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Bettine Menke: Gesture and Citability: Theater as Critical Praxis
Gesture and Citability: Theater as Critical Praxis
(p. 261 – 296)

Bettine Menke

Gesture and Citability: Theater as Critical Praxis

PDF, 36 pages

  • aesthetics
  • criticism

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English

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English

Bettine Menke

is Professor for Comparative Literature at the University of Erfurt since 1999. She has also taught at the University of Konstanz, the Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (Main), the Philipps-Universität Marburg, as well as the University of California, Santa Barbara. She directed (together with Joseph Vogl, Friedrich Balke, and Bernhard Siegert) the research training group “Mediale Historiographien” (funded by DFG, in Erfurt and Weimar 2004–2014). She has held fellowships at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar, at Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg University of Konstanz, and at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna (in 2020). Her recent publications include the co-edited volumes Flucht und Szene. Perspektiven und Formen eines Theaters der Fliehenden (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2018), Experimentalanordnungen der Bildung. Exteriorität – Theatralität – Literarizität (Paderborn: Fink, 2014), and Allegorie. DFG-Symposium 2014 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2016).
Other texts by Bettine Menke 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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