sTP32(3)pp 257-267 Intel l ect Li mi ted2012

Stu dies in T heatre & P e rfo rm a n c e Vo lume 32Num ber 3 o 2012 lnt ellec t Arti c l e Ltd En g l i slh a n g u a gd eo i ro : 1 3 8 6/stap 323257r

DANIETSACK

TheBrilliance of the Servant withoutqualities: Bare life andthe horde offstage

ABSTRACT In intsestigating thenatureof plethora and baresufficimcyonstage, HowardBarker pursues the limit case befween thepossible and the irnpossible that hashaunted the theatresincethe Attic tragedy This articleexplores the ways in which the playwright makes useof theoffstage space as a repository for theunknowable future, the spatiallyexcluded as a sitefor the temporally excluded. I reada lesser-known work of Barker's, The Brillianceof the Servant,as thesacificeof barelife to unknown potentiality,wherethe eponymous serrsant submitsto the torture of a hordeof barbarians occupying theffitage spaceLike themessenger of theclassical tragedy, thisfigure traoersing the borderbetween the scene and obscme announces a new kind of characterless character, without desire and zoithout obiectioes, but rich with a plethora of messages. KEYWORDS Howard Barker offstage catastrophe GiorgioAgamben barelife potentialify

To experimentwith the nature of plethora and bare sufficienry in the theatre is to experimentwith the limits of what is possibleonstage;it is to ask what we may considerthe capacityof the theatre as an irrevocablybounded space. How many bodiesaretoo many bodies,how little is too little? At either end of this continuum waits the offstagespace,a field rich with unarticulated excess,'rvhere every,thing and nothing could lurk in the wings. As this conditional qualification'could'remindsus, thesequestionsalsomake demandson temporalify,on what futures are availableto a depictedworld.

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Apprehending what events are possible onstage and how far a character may stray from expectedpossibilities has been at the core of Howard Barker's dramatic work at least since his decision in the late 1980sto Dursue a contem porary form of tragedy in his self-proclaimed Theatre of It ls entirely appropriate that a theatre conversing with the tragic tradition would -atastrophe pursue the extent of the minimal and the maximal. According to Aristotle's (1967) Poetics - the most influential of many attempts to encompass a genre that itself escapesdelineation - tragedy is at its roots concerned with negotiating proportionalily: what are the appropriate consequences of an action, what is the sufficient punishment for one's guilt and how does the one stand in for the many? Tragedy seeks to restrain the plethora of futures opened up by catastropheto a bounded and manageable whole. The Greek philosopher hails p1ot, or the organization of events into a set of plausible causai relations, as the most important element of the genre, requiring that whatever begins must find its suitable end. The scale of a plot that its events may be held within the scope of a viewer's memory - determines the complexity a p1ay's dramatic arc can encompass (Aristotle 1967: 30) In epic texts IIke The Bite of the Nrghf (running more than five hours in performance), the EcstaticBible (eight hours in performance, but intended to unfold over a 24-hour period) or the 2011 Aberystwyth production of The Forfu (directed by David Ian Rabey and as yet, unpublished), Barker presents a tragic work that cannot be contained in a single glance, in a single remembrance As a contemporary counterpoint, John Barton's ten-hour cycle of tragedies based on the Trojan War, Tantalus (2001),also tests the limits of a spectator'sattention Yet where Barton subdi vides his epic into smaller parts and self-contained stories to provide hand holds for attentiory Barker's performances swell beyond summary or splinter into fragments that cannot be encapsulated.His plays proceed by catastrophic accumulation rather than causality Against tragedy's attempts to establish rational proportions on irrational forces and events, catastrophe courts the disproportionate and the incommensurate. The OED defines catastropheas 'a sudden and widespread disaster', but further qualifies its application in regards to the dramatrc paradigm as 'the point at which the circumstances overcome the central motive, intro ducing the close or conciusion; denouement' Thus, catastrophe inhablts an unmarked time-space of open collapse that, through its dramatlc representation, simultaneously instigates the marked beginning of an end Tragedy ls a theatrical apparatus for processing a central catastrophic event into a socially legible meaning or product, to set an indeterminate middle on track to a determinate end. Without the tragic to delimit it, the catastrophe reverberates through other bodies and events; the plague of Thebes in Oedipus Rex,for example, casts its blight on crops, animals and humans alike, suspending the future and its unborn generations. By casting Oedipus as cause of the catas trophe, the tragedy also makes of him its cure On a much smaller scale,the dramatic simllarly processeslittle catastro, phes o{ undisciplined motion into discrete and purposeful actions complete with names and recognizable shapes Peter Szondi places the restraint of the catastrophic at the core of not only tragedy, but the dramatic theatre more broadly conceived: 'The accidental enters the Drama from outside, but, by motivating it, accident is domesticated;it is rooted in the heart of drama itself' (1987: 10) Thls taming or domestication of accidentalmotion comes to us ln the form of a named action, movement giveu an intention, name and shape. If drama is etymologically'the art of action', then it offers its audience figures

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and objects that can be identified in terms of actions and function (presumed action). Its representations are based not only on what has bem done, but also what wiII be done. Drama presupposes a network of certain bounded paths for what may come next, a finite set of teleological projections streaming forth from a character that we may call the possible.Since the earliest works in his Theatre of Catastrophe, such as the fittingly titled collection of short plays The Possibilities (1986), Barker has replaced objective-based action with the moment of choice as the cornerstone of his art. He populates his worlds with characters on the verge of opening out into multiple forms and attachments. Caught in situations rife with historical and cultural upheaval, these characters explore the many proper and improper courses suddenly made available to them in the presenf when they do choose to act they favour the profane and egregious outskirts of these possible actions more often than acceptable forms of behaviour. For example, when Anne Bradshaw, the heroine of Victory (1983), encounters the great John Milton blind and feeble in his garden, she does not offer him honour and acclaim, but a slap in the face. These characters display a remarkable skill at expressing desires in langue both sophisticated and surprising, drawing these sacrilegious intentions into the compass of an ever-expanding human community via the dramatic form. In this manner, Barker acknowledges the way in which the dramatic theatre inevitably incites its audience to analyse character in terms of his or her plausible fufures, while also staging reconnaissance missions to the outer limits of that constraint. We are repeatedly forced to reevaluate what a character could do in light of what she does. And yet, there are occasional figures in Barker's elliptical plays that maintain or even gather an inexplicable force by adhering to the barest form of life and refusing to give over to expression. For example, in a kind of counterpart to the earlier collection of short plays, The Possibilities, the thirteen disconnected scenes that comprise 13 Objects (2003) each revolve around a series of objects that do not behave solely according to function, but become the nexus for ambiguous intentionality. The characters in these scenes relate to the objects as if they, too, were live figures guarding secrets of their own: an old camera terrorizes a young man with the unfathomable memory of all the previous photographs it has taken. a child's rattle maintains the capacity for speech before and beyond any individual statement. Here the bare sufficienry of a singu.lar object opens out into the plethora of what we may call potmtiality, a factity or medium that does not express an individual statement, but instead holds its ability to express in reserve. As the example of the waiting camera or the silent rattle tells us, it is in the bare sufficiency of an obiect or a character that the plethora of the potential appears. Here we might follow Aristotle rnhis Metaphysics in imagining the block of stone before the sculptor's chisel has left a mark as containing within it a plethora of immanent figures. Or we might tum to the blank page before the stroke of a pen and say that this empty white field contains a plethora of future inscriptions. The bare appearance of a ground or medium suspends a host of worlds before us. Any further addition would narrow the fullness of what may come, would limit the future to a smaller set of possibilities. But how can a human performer appear as a medium containing a plethora of characters or messages? One of Barker's lesser-known plays, The Brilliance of the Sercant, stages a particularly effective version of this meeting of the minimal (bare sufficiency) and the maximal (plethora) and it is in this direction that I would like to orient the remainder of this article. The tragic/dramatic apparatus' corralling of

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potentiality lnto a set of possibilities here confronts an alternative system of theatrical production, always at work, but necessariiy excluded from the insistent boundaries of the stage itself: literally an offstage machine In the theatre an empty stage may already show too mucLg may already exceed the bare sufficienry of performance (for what stage is ever truly empty?) - perhaps the minimal ground of the theatrical medium appears at the site where nothing can be seen: in the blackout behind the curtain, off in the wings where who knows what \urks. The Brilliance of the Seroant figures this unseen multiplicity as an encroaching horde of barbarians, holding any number of terrifiTingly unknowable futures in reserve. The play centres upon a singular figure that occupies a position of bare sufficiency or bare life onstage, a blank slate of a figure that goes forth to meet the plethora of the offstage, and returns with its inexplicable power in tow Consummated in this fashion, this liminal presence announces a kind of characterless character, without directed desire and objectives, but repletewith potentiality. The Brilliance of the SelTant is set in the ruined hall of a great house as a cataclysmic war rages on, the proverbial barbarians at the gate. As in so many of Barker's plays, we are in the midst of revolution and political unrest, the action centred on a time between regimes when hierarchies of power are in disarray. Plays like Hated Nightfall, Victory, The Power of the Dog and The Gaoler's Ache for the Nearly Dead return to historical moments of such catastrophe; The Last Supper, Ursula and Judith look to apocalyptic transltions from the myths of Christianlty; here there is not a specific historical rupture, but the upheaval at the apex of any war, any time. As the quintessential bourgeois groom-to be Taxman remarks to Camera, the lady of the house and mother of his fianc6e, 'this war will finish off your entire class and bring about a New morality! It is my misfortune to be straddling - like a burglar impaled on a fence - Two eras' (Barker 2001: 92, original emphasis). A-11 of the characters are, like Taxman, impaled on the fence of history caught in a catastrophe without end, an event that refuses to get on with it They are burglars, criminals transgressing the order of the past and whatever order the future may bring. The overarching action concerns an attempt to counter this catastrophe by realizing a marked historical action. At the top of the p1ay, we are told that a wedding is to take place, that in spite of the obstacles that the invasion presents (no priests, no guests), the bride-to-be, Sunetra, is adamant that her wedding continue: '\Arhen the walls of culture fall. Practise culture!' (Barker 2001: 104). The wedding ceremon, perhaps the most commonly utilized denouement in the annals of theatre history, also functions as the consummate speech act confirming societ;/s continuation Every wedding announces 'I do' not only as a promise to a partner till death do them part, but as a promise to keep this culture and world alive, to keep this language alive Against Sunetra's attempt to resolve this civilizing action, the dramatic event par excellence, the encroaching barbarians present an opposing appantus that threatens the amorous jockeying of the onstage characters. This alternative machinery is comprised of a series of intricate torture devices looming in the offstage space, accumulating more and more terrible force as the play progresses.Death or great pain waits in the wings, recalling classicaltrag edy's frequent palring of wedding ceremony and funeral rite (as in Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Sophocles' Antigone) The play thus stages a conflict befween the civilizing possibilities of onstage drama and the catastrophic potentiality of offstage obscene power

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As the audience to this conflict, our only accessto the barbarians, machinery is verbally relayed by the onstage characters or indicated by offstage sound effects Early in the play we are told of a machine used to cut the lips off of prisoners as a means of negating both beauty and speechin a single, clean stroke Invented by the barbarians to process the vast number of conquered peoples in an efficient manner, it would produce bodies identically marked by therr inability to enter the human world or, at the ieast, handicapped within the realm of its dramatic counterpart where speech and appearance determine use or value. Later, we are told how the barbarlans attach limbs to bent saplings, allowing the force of the tree to dismember the victim - echoing the manner in which Pentheus, the sacrificial victim in Euripides' Bacchae,is treed and then torn to pieces by the possessedhorde of women in that prototlpical tragedy. But these inventive devices of visible disfigurement are not the one whose journey and eventual assembly just offstage forms the primary counterpoint to the onstage action. Instead, the barbarians have brought their most exquisite device, their crouming achievement, to the great house for the sole purpose of selecting a marq,r from the dramatic world. If the '1ip' machine acts as a factory for mass-producing identically unspeakable bodies, in a sense makrng the unspeakableequivalent in its silence,then this latter construction - a portable 'ca1vaq,/according to one character - is devoted to producing the singu, lar sacrifice. The excluded plethora and the singular bare life share a common space offstage, marking with a brutal imagined machine the outside limit of the human community that the drama represents Occupyrng a state of exception, included by their exclusion,they (do not) show where the representable ends Convention assumes that the representable stands in stark opposition to the unrepresentable;one is either included in the scene or excluded from its premises. However, following Carl Schmidt, Giorgio Agamben has argued that it is in the decisionbetueeninclusion and exciusion,the determinatlon of a limit casebetween one and the other, that one most powerfullv encounters the extent of both thought categories.Neither one nor the othea the state of exception delimits and defines the human and the horde. The classicaltragic martyr can protest and lament his or her fate, even choose to willingly face death, but he or she must - with a few notable exceptions - die offstage. As Jean Genet writes in The Blacks:'Greek tragedy, my dear, decorum. The ultimate gesture is performed offstage' (1960: 84) The workings of the machines are as inaccessible or incommunicable to the onstage characters as they are to the audience. During his preparations for the wedding, Taxman observes one of the barbarians' horrific acts outside, but he cannot name the action he has seen Later, one of the servant women describes witnessing another device offstage that looks like a cat,s cradle suspending an oid man in its lines, evincing gruesome cries, yet its exact manner of operation also remains a mystery: 'I can't exactly see what - why it hurts - [ ] why does it hurt?' (Barker 2001: 108) Later still, when he first introduces the arrival of the consummate sacrificial machine, the head servant Shoulder describesit as an unseen, infuitive menace: 'No one has seen it, though many testify to its existence.It is as if its coming is announced, rts presence experienced, through the nerves, and its materiality rather intuited than perceived' (Barker 2001: 118) In order to resist the objective interests of the dramatic state with its subjects, the machine must remain out of sight, lts exact process and construction unknown, but asserting a force that pressures a1lonstage, makingits presence felt through the nerves. All these machines counter the analytic contract between the spectator and the performance,s

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production of meaningful possibilities discussed above. The offstage barbarians carry with them an unnamed threat that can take any form in the future: 'All things that have been imagined will occur [...] every malicious thought will be someone's ordeal' @arker 2001:99). They incite not the particularity of fear, with its negative relation to a certain possibility (this Ihreat, tLtat danger), but institute a field suffused with unarticulated anxiety where dread suffuses all surroundings spatial and temporal. At any moment, something horrible may come from some place. They offer a plethora of tortures to the imagination. Expanding upon the conception of the nomadic war machine proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, theorist Gerald Raunig writes that 'the martial dimension of the war machine consists in the power of inventiory in the capacity for change, in the creation of other worlds' (2010:58). The barbarian's machines are such inventions in both sensesof the word: as material/technological constructions and as the machinations of deception and manipulation. The offstage machines also recall lhe deus ex machina, the contraption offstage that would allow the enhance of a god from above in classical theatre, or any number of other theatrical inventions devoted to producing supemafural appearances (the fog machines of the Italian Renaissance or the architectures of mirrors used to project image), but remaining behind the scenes.This machinery used in the classical theatre'to resolve all the aporia that had emerged in the course of the play' is, in the catastrophic theatre, used to manufacture uncertainty and disruption rather than restrain it (Raunig 2010: 38). Coupled with the characters' panic-stricken retreat from the potentiality of the horde is a contradictory fascination with what can only be described as its seductive power. It is a seduction that promises to reveal the truth about the self in all its particularity. For the prinlipal characters, to be sacrificed to the machine is to be analysed to the core of one's being as an individual, so that eventually each feels that the machine has come specifically to require his or her martyndom. One may say that in tragedy the hero achieves his or her destined meaning and individuality in becoming the chosen sacrificial subject. Such a figure becomes the centre of the drama and acquires a peculiar power that we will discuss below. Camer4 the head of the household and qrrrosure of a variety of amorous intentions, attests to the deepest understanding of the machine. She explains the device as follows: Do you not sense its anxiety? It is as if by virtue of its design, its manufacture and assembly, it has acquired a will. It is self animated in some way, and utters. The peculiar silence that follows the tightening of the ast bolt is replete with what - desire? Lack? It's almost tangible.... "2001 (Barker : 126 -127) If the machine desires its victim, then surely, as the object of so many human desires, Camera is the intended victim. She continues: 'Unlike us, tne joumeys of the machine are undertaken strictly in accordance with an end' @arker 2001: 127). Contrary to her claim, this mode of single-minded pursuit is entirely in line with the kind of future available in the dramatic world to which Camera belongs. It thinks in terms of ends, objectives and the attachment to a desired object. If we are to beLieve Camer4 the offstage barbarians merely represent the epitome of the economy (in its efrmological sense as 'household management') of desire wi*Lin which she is the queen of the castle.The machhery offstage mirrors her own striving for an 'ultimate gesture', a definite end.

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But the more we learn about Camera, the more suspect her tesn_ mony appears. Immediately after shoulder has announced the approach of the machine that none have seery she claims contrarily that she has in fact witnessed it, but only in pieces. In other words, she can only conceptualize the potential in a part-by-part segmentation, as a set of posibl" pieces. As befits her name, Camera presents herself as a woman set within a fixed pt,se, an arrangement to be seen (she asks her daughter: ,you think I pose, don,t you? You think I say things lor effect?' [Barker 2001: 90]). She may state that 'the consequencesof things .. have never interested me..., (Barker 2001: gg), and soundly refuse to give apologies or hear them, but her daughter sees through the mask of indifference. It becomes apparent that, at oddi with her ov,n avowals, Camera is most interested in the machine as a 'concentration of moral intelligence' that will translate her intended sacrifice into a definitive judgement or end. she, like all the other principal characters, desires selfrecognition through painful apotheosis. Like sunetra and Taxman, Camera desires that the machine choose her, that it authorize her character. As the head of a dlng household - drama's spectatorial-analytical house a classicaltragedy would indeed elect Camera to submit to the sacrificial act. In Barkels world" however, it is the brilliant sewant of the play's title who ultimately becomes the collective's substitute. \vhere Camera's indifference is a performecl display, intended to mask her own desire to meet this supreme endind looking'to [the machine] for some cruel kind of solace', shoulder is the most enigmatic of the characterg his intentionality almost entirely obscured throughout (Barker 2001: 131) Even at the moment when he announces his position as the sacrfficia-l subject,it is unclear whether this is an active choice or ihe passive acceptance of a decision voiced from without. He seemingiy exists outiide of personal attachment and outside the law; as he puts if it is my privilege to judge no one'. Asked to give a speech before departin& to judge the othery shoulder can only offer his 'uncritical devotion' @arker 2001: 133). shoulder is a man without qualities, a man without a place, and therefore the ideal vessel for the communi[/s blame. A blank slate, a tabula rasa, anyone can write anything onto him. In other words, he is a messenger without a message. To generalize greatry, in classical tragedy, the messenger clelivers his or her description of the offstage event with the least diversion or inflection possible. He or she has no name, ideally, and arguably no character apart from the content of the message; the messenger does not appear onstage prior to this moment, nor stay beyond its calling. writing of the figure of Hermes, the dMne messenget Michel Serressuggeststhat,the messenger appears ... but he must also disappear, or rrurite himself out of the picture, in oider that the recipient hears the words of the person who sent the message, not the messenger' (1,997:99). The quintessential messengeris a person oino impor_ tance with no end; announcing his or her own mediality as message, he oishe disappears into a pure means without end. The messenger takei possession of the potentiality to do or express without giving form to an action or statement vvhile most of Barker's characters pursue a desired object or other with fanatical conviction, here the playr,wight seems to present one that pursues desire without an object, not as a reward or end in itself, but as a way of tLrlne suspendedbeiween desireand fulfitment. some distant descendant of Chrisf shoulder loves without object and without selfish interesf he gives himself over completely in his 'uncritical devotion'. To remind us of the correlation between these two mar$rrs, each time that Shoulder slaps Tamran across the face during the play, the groom exclaims 'Christl, again and again.

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As his own name suggests, Shoulder must carry the burden of the community's transgressions: the sexual escapades between Camera and most prominent instancein a seem_ paredfor submission before the ,port_ hrist's crucifixion,he perfectlv,eilir"s fered by French theorist Ren6 Girard. he of classicaltragedy representsthe riminal acts coliapsedifferenceto such a degreethat it is necessary to radicaly separate u ,u..ifi.iur subject in order to reconstitute sociarorder. This subject,the tragic hero, is heid responsi_ ble for all dispersed negativeviolenceand the ."rt of societyreformsitself tn oppositionto this other. His or her sacrifice removescaiastrophe from the city, and so the subject becomesat once both the cause of uil dirr,rp_ tion and its resolution.He or she is the pharmakon in both senses of the word: the poison and the cure. This duar state - deprived and fulL of fo*". at once - parailels the ambivalenceof the bare rife and sovereign. ff bare life possesses the most narrow of powers sufficrentto be calledrive, and the soverelgn possesses a plethora of capacities, one would assumethat these two stand in strict opposition to one another. However, sharing a common state of exception as extraordinary figures, a radical ambivaleice oversees them. we may say that both exist ouiside the norm of the human community, so that the jurisdiction of human ordinancesdoes not apply to either category(e.g. the death of either sovereignor bare rife wourd noiquarify as homicide). As Girardnotes,in many culturesthe king is the one who canbe sacrificed, evenmustbe sacrificed, in order to marntainstablesociar order.It is this structurethat the ciassical tragedyrepricates. In Sophocles, quintessential tragedy oedipus savesThebei from tne sphinx o.,ty to becJme the causeof its plague;as mentioned above,his exiie curestne city and setshim wandering as a kind of refugeefrom city to city. In Oed.ipus at totorrs, iy tt-re time he nearshis death, the cursedman has becomedivinely '_ po_"rful hi, burial site will offer a sacredbressingto its host city. Tellingiy, this curmrnating death takesplace^offstage, its particurar rocationuns#n'even bythe messenger that reportsOedipus,demise. As soon as Shoulderacceptshis mantle as scapegoat, the stageworld begins to lloothly function. accordingto the possibiities of classilal trag_ edy's sacrificialstructure.when thJ servant prepares to encounter the rine,the other characters address him .he other seryantspraise his carriage, e with awe. This divinity has been n Taxman,s repeated exclamations of other characters, but by the electron of the world itself: here, the servant is left standing al.ne o*tug", i*_o, bile and'suddenly, a bright stream of light througl the missing"rooi iltrr_ minates him. He feels it, laughs, @arkei 2001: I01). And whei Shoulder disappears {rom sight to offei himself as victim, there is a sudden shift in onstage as the long-awaited and wirhhetdweddingU"gnr, lll: i,:::On:re tne preuousry antagonistic and despairing characters embracing in nJarry bucoliccelebration. attemptsto watch Shoulderas he is greetedwith propriery "-r?-l1t- lllT"" krndness by the barbarians offstage. It becomes increasingly diificult ::"-":-"1 loanan to describe the event that is taking pracebeyondthe triresholdof ::r rne staee:

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(straining to seeinto thestreet) I.A4-rat,s happening.. . ? It's hard to say exactly,my eyesare_ Can youPeculiar... I wish my eyeswere better,I_

I can'tteli if he,s. . . what is he.. .. @arker2001:137) He turns from the window, his attenti awareof the offstagescene.Durinq I encedtheir ow.nrecognition: Camer daughter, not her rivaf even dressin gor.r'n shehad previouslyhoped to usr have finally taken place,the nuptiar rebirth and the sacrificialdeath, Tagedy the recognition and reversai.so that as we hear machine pu.k"J ,f u.,a carried away,it seemsthat Shourder has been processed by the tradiional dramatic apparatus,that history can reached its end and the possible is reir lder's Shou t"uppeurinc" onstage, r with an 'oversized overcoat or.,orJid,. ,was 'My agony',he says, quite sirnpl!, a the world ... like rain ... the movementof the tides ..., @arker 2001:140). This is the cruel necessrlflz that Nietzsche'sBirth of rragedy ide"rin* *'rn ,n" pessimismof a radicailyinhuman and,incomprene"riLte *o.ta,-rh" pr;oru of the Dionysian.Crearlythe machinehas operateorn manner quite different from Camera'sexpectations: it does not provide an intentionarpag"*;;t o. rationalizationof its chosenvictim. And, is the lady of the housJa"E ,ir"i i" for the spectator, when she pulls the overcoatfrom his back in ,"u.J-oirtr" marks left by the machine,she discoversa surfaceof smooth and unmarked skin. Facing this blank canvasof a mi ance, Camera,the mistressof that o1d to reasserther own dramatic credenti character...[...] I am clingingto my emphasis). To which Shoulderreplies, gone,swepidownsiream on a flood .. @arker2001:142).Thatdeluge,that catastrophe discardingan endsand moral intelligence,leavesa set of figures gatherei on Barker,s"st"g; ],il-;;;"p of refugeesbereft of their place and identity. A new age begiis, herald"ed uy the unmarked messiahShourder. \44renthe stagedirectionsdescribeCamera releasing 'profound sobs, the heaving purri6', of bereaveme",; ig"rk", ,why?,or ,to 200.1: as the lights dim, the questio-n of what ..,a2, ."r.,ui., .143) entirely in the dark. In other words, in TheBriilianceof the sentantthe tragic sacrificeno longer tunctions as anticipated by Girards th;;;"i; ir'"o,"u" agent of cultural restitution.This sacrificialsubjectdoes not pro.tui--u-."tu.r., to a known role, to a character with knowable quaiities. If the spectatoriar drama/tragedywith its possiblefutures functions rike --tn, a torturing machine, then it is one akin to that described i" ru*J" t PenalColony.It is a device of extensiveand iniricate, but urtimate$,inite

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inscription.The stylusthat carvesat its victim's flesh arrivesat an end, reaves the body.markedby a moral and juridical statement, the revelationof a char_ acterto the-analyticalgaze, even-ifthat meaningis, as in Kafka,sparable,only legrbleto the judged and god above.We, in the spectator,s seat,get to play the part of-sucha god and seea character made iegibre.But Bark#s barbarians from the no-man's-randof the offstage,pu." i-"urr" no trace;rather they refurn the body of the sacrificiar subjectiniact and unscathed, io"g.. ,.*"o - pe.rhaps no ionger a characterat all _ and sacred g oiy as the ?_. ii:.:t ta,wa rasa oi a iife outside the realm of the possibre.The stage directions describeshoulder watching the barbarians'departure from the window, ,as if taking leave of someoneprofoundly loved for whom no gestureis app.opriate' @arker 200I: 140). How *orrl,C o." stage this mom"ent,p".nup', tn" in the play, with its gesturethat ii not a gesture? Sioulder has -:tt.l?*:.fuI established an inimitabreconnectionwith the horde, tiing on their fi",}roru of cruelty-the full potential of a world,s unrealizedimagrnings. No glrtu.u o this great expanse; there is no way of thJ protun_ 1,"_t:t]",9"{::e orry oI nrs rove, nothing to show of the horror endured. "ipr"rli.,g ThiJnaked back, displayng a shoulder as wourd dispraythe ability or potentiarita .u.ry -one -_the oniy a burdery is the bare sufficienry sufficienry- oi such a magnitude of feeling. The classical ""p."rrirg m< and showing where all is told and n crisis.Baring himself Shoulderreveal messenger who could contain a plethc like the tragiccharacter he fuLfils the t the many: not as a sacrificiar surrogatefor the many, but as a singularfigure that possesses the capacityto be miny others. R E F ER EN C E S AgTl:1 Giorgro (1998),Homo poz,erand BareLife (Irans. Soaereign -Sacer: D..Heller-Roazen), Stanford:Stanford UnivJrsity press. (2000),Potentiarities: Coilected Essaysin philosophy(trans. D. HeilerRoazen),Stanford:StanfordUniversitvpress. Aristotle (1967),Thepoetiu (trans.G. Ekei, annarbor: Universityof Michigan l-ress. Butf:.. Howard (1997),Arguments a Theatre, Manchester:Manchester for UniversityPress. plays:Volume (2001),Collected 5, London: John Calderpress. Blocfr,Ernst (1995),Theprincipleof Hope:Volume 1 (trans.N. plaice, S. plarce and P. Knight), Cambridge:Uif piess. _ Genet, ]ean (1960), The Blicks: A Clown Show (trans. B. Frechtman),New York: Grovepress. Girard, Ren6 (1979),Violence and the Sacred(trans. p. Gregory), Baltimore: ]ohns Hopkins Universitypress. Kafl<a, Franz (1995),The Complete Stories of FranzKafka (trans.W. Muir and E. Muir), New york: Schocken Books. Nietzsche,Friedrich(1967),The-Birth of Tmgedy and theCase of wagner (trans. W. Kaufmann),New york: Vintaee. RaT1&_ Gerald Q01O), A Thousani Machines:A Concise philosophyof the Machineas a Social Moaement (trans.A. Derieg),Cambridge: Mfi i.;'rr. "Cowper), Sen;1_Micfel (199n, Angels:A Modern Myti ltrans. n. taris,
_FialruTlanon.

of the servan f w i thout o uali ti es The B ri l l i ance

of the PIay, Ithaca: Cornell University States,Bert O. (1994), The Pleasure Press. Szondi,Peter (1987),Theoryof Modem Drama (trans.M. Hays), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. CITATION SUGGESTED without qualities:Bare life and Sack,D. (2012),'TheBrillianceof the Seruant 32" 3, pp 257-267, I Performance in Theatre the horde offstage',Studies doi: 10.1386/stap.32.3.257 -L CONT RI BUT ODE R T AIT S Professorof Theatre Studies at Florida State is Assistant Sack Daniel University. Prior to this appointment he was a Five College Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Performance Studies at Amherst College and the He is currently revising his book manuscript, University of Massachusetts. and Potentialityin LiaeArt. Possibility of Performance: TheFutures E-mail dsack@fsu.edu his right under the Copltighf Designsand Patents Daniel Sackhas asserted Act, 1988,to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submittedto Intellect Ltd.

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