A Philosopher at the Door: A Theatrical Interruption

Abstract

A Philosopher at the Door: A Theatrical Interruption Ira Avneri (bio) 1. Introduction In drama—both in text and on stage—an entrance into a space serves to “further artistic purposes which could not be served in any other way,” as Oliver Taplin has claimed.1 It is often designed as “a profound—can we say life-threatening?—event,” as Arnold Aronson has claimed,2 suggesting thereby that an entrance always creates an essential shift in the scene and often places someone at risk, either the entering character or the ones already present. Such qualities are at the core of this article, which discusses several dramatic scenes introduced not in plays for the stage but rather in philosophical texts that address the art of theatre. These scenes revolve around a specific image: the arrival of a philosophical character at a house associated with theatrical activity. The interruption caused by his arrival stirs critical thinking and sets the stage for a display of philosophizing within the arena of theatre. And yet, these scenes also imply a theatrical mischief or even a misperformance in the philosopher’s strategy and treat it with dramatic irony.3 The paradigm for the introduction of dramatic scenes within a philosophical text is obviously Plato’s dialogues. Thus, the first case is Plato’s image, in the Symposium, of Socrates’s entrance into the house of the tragic poet Agathon, where a banquet in honor of the host is taking place. Although the event has already begun, Socrates first chooses to remain outside. Standing immobile in a neighbor’s doorway, immersed in thought, he ignores Agathon’s repeated requests from him to enter, and enters only after concluding his act. This deferred entrance is the first stage of Socrates’s agôn (contest) with Agathon, juxtaposing the self-absorbed standpoint of a philosopher with the audience-dependent standpoint of a playwright. And yet, the publicly visible nature of Socrates’s gesture implies that it is not a pure display of commitment to philosophy; rather, it is a theatrical display aiming at arousing curiosity about the ritual of philosophizing. Socrates plays to an audience no less than Agathon does. The second case is Bertolt Brecht’s image, in the dialogues of Der Messingkauf, of the arrival of an unnamed philosopher at a large theatre house, to hold discussions with its “inhabitants” (the practitioners) about the future of theatre. Whereas [End Page 27] in Plato’s dialogue the bodily standstill occurs outside the house prior to the philosopher’s entrance and interrupts the indoor sequence, in Brecht’s dialogues the “standstill” occurs after the philosopher’s entrance and is embodied in the form of the aforementioned discussions. They allegedly take place during four nights, on the stage itself, after the evening’s show, as a philosophical alternative to the theatrical show that has just ended. In these discussions, the philosopher declares his vision of subjecting the theatre to philosophical ends by turning it into a laboratory for the study of social interactions. However, he also declares that he lacks any material way of fulfilling his vision. The discussion of Brecht creates a context for the third case—directly related to him—introduced by Walter Benjamin in three essays that address epic theatre. In these texts, Benjamin depicts the image of a sudden entrance of a stranger into a house in the middle of a family row, just as the mother is about to pick up an object to throw at the daughter, and the father is about to open a window to call the police. The stranger’s entrance arrests these events and turns the scene into a tableau (frozen representation). This, Benjamin states, is how epic theatre operates: through the interruption of actions, it uncovers the extra-theatrical conditions on which the scene is based, thereby forcing us to adopt a critical attitude toward it. Benjamin’s insistence that the tableau is framed precisely through the viewpoint of the stranger—a detached, rational observer—suggests that epic theatre emerges from a philosophical interruption. Within this frame of reference, Benjamin associates Brecht with Plato’s philosophical dramas, thus implying the non-Aristotelian nature of epic theatre, whose mechanism of...