This article explores the tension between freedom and constraint in contemporary political and social contexts through Olga Ntenta’s performance project, Greek Precarious Body. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s critique of the depoliticization inherent in deliberative democracy and the naturalization of precarity, the article examines how performance and scenography stage the embodied experiences of vulnerability and agency. Through the Classical figures of Oedipus and Jocasta, Ntenta’s work enacts the restrictive language of costume as a metaphor for externally imposed limitations that simultaneously evoke states of precarity and enable new forms of engagement. The performance’s dialogue with the Classical Greek concept of fate reveals that vulnerability might be not only a passive condition but also a generative force. This reframing has broader implications for political theory and performance studies. For the former, it suggests new ways to understand political pluralism and social agency; for the latter, Ntenta’s work positions performance as a vital space for imagining and enacting social and political transformation beyond conventional oppositions, offering possible lines of flight from entrenched binaries and fostering richer modes of collective engagement. Ultimately, the essay positions Ntenta’s work as a critical intervention that resonates with agonistic pluralism and imagining social and political transformation beyond oppositional frameworks.
This article analyses the process of translating and adapting Charlie Josephine’s I, Joan (2022) for the Komedie Theatre in Prague, tracing how queerness is negotiated across linguistic, cultural, and theatrical contexts. Drawing on my dual role as a translator and a collaborator of the creative team, I examine the tensions that arise when the play’s explicitly queer dramaturgy – deeply embedded in the fluid and inclusive possibilities of contemporary English – encounters the grammatically gendered and more normatively structured landscape of Czech. The article explores how linguistic inclusivity, gender-neutral pronouns and performative ambiguity function in the source text, and what happens when these strategies are transposed into a language with more limited tools for expressing gender fluidity. Commissioned in the aftermath of the Globe production, the Czech version developed within a dramaturgical framework that sought to foreground queer experience and collaborate with artists from the Prague-based platform PiNKBUS. I discuss the translation’s linguistic constraints and creative solutions. The article further considers the subsequent adaptation led by dramaturge Lenka Dombrovská and director Alžběta Vrzgula, featuring the creation of the allegorical figure Q and the integration of drag, choreography, and embodied queer performance. Drawing on agonistic pluralism, I argue that the Czech I, Joan demonstrates how translation, adaptation, and productive contestation can together generate new forms of queer agency and expand the expressive limits of language.
The article focuses on the communicative situation of the socio-political double bind that generates politics of impasse. This is located outside the performativity of both agonism and deliberation. The impasse is neither a state of conflict nor of an agreement. Rather, it represents a state of inertia, whereby the amplification of sociopolitical forces causes them to weaken. Two cases of artistic research focusing on the performativity of the double-bind are presented. The Strachy (Fears) project explored the theme of art as a space that openly criticises social power relations, while being simultaneously dominated by the same types of power. The second project, Propojme se včera (Let’s Connect Yesterday), explored social rigidity in the face of a growing global polycrisis, of which society itself is the main instigator. Through artistic research, we explored whether it is possible to reverse communication based on self-destructive implosion and transform it into self-transgressing communication, making the invisible aspects of these social phenomena visible. The aim was not to ‘shoot the problem’ or escape it through art. Instead, we sought a performative reframing of the impasse that would transform the double bind into an affirmative and agonistic participation in social reality, with the potential to bring about social change.
This essay examines two seemingly different manifestations of shock under the sign of British Romanticism, one associated with electricity and the other associated with mining. In both popular and scientific discourses about electricity, shock named an embodied experience characterized by intense vulnerability and perceptual deactivation. A similar kind of experience was invoked in descriptions of catastrophic mining accidents, as well as in prints of mined landscapes. Attending to mining landscapes and to the language used to report on mining accidents, I argue that industrial resource extraction meaningfully prompted and shaped shock as a category of aesthetic experience in the early nineteenth century.
This article considers the workings of performativity and agonism in Milo Rau’s Medea’s Children, presented at the National Theatre in Prague in November 2024. A provocative work that reimagines the Classical myth of Medea through a contemporary lens, Medea’s Children raises pointed questions of theatrical affects and effects. The performance mobilises a repertoire of postdramatic and metatheatrical techniques that have come to characterize Rau’s dramaturgy. Drawing a line from Jacques Derrida’s thinking on absence, iterability and context through to Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, the article analyses the use of non-professional child actors who both enact and reflect on the traumatic events of the performance, destabilizing the boundaries between reality and fiction, and presenting the myth as a living, polymorphous structure. Medea’s Children thus generates a space where audience expectations are both anticipated and manipulated so that the act of performance becomes an agonistic arena. The concept of agonism (with reference to Chantal Mouffe) is used to explore how the play stages a confrontation between diverging viewpoints, highlighting the irreducible nature of societal (and existential) conflicts where differing perspectives on victimhood, justice, and suffering coexist and clash. Ultimately, the article contends that Medea’s Children serves as a performative act of resistance, questioning the narratives of power and victimhood, and inviting the audience to weigh the complex interplay of personal and political struggles within the mythological and contemporary contexts it interleaves.
This article explores the ways in which Jane Austen repurposed the eighteenth-century idiom of surprise and shock. Aside from a few scandalous revelations that hark back to eighteenth-century narrative données, Austen’s novels are not designed to deliver major surprises to the reader, and none of their heroines is subject to the kind of physical assaults visited upon Pamela and Evelina. Nevertheless, Austen’s characters frequently express feelings of surprise and shock: such statements typically serve more as vehicles of moral or social judgment than as spontaneous responses to the sudden. Rather than narrating surprising events, Austen is interested in what might be called the sociolinguistics of surprise. The article concludes with a consideration of Austen’s poetics of shock. In her early novel Northanger Abbey, Austen mimicked the obvious jump-scares of Gothic novels; this article shows how she went on to borrow from their perceptual and affective syntax in her later novels.
Mary Robinson’s first novel, Vancenza (1792), charted a new path for politically liberal women writers. Robinson used her pre-existing reputation as an actress, mistress and established poet to carve out a space in which she could write and publish fiction, avoiding some of the pitfalls for eighteenth-century women of participating too eagerly (or at all) in public life. Vancenza challenges inherited relationships of patriarchal and political authority to argue for the importance of radical social change, weighing its destructive nature together with its positive moral value. Is the disclosure of truth a crucial step on the path to justice, or a misguided intervention that can lead only to suffering? Robinson uses Gothic tropes as coded political symbols, producing a political novel disguised as a Gothic one, in order to advocate societal reform rooted in honest reckoning with the past. Even if painful – so painful that the shock of it kills – Vancenza presents such a reckoning, and the change it brings, as the only path to moral regeneration.
As far as “shocks” go, none was greater to late eighteenth-century minds than the events of 1789. Whether they took part in it, observed it from a distance or opposed it, the Revolution was experienced as a world-historical event whose ideological roots were transnational and whose impact extended far beyond national and linguistic borders. Its meaning and exportability as a political model were the object of fierce debate across Europe. These political issues were frequently seen and addressed as problems of language, as testified by a plethora of initiatives around language planning, dictionaries and instruction manuals explaining the meaning of the new revolutionary lexicon. But how did the shockwave of 1789 translate into other parts of Europe? And how translatable was the new language of the Revolution, which enlisted the cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment but also redefined the political nation, seizing on the rhetoric of patriotism and love of country? This article looks for concrete answers to these large speculative questions by considering some examples of language policies, political lexicography and discourses on translation from the 1790s in France, Britain, and the Italian states.
This article focuses on the history of the performativity of cinema, a technical medium that, by definition, excludes traditionally understood forms of performativity. Central to this inquiry – drawing on Dieter Mersch’s and Vilém Flusser’s theories – is the identification of moments when filmmakers employ technology non-technically, against its prescribed use. Such camera gestures can be understood in relation to the original meaning of technē, which does not signify mere making, fabrication, or utilization of tools, but rather the revealing or uncovering of the truth of things. The core of the article is the camera in the hands of feminist filmmakers, whose performative camera use attempts to discover a feminine handwriting and an autonomous expressive mode. The classical, male-dominated cinematic narrative can be disrupted through long takes, unconventional axes of movement, unusual distances and angles, panoramic rotation of the camera, and recording with atypical devices, techniques, and technologies. The camera is no longer hidden and concealed; on the contrary, it is made visible, emphasized, and presented to viewers as a means of demonstrating alternative possibilities. Such a camera may be used for thinking differently – subversively, expressively, experimentally, and, crucially for this study, performatively. The camera comes to the foreground, interrupting and unsettling. This article shows how this performative camera has been realized in the work of selected women filmmakers and asks what role it might serve today, how it might reveal other perspectives and offer new modes of negotiation with the technology that continuously surrounds us.
Taking as its starting point the popularity of the moving statue motif, this article explores the “re-animation” of the Classical body in early nineteenth-century literature and visual as well as material culture, with a focus on the figure of the “Dying Gladiator.” Some established strategies for viewing sculpture that attempted to simulate movement and life-likeness include gallery visits by torchlight (for instance at the Capitoline Museum in Rome – home of the Dying Gladiator), but for those unable to travel, other options were available. The first part of the article examines the “moving sculpture” shows on stage at Astley’s in London, in particular the innovative spectacles devised by the circus performer, Andrew Ducrow, who coined the term “poses plastiques” to describe attitudes drawn from Classical statuary or mythology that he performed on horseback. His performances were praised for “astonishing exactness and fidelity” as well as for impressive transitions between “marmoreality” and living flesh. The next part of the article positions the reception of Ducrow’s incarnations of the Dying Gladiator alongside responses to the statue in print culture, from the Penny Magazine to – in the final section – poems such as those of Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans that dwell on (and recover) the moment evoked by the statue when life and death hang in the balance. Here, the potent features of sculpture as a form, and the importance of the viewer’s imaginative engagement, become integral and activating elements in the works’ rapturous reception.
The article focuses on the communicative situation of the socio-political double bind that generates politics of impasse. This is located outside the performativity of both agonism and deliberation. The impasse is neither a state of conflict nor of an agreement. Rather, it represents a state of inertia, whereby the amplification of sociopolitical forces causes them to weaken. Two cases of artistic research focusing on the performativity of the double-bind are presented. The Strachy (Fears) project explored the theme of art as a space that openly criticises social power relations, while being simultaneously dominated by the same types of power. The second project, Propojme se včera (Let’s Connect Yesterday), explored social rigidity in the face of a growing global polycrisis, of which society itself is the main instigator. Through artistic research, we explored whether it is possible to reverse communication based on self-destructive implosion and transform it into self-transgressing communication, making the invisible aspects of these social phenomena visible. The aim was not to ‘shoot the problem’ or escape it through art. Instead, we sought a performative reframing of the impasse that would transform the double bind into an affirmative and agonistic participation in social reality, with the potential to bring about social change.
In contrast to Foucault’s concept of “the political technologies of individuals,” the Internet protocol (theorised, e.g., by Alexander Galloway) can be interpreted as an instance of a political technology of “dividuals” (Gilles Deleuze). The performance of protocols, or the execution of “distributed management”, is based – among others – on a problematic identification of life with a code and a medium. It is believed to generate a new form of life, described as a “cybernetic system of man and machine” (Galloway) and a new type of individual who differs from the subject of the Enlightenment liberalism. On the one hand, these individuals are mere “body-objects,” on the other hand they are endowed by a power of resistance. This is paradoxical, if not absurd, since “by definition, there can be no resistance to protocol” (Galloway). The most problematic example of “protocological management” is the technique of “collaborative filtering” (typical of the “recommendation engines”), which opens the network to homogenizing manipulation of political or economic forces. Individuals active on the net are processed into “dividuals” (or sets of statistical data comprised in their diverse profiles), whose “personal identity is formed only on certain hegemonic patterns” (Galloway). As a result, the “bio-political self-organization” of “the multitude” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), is supplanted by the operation of social media platforms. These function as “plateaus of intensity,” which construct “continuums of intensity” (Deleuze and Guattari) out of the affects, emotions and desires of their users, who have become “dividuals.” The social media platforms enable “the operation of markets,” both economic and political, to function as “the instrument of social control” (Deleuze).
This article examines shifting modes of “looking” in contemporary Asian media by extending the theoretical discourse on the gaze beyond its Western-centered origins. As Korean dramas shape and perform popular imaginaries across Asia, they offer alternative narratives that contest Western hegemony while simultaneously introducing new hierarchies. Their polished aesthetics, storytelling, and staging of South Korea as an ideal contribute to their appeal; however, these same representational strategies may also reproduce unequal perceptions of other Asian cultures. Drawing from the concept of re-orientalism, this article interrogates whether a “Korean gaze” emerges, one that positions South Korea as the center of Asian modernity while framing neighboring nations as otherwise. As K-dramas also expose contrasting portrayals of South Korean and other Asian cultures and settings, this article offers insights about inter-Asian representation, cultural imperialism, and the construction of regional identities.
The Norse skaldic poem The Death Song of Ragnar Lodbrok, a celebration of the military exploits and death of the legendary warrior-king Ragnar Lodbrok, was a popular text for translation in the eighteenth century. In the early part of the period, the barbaric ancient North was set in opposition to the refined Classical world, but by the late eighteenth century the Nordic landscape was recast as a place of Gothic liberty, and the Norseman as a familiar Other. Translations of The Death Song increasingly presented Ragnar’s violent exploits and fearless death in a snake pit as a spectacle of heroism, especially when the Norse-Gothic became integrated into England’s search for an ethnic literary past to counter the rising Celticism post-Ossian. However, despite revising the Nordic martial spirit into a symbol of resistance against tyranny, English translations of Norse narratives continued to present shocking visuals for the British public, where tales of terror and extraordinary courage were packaged in gory visions of Viking warmongering. This article compares three influential translations of The Death Song: by Thomas Percy (1763), Hugh Downman (1781), and James Johnstone (1782). The article examines how their presentation of gory spectacle reworks Viking death-defiance into a British, specifically English, trait, thus transforming Ragnar’s exploits into a prototype of resistance and “necropower.” Death is reimagined within modes of political sovereignty via the shocking aesthetics of Norse-Gothic terror.
This article explores the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in training second language actors through the lens of schizo-affect, a concept derived from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, representing the non-linear, affect-charged dimensions of utterance. Conventional voice and speech training prioritizes native-standard fluency, often stifling individuality and the expressive potential of second language actors. Drawing on Jean Cocteau’s monodrama The Human Voice, the project investigates how second language actors can develop a distinct, performative English – an English-becoming another-language – by harnessing schizo-affect. AI tools such as Speakometer, Speechling, and Resemble AI, typically designed to normalize pronunciation, are repurposed to amplify the expressive, affective dimensions of speech, providing critical feedback, mirroring, and contrast. Through targeted engagement with AI, actors explore internal auditory models, isolate and manipulate idiosyncratic pronunciation, and cultivate a unique vocal identity, while simultaneously aligning schizo-affect with character creation. The analysis demonstrates that second language expression should not be treated as a deficit but as a source of creative rupture, enabling actors to integrate unpredictability, bodily tension, and unusual rhythms into performance. Ultimately, the article argues for a rethinking of second language acting pedagogy, emphasizing expressive experimentation, individuality, and the cultivation of non-standard voices as aesthetic and performative resources.
The emergence of dark ecology signals a critical rupture in the bright green veneer of Romantic ecocriticism – a shock not only to its anthropocentric assumptions but also to its varied areas and methodologies of scholarly inquiry. Driven by the pioneering work of Richard Bridgman and the theoretical impetus of Timothy Morton, dark ecologists set ugliness and horror on equal footing with the beautiful and the sublime, while promoting a discursive style pervaded by irony and doubt. Yet this darkness and doubt, as I would like to suggest, are informed not only by life’s ephemerality – its tendency, that is, toward inevitable death and decay. Even generative or life-giving manifestations of nature may startle with their grotesque, irreducible otherness. John Clare’s “The Mouse’s Nest” is a striking example of descriptive verse that mingles dark ecology with the fecundity, the teeming plenitude, of natural life. Distilled to sonnet form, but even more so, to a sequence of seven rhyming couplets, the poem manifests the experience of startlement, a sort of disorienting moment-by-moment process of perception in which expectation is initially baffled, then recalibrated, but ultimately thwarted in its coming to terms with the teleology of non-human life and reality. Clare, moreover, makes his language complicit in this epistemological bewilderment, shifting from verbs of efficacious physical action to those of open-ended speculation, with the dialect verb “proged” – meaning “poked at” – signalling the transition between these realms. The sonnet as a whole, as I will argue, functions as a mystifying “prog” into the dark corners – or weirdness – of our ecosphere.
This article argues that Shelley’s Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude dramatizes the fictional Poet’s physical decline and death as a psychosomatic response to philosophical overreaching, where the pursuit of Ideal beauty produces a state akin to inflammatory processes and a sustained condition of shock fatigue. I demonstrate how Shelley’s depiction of illness is shaped by contemporary medical theories, particularly John Brown’s Elements of Medicine (1780) and John Hunter’s A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-shot Wounds (1794). These works inform Shelley’s portrayal of the Poet’s flushed but wasting body and his over-excited sensory system, offering a physiological substrate for the poem’s metaphysical and erotic tensions. Rather than signalling the Poet’s moral or spiritual failure, his decline expresses a complex convergence of somatic and Ideal desires. The “veiled maid” whom he attempts to pursue beyond the grave is both an erotic object and a Neo-Platonic figure of perfected self-knowledge. By aligning erotic longing with the naturally ambiguous semiotics of inflammatory response, subjectivity emerges as an ecologically entangled phenomenon, responsive to both the shocks of material nature and the lure of Ideal forms.
