Radical Disappearances: Art, Terror and the Body in Performance.

摘要

If the performative qualities of self-directed acts of public violence entered the western social consciousness in the twentieth century via the work of performance and experimental theater artists, so too did acts of spectacular public violence themselves, as performed by political insurgents. Considered structurally and in terms of their effects, acts of terrorism and performance are strikingly similar: Attention to their respective effects makes the comparison plain, the performative result of acts of terror, which distinguishes them from simple crimes, also brings them into the realm of performance. This dissertation makes the case that using performance as a frame helps us understand the affective braid between symbolic and material violence and maps the particular arrangements of power in the twenty first century.;In this dissertation I offer a taxonomy of radical disappearances organized around three themes; 1) The utility of performance as an organizing principle for considering the aesthetics of violent public action; 2) A critique of the use of suicide as a weapon against authoritarian power, as a constellation of performance practices; 3) The ways that acts of performative self-destruction contest hegemonic discourses and structures of power by bringing them into visibility. I suggest that if the presence of racial, ethnic and gendered subjects is deferred by interlaced political and social systems of control---colonialism, patriarchy, orientalism---then it might be performed, and thereby brought into visibility, as absence. It is then possible to overwrite, or, more properly, over-body, the normative dimension of power through a performative act of self-destruction. The name I suggest for this performance strategy is radical disappearance, which is used to make visible the power dynamics of a culture and employed, in its extremis as an act of violent self-destruction.