Performance Philosophy, at its most hopefully imagined, seems to promise to succeed where other philosophical discourses and performative practises have come up short—perhaps even failed. That is to say, far from simply announcing a relatively modest interdisciplinary venture between philosophy and performance, Performance Philosophy seems invested with a radical potential that would, if realised, reveal a paradigm of creation and/or interpretation that is quite new and distinct. Its achievements, if successful, would be beyond the compass of performance and philosophy conceived (...) independently of each other. Even the term itself, ‘Performance Philosophy’, conveys a certain paratactical momentum that seems directed towards a profound artistic, intellectual, and disciplinary miscegenation where neither performance nor philosophy would remain separate and intact and neither would be subordinated to or conditioned by the unchanged disciplinary genealogy and underpinnings of the other. Though exciting in prospect, this is far from unproblematic. Is performance, as an act of deliberate creative expression, not to some degree pulling in the opposite direction to truth-revealing, knowledge-bearing philosophy? Or does Performance Philosophy relate only to more elastic understandings and redefinitions of philosophy? More specifically, this article asks what ‘thinking’ ‘itself’ might be in the context of Performance Philosophy and what sort of ‘knowledge’ it might give rise to. It will be argued that against the usual measures of epistemological success Performance Philosophy must be judged to fail. However it will then explores whether, in a move reminiscent of the aesthetics of failure of early German Romanticism, it is precisely failure that seems to hold the promise of opening up new epistemological ground. (shrink)

This review of North Korea’s Airirang Mass Games presents a primary account and analysis of a performance unlike anything and unseen anywhere else in the contemporary world. This review contributes to the beginning of a conversation about this performance that has been nearly inaccessible and unavailable to most people, including most other academic researchers or commentators, outside of North Korea. It is arranged into a first-hand descriptive account and then an analysis of the Arirang Mass Games. This review analyses the (...) Arirang Mass Games through a discussion of the materialization, enactment, and embodiment of the regime’s ethnocentric Communist ideology and culture. This analysis draws upon the work of performance philosophers and the work of other scholars and journalists, who have either analyzed and/or also attended the games, to start connecting the ways in which this performance can be regarded as the material embodiment of North Korean culture, national identity, and ideology, or at least the regime’s construction and fantasy of these aspects of the country. This review does not aim to provide justifications for or intend to give support to the North Korean government. Its purpose instead is twofold: first, to help shed light on a spectacular performance that few people outside of North Korea have experienced in such a little known or little understood country; and second, to present a perspective on repetition established in such an isolated and mysterious place, at least compared to the relative openness of most other countries, that few other individuals have personally experienced. (shrink)

This article begins by arguing that the ‘madness’ of Antonin Artaud is either fetishised or resisted, depending on the disciplinary angle from which one works. It proposes an alternative approach to the study of Artaud, which might avoid such pitfalls by reading Artaud’s work as performative philosophy or a philosophy of performance. The approach is defined by the principle of ‘working with’, rather than working on, a literary or philosophical figure. The second part of the article works, or philosophises, with (...) Artaud, reading his work on the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ alongside Immanuel Kant’s work on judgment from the third Critique. It explores the Kantian distinction between determining and reflective judgment, extending reflective judgment into what I call anarchic reflection. To do so, the article elucidates the conceptual relation between actuality, entropy, an-archy, cruelty and sublimity, defining anarchic reflection as an unintentional and/or intentional crisis of the judgment or krisis of Form that opens the possibility of its transformation. (shrink)