Digitale Theaterforschung

Video coming soon.

Vortrag vom 11. November 2025

The starting point for this presentation lies in Benjamin’s attempt to write a habilitation-thesis on the theme of “language and logic.” The original framework for the pursuit of this theme collapsed when Benjamin re-read Heidegger’s habilitation-thesis. Starting anew, Benjamin conceives a new framework that revolves around a formal distinction between knowing (Wissen) and cognition (Erkenntnis): whereas the latter, associated with logic, is subject to critique, the former, correspondingly associated with language, is to be prompted in the diversity of its equally valid kinds. The language-and-logic theme thus develops into a philosophical program that, in contrast to the earlier “Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie,” is principally concerned with a certain concept of truth. Prompted by the prospect of habilitating in Heidelberg, Benjamin’s second attempt to elaborate this theme culminates in the claim that there must be a “pure type”—the term derives from Max Weber—of what he calls “theoretical knowing.” Prompted, in turn, by Max Scheler’s Cologne-based program for an anti-positivist sociology of knowledge, Benjamin specifies the core “kinds of knowing” and adds a hybrid kind, which represents a transformation of “theoretical knowing”— and with it, the very idea of philosophy. The presentation concludes with a description of why and how the second program for the coming philosophy goes underground, so much so that at the end of the habilitation-thesis Benjamin eventually writes, a kind of knowing that proudly denies its kind-wise diversity (“bloßes Wissen”) forms the infrastructure of hell.

Peter Fenves is the author of several books, including The Messianic Reduction, and co-editor of two Benjamin translations, Toward the Critique of Violence and On Goethe.

Vortrag vom 8. Juli 2025

“The greatest act of cowardice on the part of any man is to keep silent. It is therefore incumbent on every one of us to speak out aloud. It is my wish that this play would shock to the very core those who blandly remain tongue-tied.” (Note to the Director) – Sony Labou Tansi

The lecture examines ways of understanding “difference” and “repetition” as a space of resistance reflecting the ambiguity of the post-colonial subject. It does so by considering repetition and difference in the rewriting/adaptation of Shakespeare‘s play Julius Caesar by an African. Rewriting this play is a discursive gesture through which the question of “difference” dislocates fixed definitions in such a way that opposing cultures seem to become interminably interchangeable with one another. Shakespeare in African dress may be understood as a recuperation of agency and re-presentation by the postcolonial subject through a space opened up by cultural encounters of the colonizer and the colonized. Moi, Veuve de l‘Empire, is the French title of this version of Julius Caesar, the Congolese author and playwright Sony Labou Tansi’s Shakespearean drama. Labou Tansi is the foremost Congolese writer of the 20th century – he is the author of several novels and plays, and the founder of his own theatre group called Le Rocado Zulu Theatre de Brazzaville.

Frieda Ekotto is Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Comparative Literature and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan. As an intellectual historian and philosopher with areas of expertise in 20th and 21st-century Anglophone and Francophone literature, West African cinema and its diaspora, she concentrates on contemporary matters of law, race and LGBTQIA2S+ issues. Among her publications are Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of A Young Artiste From Bon Mbella (2019) and Rethinking African Cultural Production (2015) with Kenneth W. Harrow.

Vortrag vom 24. Juni 2025

After thousands of remounted performances and cascades of critiques, many preceding scholarships have demonstra- ted a development in understanding Madama Butterfly as a story epitomizing the imagined orient formulated within the framework of the so-called “Spaghetti Eastern” Italian operas. By situating the Orientalist view of Madama But- terfly as a historical counterpoint, I will discuss in this talk how Japanese playwright-director Ichihara Satoko challen- ges the political violence of Puccini’s opera through the scope of women of color dramaturgy. In doing so, I will demonstrate how, through the deliberate ‘activation of the abject’, Ichihara aims to override the automated racialized assumptions and epistemic systems that stipulate the co- dified repository of imaginations cast from the other and far from the real.

Kyoko Iwaki is an Assistant Professor at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. After her career as a theatre journalist, she became a scholar specializing in Japanese and Euro- pean contemporary performance conducting research at the intersection of post-visual dramaturgies, Japanese philosophies, and theatres of catastrophes. She has pub- lished articles in various journals such as Performance Research, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Jour- nal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. She is the co-founder of Performing Ends: Collaborative Performance Research, the Associate Editor of Performance Research and has contributed a chapter to the edited collection Japan after Precarity: The Theatre of Okada Toshiki (2020). Her books include Japanese Theatre Today: Theatrical Imaginations of Eight Contemporary Practitioners (2018).