The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy - flyer

AVANT. The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard, 2014

David Davies's Philosophy of the Performing Arts is a great and informative book, written in a remarkably clear style, definitely worth recommending this to both professionals and graduate students, since reading it requires background knowledge. Accordingly, in his book, following the recent interests of philosophical aesthetics in the philosophy arts, Davies provides the reader with a throughout discussion of artistic performances that are considered as artworks in their own right. Such approach is thus distinctive from the framework of so-called "Classical Paradigm" (discussed in Part I of the book, see below), based on the assumption that classical music provides us with a model for performing arts as a whole. The author establishes the framework for further explorations (Part II), while bringing our disanalogies between performances of classical music and various other kinds of artistic performances. Thus, in his book Davies aims to identify, explore, clarify and account on the range of philosophical questions arising when one reflects on the nature of performing arts and our involvement with it. Chapter 1 focuses on the nature of artistic performance as such, while aimimg to distinguish performance from mere action. Here Davies draws on the classical works of Beardsley (1982) or Dickie (1974) and others, while

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2021

Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença, 2020

Performance Philosophy: an introduction-This article introduces performance philosophy, despite the risk of performative contradiction such an act involves. First, it considers performance philosophy as a field that questions how performance thinks and thought is performed (including, specifically as philosophy). Drawing from Laruelle's non-philosophy, it then addresses performance philosophy as method, framing it as an alternative, performative paradigm to the philosophy of the arts approach that has historically dominated approaches to aesthetics. It concludes by affirming the call to the field to address the ethico-political dimensions of knowledgeproduction in not only disciplinary, but also geopolitical terms.

2020

Performance philosophy has been in development for the past decade as an interdisciplinary approach to performance studies. The contemporary global reality and political-economic situations have called forth performances that operate within new frames of reference and use new technologies. Understanding the complex politics of these new performances requires a

Inter Views in Performance Philosophy, 2017

Offering a diachronic approach to the ways in which the humanities have gradually been transformed by the advent of performance, this introductory chapter traces the emergence of notions and instances of the performative, first in Anglo-Saxon linguistics, then with the arrival of French Theory and the parallel development of Performance Studies, noting their unrecognized affinities. Advocating for the overcoming of these sterile oppositions across continents and traditional fields of knowledge, the introduction focuses on the fruitful encounters between performance and philosophy, and the current stakes of the ever-expanding field of Performance Philosophy. While French institutions have tended to distrust and distance themselves from Anglo-American practices and multidisciplinary explorations in spite of the influence of “French Theory,” this introduction presents the volume’s varied contributions as a way of reinstating a dialogue between Continental and Atlantic perspectives. Weaving together kaleidoscopic views (and interviews), the co-editors present Performance Philosophy as an inclusive approach to performing thinking within cultural specificities while moving beyond disciplinary boundaries.

In this article I attempt to trace the path of my artistic research, which began from the application of schizoanalysis in performance and which now explores the possible limits of thought in order to regard how performance thinks in specifically different ways from discursive forms of thought, such as philosophy. The main argument starts from the notion – borrowed from French thinker, François Laruelle - that philosophical thought does not tell us more about the Real than any other gestures of thought. I begin from a speculative relationship between the apparatus of cognitive capitalism. I conclude by superpositioning the post-humanist thought of Laruelle and Karen Barad with the concept of ‘non-standard’ performance as fictioning. As a whole, the article aims to propose a performative approach to artistic research in these terms.

Martin Puchner’s The Drama of Ideas (2010), Freddie Rokem’s Philosophers and Thespians (2010), and Simon Bayly’s The Pathognomy of Performance (2011) are only three recent publications that one could cite as evidence that the international field of Theatre and Performance Research is undergoing what we might call ‘a philosophical turn’: an intensification of its long-standing interest in and engagement with philosophy, as a source of diverse concepts, plural methods and multiple ontologies that can be productively explored in relation to performance. But what is at stake in this turn? What relationship between performance and philosophy is being staged in this work? In this presentation, I will suggest that we need to move beyond the mere application of philosophy to performance, beyond an approach to philosophy determined by a pursuit of the next new and fashionable method of performance analysis. In particular, I will propose that our experiments with what I am calling ‘performance-philosophy’ need not begin with clear and distinct definitions of each term. We do not yet know what either performance or philosophy can do; it is precisely the indeterminacy of the distinction between the activities that we call ‘performance’ and ‘philosophy’ (as exposed in the ‘nonart’ of Allan Kaprow) that makes performance-philosophy an exciting prospect. Ultimately, I will argue that the encounter between performance and philosophy is at its richest and most egalitarian if philosophy is willing to encounter performance as thinking, and as that which might extend what philosophy counts as thinking – a discussion that will also lead us to question the implications of the provocative idea that everything (not just the theatrical subject or philosophical mind) thinks. In this way, I hope to address not only the philosophical turn in performance, but also the non-philosophical turn in philosophy: the democratization of thought that has recently been called for by the French (non-) philosopher, François Laruelle. Non-philosophy will meet nonart, then – but as its equal, not as its illustration.

Performance Philosophy

In my short manifesto I consider the interrelation of the emergence of performance philosophy and the simultaneous emergence of practice-based or artistic research in the humanities and the higher education in arts. The need for performing artists to have recourse to philosophical discourse is motivated by an attempt to establish their new political and academic role as artist-researchers, as well as to understand the nature and the significance of the knowledge they produce. Performance philosophy opens up a new academic practice in which performance, performance makers and performers can make contact with philosophical thinking without the advocacy of intermediary disciplines and in equal dialogue with them, learn to think in their own terms, and become understood by others. It builds upon a collective attempt to give an answer to what performing arts and artists can do in an age where ‘performance’ has become a denominator of global capitalism.

2008