This book explores the intersection between apophaticism - negative theology - and performance. While apophaticism in literature and critical theory may have had its heyday in the heady debates about negative theology and deconstruction in the 1990s, negative ways of knowing and speaking have continued to structure conversations in theatre and performance studies around issues of embodiment, the non- and post-human, objects, archives, the ethics of otherness in intercultural research, and the unreadable and inaccessible in the work of minority artists. A great part of the history of apophaticism lies in mystic literature. With the rise of the New Age movement, which claimed historical mysticism as part of its genealogy, apophaticism has often been sidelined as spirituality rather than serious study.
This book argues that the apophatic continues to exert a strong influence on the discourse and culture of Western literature and especially performance, and th
at by reassessing this ancient form of negative epistemology, artists, scholars, students, and teachers alike can more deeply engage forms of unknowing through what cannot be said and cannot be represented in language, on the stage, and in every aspect of social life.
Ideas about negativity, emptiness, nothingness, and disappearance have maintained great theoretical currency in the field of performance theory. Performance Apophatics argues that performance is often an ethical injunction against what it would know or seek to make known. The book explicates texts, performances, and theories of performance as negative epistemologies that encounter the unknown through the known, drawing from literature in theology and apophatic spirituality for guides and examples.
1. Introduction.- 2. Performance Studies and Negative Epistemology.- 3. Intercultural Performance and the Apophatics of Appropriation.- 4. An Apophatics of the ArclÃo
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