Hvar City Theatre Days, Vol. 51 No. 1, 2025.
Original scientific paper
Trauma: the Phrase-Affect in Croatian Drama
Sibila Petlevski
orcid.org/0000-0001-5006-2646
Abstract
In this text, the theoretical framework is only indicated, since in previous research we have already dealt with the legacy of Moreno’s ideas, Freud’s and Tausk’s approaches to trauma, and we have also repeatedly referred to the dramaturgical and directorial potentials of this issue in Kazalište srama (Petlevski 2015). For this reason, the focus of our interest here has shifted to thematizations of trauma in drama. From the corpus of recent Croatian dramatic writing, we examine Tomislav Zajec’s Nestajanje (2023), and we also deal with the dramaturgical effects of »returning« the psychodramatic to the dramatic, using the example of Lada Kaštelan’s Dva i dvadeset (2015). In Lyotard’s system of thought, idioms related to the body are existences charged with affects. However, the term phraseaffect in Lyotard should not be lightly transferred from the domain of philosophical-social criticism (initially inspired by Freud’s theoretical concepts related to libido) to the domain of the theory of affects: neither to the theory of political affects, nor the affect-script theory of Silvan S. Tomkins. The phrase-affect has the possibility of being articulated (e.g. in the plays of Zajec and Kaštelan) and of being argued (e.g. in the analysis of the plays selected here), but this is only possible from that which is in constant evasion and which, in Lyotardian terms, is being reduced to an unargued residue. This »residue« is disturbing because it bases its dramatic logic on the external manifestations of trauma whose inner essence escapes logic. The dramaturgical skill of Zajec and Lada Kaštelan lies in the fact that in the plays of these Croatian writers, the unargued residue of traumatic mental pain is translated – equally skillfully, although in different ways – into a dramatic plot about the impossibility of expressing trauma.
Keywords
the phrase-affect; Croatian drama; Kaštelan; Lyotard; Zajec
Hrčak ID:
330804
URI
Publication date:
14.5.2025.
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