The Act of Faith in Trusting Madness as Freedom — or Am I the Madman Searching under a Strong Light?

The Act of Faith in Trusting Madness as Freedom — or Am I the Madman Searching under a Strong Light?

Examining “the great American tradition of Westerns, admired by Alain Badiou as the great genre of ethical courage” (73, Zizek 2002 - emphasis in the original), Zizek refers to the structure of displaced decisions and when a “key Act is performed not by the central character who appears to be the focus of the ethical ordeal, but by a secondary character” (74, ibid). Le Petit Mort educes this quality of a ‘secondary character’ by soliciting the audience to have the courage to question their position within the performance and constitute an idea of the Hegelian divine gift — the ‘Beautiful Soul’ that is tempted to participate in a spirit of freedom or madness.

The key Act ‘doubles’ when a space is placed for it to be performed not by the ‘designated’ live performer, but the audience’s engagement .This is the ‘work of the work’ in Le Petit Mort substantiated in:- refusals to subject oneself to the performance environment; a kiss from someone’s lips; a caressing brush of the hair, off the forehead, by the fingers of audience members hands; the audience’s mimicry of the live performer’s movement in the head, tongue, hands, fingers or sounds and words; and even in sheer physical exertion — a sprinting run around the park block! — these are just some of the audience behaviour encountered prior to, during or following the live performance; attesting to effectuations and liminal qualities of time in Le Petit Mort.

“An act always involves a radical risk, what Derrida, following Kierkegaard, called the madness of a decision: it is to step into the open with no guarantee about the final outcome … an Act retroactively changes the very co-ordinates it intervenes” (152, ibid)

Like the superficial example of choosing to look into a ‘Lacanian’ theoretical mirror and responding “FUCKING HELL!-HOLY SHIT!!! FUCKSHITFUCK — I DIDN’T KNOW I LOOKED LIKE THAT … that I WAS looking like that …” — the live performance of Le Petit Mort approaches what might be — the (im)possible of someone’s act.

Following Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” in the book Fear and Trembling, Abraham in the Christian Holy Bible serves up his and Sarah’s only son Isaac for sacrifice, to prove a faith in God which is akin to the Russian word ‘Pravda’ — a “self relating truth” (81, ibid).This notion becomes evident in Le Petit Mort, as there is no guarantee that this — its ‘Truth’ — will succeed in asserting itself at the level of factual transference between the live performer and audience (81, ibid) nor these words here now to you as ‘dear reader’. The Act of trust in an intuitive philosophy that ‘spoke’ or insisted — begot from the Japanese dance form — Butoh, Artaud and French theorist Roland Barthes notions in the essay ‘Death to the Author’ i.e. beyond ‘I’-me-myself-Craig Darryl Peade — influenced the aesthetics of Le Petit Mort as a work that will ‘make itself’ with the audience-participant, as opposed to me just simply ‘making the work’.

Le Petit Mort tempts a “gesture of radical and violent simplification” from the an-other-audience-participant, not unlike the fundamental cut of the “proverbial Gordian knot” (101, ibid) Zizek refers. Evoking the Marquis de Sade’s ‘Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man’ — positing understanding as simplification — Le Petit Mort conspires for an-other-audience-participant to act within the complex event and verify together our corporeal existence beyond a ‘deadly’ gaze. Paraphrasing the French Revolution leader — subsequently implicated in the ‘Reign of Terror’ — Maximilien Robespierre, Zizek declares that “those who oppose the Act as such … want an Act without the Act” (153, ibid). Transposed onto live performance, this Act becomes akin to its live-ness that must be ‘tempered by invisible barriers’ or negated by the ‘novel’ mediatisations permeating contemporary artistic practices. Attitudes embracing image-technology for its own sake, exposes live performance to congealed audiences, whose experience is informed by slavishly worshipping at the ‘altar’ of ubiquitous, virtual images. Worse still, wooden performances set in concrete, owing to these ‘state of the art’ distractions, act as a crutch for performers who are metaphorically — and might as well be as good as — dead from a lack of vitality, that is, life.

Le Petit Mort is a metaphorically, suicidal “ecstatic transgression” — to evoke Zizek’s citing of Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (98, ibid) — in a situation which is ‘always already too complex’ — we don’t really know who the fuck each — any of us — really are – let alone the closest to us – the ‘self’.

Within the enclosure of the performance’s framing devices, the limits of in-and ex-clusion might be renegotiated by a knowledge-becoming-aware of our being — “we are instruments of the Other’s jouissance”. Relations might then be rearticulated by reconsidering the specific, structural conditions that are contingent and configured within fields (96, ibid) specific to Le Petit Mort. Together, the authenticity of the ‘self’ is ‘freed’ and contextualised by the constitutive acts apparent to, or within performance. The necessity of a decision — that is, an intervention ‘not of one’s own making’ — in representation and practice is ‘without an intention’ proper, and as a consequence one becomes ‘not oneself’ — evoking Richard Schechner’s ‘double negative’ of “not me … not not me”’ theory following from psycho-analyst Donald Winnicott (112, Schechner) — or ‘more-self’ in Goulish’s appropriation of the Wooster Group’s terms (See below page 77). Provocation becomes confused with confrontation, when an audience-participant seemingly has no choice but to act, as one draws a line — even if a ‘passivity’, by refusal to participate — and take full responsibility. Performing is enacting an active attitude of risk, combining voluntarism with a fundamental fatalism in that one acts, hopes and trusts things will be ‘OKay’, ‘all right’, or ‘safe’ for the live performer of Le Petit Mort and audience-participant alike i.e. have faith in belief

“There is a risk involved, but in the present circumstances … believe it is a risk worth running” (83, Artaud 1958).

The hidden complexities of the two poles that support and reproduce each other within Le Petit Mort and 11th September 2001 have a close connection between Hegel’s opposition of Enlightenment and Faith in Phenomenology of the Spirit. This might be perceived as the repression and exclusion common to the same symptomatic anxiety — whose antagonistic and traumatic feature resides within the always already alienated subject. Ultimately, there is nothing beneath these so-called deceptive appearances other than a lack of inner form and identity — Lyotard’s “bad form” of being — a formlessness, that is an ‘always already’, empty power and its occupancy has to be accepted within the so-called ‘logic of castration’ i.e. trepidation, fear and anxiety or terror. To acquire meaning from existence, an-other is required to be present. The confronting, radical contingency of the Lacanian Act and Le Petit Mort is “the ultimate abyss of freewill, the imponderable fact of ‘I did it because I did it!’ which resits … explanation” (137, ibid) — from German philosopher F.W.J von Schelling; alludes to a concept of the Hegelian Gnostic God previously referred above. Despite being critically derived in opposition to a pan-logical idealism, the Hegelian universal, logical, system is rendered impotent. Without the supplementary, ‘irrational’ act of pure Will in order to actualize itself — positing Hercalitus’ notion of “in differing, it agrees with itself” (198, Wilson), Lacanian theory’s mobius strip as topological subjectivity; or extimite; and the ‘coin idiom’— Le Petit Mort ceases to exist, if it were not for an-other-audience-participant-you, that is, ultimately, essential, to its enactment.