Original scientific paper

THEATRE OF SHAME: IDENTITY AS WITNESSING

Sibila Petlevski ; Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

Abstract

Starting from Agamben’s term “Gesture” – interpreted as “communication of
communicability” – and having in mind links between Gesture and politics,
this text opens the possibility of reading Guy Debord’s ideas into the heterotopia
of the Prologue of “Dundo Maroje” by Croatian Renaissance playwright
Marin Držić. In this way, the posssibility of cultural criticism has been tested
on the basis of an insight into social performances structured as acts in a play;
from the crisis and the culmination to the dramatic solution, and back again.
The title syntagm “theatre of shame” is being argumented with the thesis that
spectacularized societies archive shame by false identity witnessing. This paper
suggests that our confrontation with the Other in ourselves – exemplified
through the lack of capacity to witness identity in the media – leads to what
Agamben describes as the slipping away of the truth of witnessing from the
jurisdiction of the archive.

Keywords

gesture; spectacle; heterotopia; intellectual responsibility; identity; witnessing; shame

Hrčak ID:

55116

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/55116

Publication date:

12.4.2010.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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