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Sebastian Kirsch: Why Streets Are No Longer Paved with Theater Gold: Critique and Stage Form(s)
Why Streets Are No Longer Paved with Theater Gold: Critique and Stage Form(s)
(p. 325 – 342)

Sebastian Kirsch

Why Streets Are No Longer Paved with Theater Gold: Critique and Stage Form(s)

PDF, 18 pages

  • criticism
  • aesthetics

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Sebastian Kirsch

is a German theater scholar currently affiliated as a Feodor Lynen research fellow to the Department of German Studies at New York University (until Oct 2020). Having worked particularly on the history of the baroque theater and of the ancient chorus, he holds his PhD and his habilitation from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He also held research positions and host professorships at the universities of Vienna and Düsseldorf. His current research focuses on the history of the chorus and on questions of governmentality and taking care. He is the author of Das Reale der Perspektive: Der Barok, die Lacan’sche Psychoanalyse und das “untote” in der Kultur (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2013) and Chor-Denken. Sorge, Wahrheit, Technik (Paderborn: Fink, 2020) Besides his academic activities he worked as an editor and regular author for the German theater magazine Theater der Zeit (2007–2013) and has been cooperating as a dramaturge with directors and performers Johannes Schmit and Hans-Peter Litscher.
Other texts by Sebastian Kirsch for DIAPHANES
Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

Critique is a form of thinking and acting. It is determined by its objects, yet never accesses them immediately but is always mediated through its own forms of (re)presentation. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as topoi such as the break, the marginalization, the tearing and opening indicate. However, these multifarious attempts to “build on the structure through demolition” (Benjamin) testify to the dependence of all articulation on the forms of (re)presentation [“Darstellung”]. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated which generate their critical statements less argumentatively than through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene—whereas the theatrical scene as a stage of critique has been contested intensively during the 20th century. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.

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