Studies in Communication and Culture (441-0-1)
Instructors
Nikolaus Albrecht Mueller-Schoell
Meeting Info
Kresge 3354 German Seminar Rm.: Tues 3:00PM - 5:50PM
Overview of class
"The Politics of Theatre" - this title indicates that the seminar will be based on two hypotheses: Following Jean-Luc Godard and Heiner Müller, the seminar will not examine so-called political theater, but rather theater made political. And different forms of dealing with politics will be analyzed. The only thing they have in common is that in each of the cases to be discussed, theater is not understood as supporting, illustrating, reflecting or replacing politics, but rather that the political must be sought on the level of forms and materials of representation. The fundamental distinction between Le and La Politique (Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Mouffe and others), i.e. the political and politics or politics and the police (Rancière) in French theory of the past decades, which itself draws on German-speaking thinkers of the political such as Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, is a prerequisite. We will examine plays from different centuries, literatures and theater contexts from the early modern period to contemporary script-based performance. Questions that will occupy us could include, among others: Coloniality and decolonialization (Shakespeare, Genet, Heiner Müller), political and police dramaturgy (Lessing, Foucault, Brecht/Weigel, A.H. Recke), the theater of capital punishment (Büchner, Derrida), theater and potentiality (Brecht, Benjamin, Heidegger, Agamben), and the (queer) feminist deconstruction of the masculine dispositif of drama and theater (Fleißer, S. Kennedy). The seminar takes up research topics that have occupied me in recent years, but should also be understood as a research context itself, not only and not primarily as mediation, but above all as a joint investigation. This is one of the reasons why the concept of the seminar is discussed with the participants in the first session and adapted according to their interests.