Dramatic Experiments: Life according to Diderot

Four: The Identification with the Phantom

PART II Three Short Experiments 117 FOUR The Identification with the Phantom The Paradox of the Actor Have you ever thought of the difference between the tears produced by a tragic event and the tears produced by a moving story? (PARADOXE SUR LE COMÉDIEN)1 If a people have never had anything but one kind of play which is gay and pleasant, and another kind which is serious and moving is suggested to them, do you know, my friend, what they would think of it? I am very much mistaken if men of sense, after having considered the possibility, would not say, “Of what use is this kind of play? Does life not bring us enough real afflictions, without inventing imaginary ones? Why should we admit melancholy even into our amusements?” They would speak like aliens of the pleasure of being moved to pity and the shedding of tears. (DE LA POÉSIE DRAMATIQUE)2 I take thee to witness, Roscius of England, celebrated Garrick; thee, who by the unanimous consent of all existing nations art held for the greatest actor they have known! Now render homage to truth. Hast though not told me that, despite thy depth of feeling, thy action would be weak if, whatever passion or character thou hadst to render, thou couldn’t not raise thyself by the power of thought to the grandeur of a Homeric shape with which thou soughtest to identify theyself? (PARADOXE SUR LE COMÉDIEN)3 118 DRAMATIC EXPERIMENTS Mais comment se métamorphoser en différents caractères, lorsque le chagrin nous attache à nous-mêmes? (DE LA POÉSIE DRAMATIQUE)4 Soit donc que vous composiez, soit que vous jouiez, ne pensez non plus au spectateur que s’il n’existait pas. Imaginez sur le bord du théâtre un grand mur qui vous sépare du parterre; jouez comme si la toile ne se levait pas. (DE LA POÉSIE DRAMATIQUE)5 We have defined Diderot as a thinker of positive alienation, that is, as a thinker affirming an originary strangeness—an excess over any capacity for self-recognition—that occupies the heart of the self. The most paradigmatic figure through which Diderot attempts to develop this logic of positive alienation is perhaps the actor. The Paradox of the Actor, one of Diderot’s greatest texts, examines the general question of theater through the lens of this enigmatic figure, the one who never seems to be himself, identifying as s/he does with other figures, haunted by not having an identity. While traditionally the loss of identity associated with the actor, this identifying with . . . characterizing him/her has been the source of a metaphysical rejection of the actor as the most inconstant figure, in Diderot’s hands this capacity to not be herself that the actor possesses, a capacity marking a privileged relation to the power of identification with . . . becomes the source for a reversal of the metaphysical interpretation of the self as ideally constant and self-same. Identification, from this perspective, will no longer be the weakness marking a self that is taken away from its ideal constant self, but, in the hands of the actor, the power and wisdom of the one who knows how to activate a fundamental internal excess and non-identity, an intimate alien. This “knowledge” of the actor not to be him/herself is related for Diderot to the actor’s mysterious capacity to be insensible. Sensibility, at its most fundamental, as we have seen, has to do with a loss of identity of the self. The actor though has a capacity to not be himself, thus has a certain control over her self-loss. Her insensibility is the ability to have a different relation to self-loss, that of a paradoxical mastery of that which dispossesses. The loss of identity that metaphysics has opposed to a self-same constancy is as a consequence marked by Diderot as well by an opposition, yet this time not to a constancy of that which is self-same but to a creatively controlled self-loss, a controlled creation that brings with it new kind of constancy and wisdom. In the following discussion I would therefore like to pursue Diderot’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the question of the self through his exami- 119 THE IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHANTOM nation of the theater as the realm of the actor, the realm in which the...