, imagine and think a performing body otherwise than through sublime scenarios?