Das Politische spüren: Heiner Müllers Horatier und das Körpergefühl der Repräsentation

Abstract

Abstract Representation as a form of embodiment relates to the human body’s capacity to experience emotion. While this dimension for the most part remains latent in institutional politics, theatre as a medium of physical co-presence can foreground it and explore its potential for a critique of practices and institutions of political representation. This article reads Heiner Müller’s Roman play Der Horatier (The Horatian, 1968) as a theatrical reflection on the role of somatic experience in practices and images of political representation. Drawing on recent studies on the embodiment of emotions, on body memory and the experiential quality of representation, as well as on Antonin Artaud’s concepts of theatre and acting, the reading demonstrates how the evocation of somatic experience and bodily feeling constitutes a core strategy in Müller’s work on an anti-representational form of political theatre.