Vortrag vom 10. Dezember 2024

When the sublime became a category of art (in post-Kantian aesthetic theories), the problem of representation came to be reassessed and the category of the beautiful expanded. Modern theories of the sublime (e.g. Adorno and Lyotard) emphasise the process of de-subjectification in aesthetic experience and criticize of the rational control of nature. In this lecture, I question to what extent contemporary theatre may enable a thinking that approaches the philosophical-aesthetic experience of the sublime – how it may question it, interrupt it and develop it further. Using examples from Romeo Castellucci’s, Howard Barker’s and Jan Fabre’s art of theatre, I consider the sublime as a limit-experience, as a feeling of sensorial and intellectual intensity, and finally as an announcement of alterity, formlessness and transcendence, which nevertheless represents an immanent confrontation with the materiality of the image, the body, and language.

Karoline Gritzner is a theatre scholar with extensive experience of research and teaching in the fields of theatre studies and performance studies in the UK and Austria. She held a position as lecturer at Aberystwyth University, Wales, and is one of the founding members of the international, interdisciplinary research network Performance Philosophy. From 2019 until 2022 she led a FWF-funded research project on the topic of the sublime in theatre at the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Graz (2019–2022). Her publications include Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (2019) as well as Adorno and Modern Theatre: The Drama of the Damaged Self in Bond, Rudkin, Barker, and Kane (2015).