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The radicalisation of the process of civilisation is a challenge to art, even an overwhelming one. High-modernist art, with its claims to understanding and expressing the world, positioned within a world that has become highly complex, is challenged by itself.

How is one to dance against Auschwitz or Hiroshima?

The sheer attempt to “dance against” anything would be naïve! Art after modernism – and I think the date 1945 would serve very well as a point of reference – had to and must now relinquish its own irresolvable complexity and retreat. It becomes in a sense truly radical but it would be more accurate to say it becomes nuclear, focussing on the core. Beckett’s plays are destilled cores – their greatness lies in their smallness. Absolute music, absolute art – Merce Cunningham’s dance could well be termed absolute dance in this sense – cristallises something from out of the cultural forms of bourgeois art, something which can...

• crisis
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• body
• politics

As it happens, in relation to questions of fragile identities, I think these are very useful words. One issue that has been confronted in recent discussions of identity has been whether it is singular or plural and if the latter, which is the predominant critical view, what kind of plurality is being evoked by the term? Specifically, are we talking about something that is fragmented or something that is multiple? Is the human subject notionally one, but through exposure to forces of various kinds, ranging from the excessive competing demands of post-modernity through to devastating trauma, it becomes a split subject? Or does the multiplicity of selves and identities (to run the terms together for a moment) reflect the simple reality of life – we are multiple beings, and our task is to do something with this multiplicity, not to wish it gone? It is this position that I would...

• Hannah Arendt
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• Judith Butler
• Judaism
• identity