The Strangest of All Things

Abstract

This introductory essay finds in Derrida and Benjamin a determination to overcome what Derrida calls philosophy’s “forgetting of theatre” and thus a recovery within thinking of what Benjamin calls “this strangest of all things: the stage itself.” In Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht’s theatre of gesture re-appears as a theatre of quotation. In Derrida, Antoine Artaud’s theatre of cruelty re-appears as a theatre of undecidability. And in both, the theatrum mundi, or theatre of the world, is glimpsed as a host of still stranger theatres: the theatre of the state, the theatre of the university, the theatre of killing, the theatre of ghosts, the theatre of pardon, the theatre of hospitality, and indeed an “as yet inexistent theatre” of the other—a theatre of faith, blind faith.