Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning in Modern European Drama

Puts modernist theatre in conversation with new materialist, posthumanist philosophy

• Establishes a dialogue between new materialism, the biopolitical turn, affect theory, and theatre
• Provides close readings of key dramatic texts as entry points into a cartography of four related spatiotemporal locations across Europe – Scandinavia, Germany and France in 1889, 1918, 1935 and 1943 – leading up to and contemporaneous with European fascism
• Establishes a conversation between generations of cultural theorists in both the epistemological and ontological traditions that will increase your understanding of 20th and 21st century theoretical movements
• Maps the trajectory from representationalist-naturalist theatre to the theatre of the historical avant-garde (Brecht, Artaud), and from the rationalist, humanist philosophical tradition to new materialism and posthumanism
• Explores the performativity of theatre in its double sense

Arguing that existing modernisation theories have been unnecessarily one-sided, Hedwig Fraunhofer offers a rewriting of modernity that cuts across binary methodologies – nature and culture, mind and matter, epistemology and ontology, critique and affirmative writing, dramatic and postdramatic theatre.

She specifically reworks the biopolitical exclusions that mark modern western epistemology, leading up to modernity’s totalitarian crisis point.

Fraunhofer reveals the performativity of theatre in its double sense – as theatrical production and as the intra-activity of a dynamic system of multiple relations between human and more-than-human actors, energies and affects. In modern theatre, public and private, human and more-than-human, materiality and meaning collapse in a common life.