Introduction: Performance Apophatics

Abstract

In the Introduction, Chambers argues that the ancient traditions of negative theology and apophatic spirituality are still a vital part of Western cultural discourse, especially in performance theory and theatre studies. Apophaticism is a tradition that performs against itself as it resists its own resisting and denies its own denying. Chambers introduces the invented term ‘apophatics’ to define the restless dynamic of the unknowable that often structures performance itself. Performance apophatics describes not only the way performance may deny, resist, or fail, or the way that performance may depend upon the absent or processes of disappearance, or the creation of the indistinguishable, the contradictory, and the im/possible, but also the way that such performances may end up in a place where the negation itself is no longer enough.